GeographyNew Zealand RepresentativesCurriculumYear 13
Robbie Nichol, 26 August 2026
My iGeo Experience
During Weeks 4 and 5, I travelled to Istanbul, Türkiye, to compete in the International Geography Olympiad, also known as iGeo, as part of the New Zealand team.
It gave me the opportunity to experience a new place and culture, visit historical sights around Türkiye, meet new people from all over the world, and represent New Zealand.
We stayed at the competition venue for seven nights. The competition was hosted at a hotel about 20 minutes by train or car from the old city of Istanbul. To get to know students from other countries, we were allocated rooms of three, with competitors from two different countries. I was put with boys from Belarus and Slovenia.
The competition involved a written test, a multiple-choice test, and a fieldwork exercise and analysis. There was also a poster session, for which our team created a poster based on the impacts of and recovery from the 2023 Cyclone Gabrielle weather event. Although posters do not contribute to the overall marks for the event, they are still judged, and this year the best poster was awarded to the Iranian team. Although the competition is entirely in English, students who are not educated in English are given around 20% more time and also have access to translation dictionaries to help them overcome the language barrier.
Each person competes individually, and then the results are combined to give the team ranking. The New Zealand team placed 18th out of the 48 teams that participated, which was a result we were pleased with. One of the students in our team, Anna Armitage, who attends Rangitoto College in Auckland, also received a gold medal at the event, putting her in the top 16 geographers at the competition. The top student and winner of the event was from Kazakhstan, while the highest-scoring team was Lithuania, narrowly followed by Kazakhstan and the USA.
At the competition, we also enjoyed an excursion on a Bosphorus Strait boat trip, as well as a cultural night and opening and closing ceremonies, which included remarks from Turkish politicians and committee members from the Turkish Geographical Society and the International Geographical Union.
Outside of the competition, we also had time to look around the Istanbul area. We visited historical sights including Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and the Grand Bazaar. While our team leaders were in a meeting during the final day of the competition, we also had the opportunity to travel with the Turkish team to the island of Heybeliada, which is off the coast of Istanbul. The island only has electric vehicles, and we got to visit a Greek Orthodox church, as well as the Greek Theological School.
On our final day in Türkiye, we took a day trip to Gallipoli, where we were able to visit Anzac Cove, as well as various British and Turkish gravesites and war memorials in the area.
