Fortunately I managed to do some things I’ve wanted to do since I was a teen: walked around Lake Waikaremoana with my father and brother, sailed through Milford Sound, and hitched up the West Coast of the South Island.
One interesting thing to come out of it for me is the realisation that Aotearoa is not so much unique for its wilderness but for the isolation of its wilderness. I love London because there’re so many bloody people here, of all walks of life. Conversely what I love about NZ is the fact that there’s almost no people, and the culture that grows from that.
While I was back it took me some time to get used to anybody within a five metre radius saying hi or kia ora. And I remember arriving in NZ with a list of things that I’d given myself a week to do. I crossed off the last item by lunch time of the first day. No queues, no items out of stock, no parking problems. No dramas.
Unfortunately, given a chance, the growth imperative of our current infantile economic system will likely put an end to all this eventually, including the purity of the NZ wilderness.
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