Last Straw

So much for hav­ing wads of time to blog, I’m back in Lon­don now. Tak­ing a hol­i­day in NZ doesn’t involve a whole lot of time indoors.

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.

More pho­tos on Flickr.com.

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.