New Zealand: Not Ugly
Located 2500 miles across the Tasman sea from Australia, 3900 miles from Antarctica, and 7400 miles across the Pacific from South America, the island country is quite literally in the middle of nowhere. It was discovered and settled by Māori, an indigenous people of Polynesian descent, in the fourteenth century. Europeans arrived 300 years later. Britain eventually declared New Zealand as part of its empire both to shore up its presence in the Pacific and to prevent France from doing the same. Waves of families were sent from elsewhere in the empire to settle the islands. Today, New Zealanders of European descent represent 71% of its roughly five million residents.
So our visit to the other side of the planet was never going to be that culturally different from what we already knew and experienced at home and in Europe. That’s what I thought at least. However, I was surprised to learn how much of the Māori culture remains and is celebrated as part of New Zealand’s identity. Māori represent over 17% of New Zealand’s population (vs. 1.7% of Americans who identify as partially or completely as Native American). Roughly the same percentage of New Zealand’s parliament are Māori. And throughout the country (known as Aotearoa in Māori), towns, sites, and monuments are referred to and marked both by their European and Māori names.
None of this is to claim that Māori are thriving in the lands that they discovered and inhabited for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Like nearly all indigenous populations globally, they lag behind their European peers both in terms of economic and health outcomes. But I was impressed by the extent to which they continue to influence a nation’s global identity, from the famous haka of the All Blacks rugby team to the tail designs on Air New Zealand aircraft. I even remarked that Oriini Kaipara, a female news anchor, presents news to the entire nation with a traditional Māori face tattoo.
(I am also embarrassed by how little my children and I know about our own Native American culture.)
We spent a few hours one day touring a Māori village near Rotorua, an active thermal region in the North Island’s interior. There, a dozen or so Māori families still live and practice traditional means of cooking (using a hangi, an oven that uses thermal heat from the island’s still active volcanos) and communal bathing, while preserving and promoting Māori history, language, and culture to visiting tourists like us. We learned about traditional Māori dance, song, religious and agricultural practices, and tattoo culture. Our guide herself bore lips and chin that are permanently inked with moko kauae, signifying a woman’s leadership position in her community.
When we started laying out the essential items to pack for our year-long trip, one of the biggest questions was whether or not to bring our DSLR camera. There is no question that our pictures would be better if we packed the bigger camera and its sundry of lenses and accoutrement. While convenient and packed with bells and whistles of its own, the iPhone just doesn’t compare. However, the whole kit is fragile and takes up a ton of space. So we decided to leave it all at home.
I regretted that decision every day we were in New Zealand.
New Zealand boasts some of the most beautiful natural landscapes in the world. Three weeks is not enough to even scratch the surface — we could have spent that time entirely exploring Fiordlands National Park. But three weeks we had. So we rented a campervan to help us see as much as we could. It was a fun return to the #vanlife. Our first stop on our world tour was a 10-day campervan tour of Iceland. The kids loved cooking meals in our little kitchen, spreading out on long, scenic drives, and not having to unpack and repack their bags every few days. Our New Zealand home on wheels was a little bigger and had a toilet, which was nice. Waking and walking in the frigid darkness to a campground bathroom is one aspect of our Iceland experience I hoped never to repeat.
We started our tour with a brief transition in Auckland, a rainy couple of days that didn’t amount to much. We quickly turned our sights south, stopping to take in rain forest walks, waterfalls, mountain vistas, and live volcanos. The highlight of the North Island was a 12-mile hike in Tongariro National Park known as the Alpine Crossing. We hiked up and around volcanic mountains and steaming thermal lakes stinking of sulfur. The views were spectacular and we were blessed with clear skies and amazing visibility. We also spent a couple days in Rotorua, riding mountain bikes in a redwood forest and sliding down a low mountain on luge carts.
After a lovely night walking around Wellington at the North Island’s southern tip (which feels like a smaller, less filthy San Francisco), we boarded a ferry that connects to the South Island. It was a fun and scenic 3-hour ride across the Cook Strait. The South Island (to me at least) is more naturally dramatic, marked by snow-covered mountains, glaciers, and the fjords they carve. It is also home to Marlborough, a gorgeous valley of vast vineyards and home to much of New Zealand’s thriving wine industry. We drove through this valley, along the scenic Buller River Gorge, toward the western coast, stopping at Murchison and Punakaiki. It was some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever witnessed through a windscreen. The only downside, whenever we stopped along the banks of a river or the coast, was the sand fleas. These bastards crushed us, leaving painful and itchy bites on all of us that lasted the length of our time in New Zealand.
After playing in sand and the waves of the Tasman Sea, we turned inland and drove through Arthur’s Pass. The interior of the South Island is Lord of the Rings country. Many of our stops were, in fact, used as filming locations for the Hobbit and Rings trilogies. The mountains rise quickly and dramatically from the river-carved valley floors thousands of feet below. The weather changes quickly and often. There were moments when we felt like we were in the safe and peaceful shire. And others when it felt as if we would be attacked from the looming clouds by mountain-dwelling goblins and orcs.
We carried on southward, along impossibly blue lakes like Tekapo and Pukaki, toward Mt. Cook (Aoraki in Māori) and the Southern Alps. Like many of the mountains in New Zealand, there isn’t much of a gradual build up to the country’s tallest peak at over 12,000 feet. There are no foothills. There is just the valley floor, often accompanied by a lake, then mountains that abruptly climb to heights that can sustain glaciers. These rivers of ice built this landscape over millions of years, carving and pushing stone and rock like our feet move sand, leaving valleys, rivers, and lakes as they retreated a few thousand years ago. All of it makes for dramatic views and challenging climbs. We did a couple of short hikes, including a beautiful one to the base of the Hooker Glacier. But we needed a little help to get the full experience in such a short period of time.
So we cheated and took a helicopter flight up to the Tasman glacier, New Zealand’s longest frozen river, which wraps and is fed by glaciers off several peaks, including Mt. Cook. Then we hiked on crampons across the icy surface, navigating the many crevasses (deep cracks) and moulins (holes and tubes created by melting water) along the way. It was like walking on another planet, except for the heavy boots and crampons that kept us glued to the surface. It was amazing and we were blessed again by the weather elves with glorious blue skies.
Again, these experiences barely scratch the surface of what the South Island has to offer. We drove further south to the lakeside town of Wanaka. Meg and I agreed that this is a place we could spend the rest of our days, if it weren’t so far away from our friends and family. Here we started to see the first signs of autumn, with leaves changing color and contrasting boldly with the mountains and reflective lakes. Similar to Wanaka, Te Anau sits alongside a gorgeous lake, surrounded by low mountains and carved by glaciers and rushing rivers. Te Anau is also the gateway to Fiordlands National Park and its crown jewel, the Milford Sound.
Milford Sound is the only fjord in the national park that can be reached by car. And getting there is no small feat as it can only be accessed via the single-lane Homer tunnel, carved through 1.2 kilometers of solid rock. The sound is actually not a sound. Sounds are bodies of ocean water that have been carved by rivers. Milford Sound is a fjord, ocean-filled valleys carved by glaciers. I have no idea how it came to be called a sound, but none of it matters when you see the thing. It’s stunning. Steep-sided mountains rise sharply from still, black water while glacial and rain-fed waterfalls spill down their sides. We took it all in from land and sea vantage points, suffering the limits of our little iPhones and their shitty little lenses. Even still, just look at what we were able to capture.
The sound was a fitting climax to our three weeks in New Zealand. We occupied our last day driving to and spending a night in Queenstown. Again, this could be a city where I could spend the rest of my life. Sitting next to a mountain-framed lake, full of outdoor and adventure activities (and more than a few pubs), Queenstown feels like my kind of town. We awoke on our final morning to the season’s first snowfall, blanketing the surrounding mountains in a light dusting of white. Soon it would be winter in New Zealand, one of the southernmost inhabited places on earth.
Our trip to New Zealand was a homecoming of sorts for Meg. She came here 26 years ago as a 21 year-old college student on her first ever trip outside of the US. Armed with a Lonely Planet, a backpack, and not a lot in her bank account, she explored the islands and awakened what would be a lifelong love for travel. Her only plan was to make it to her flight to Australia three weeks later. Meg’s return to New Zealand was not so much a reflection on how much it has changed since then (not much). Rather, it was more about how much she has changed. I’d argue that she hasn’t changed much from that daring girl who traveled alone to the opposite side of the planet. She simply released what was always there, exploring and expanding her open heart and mind. I think anyone who knows Meg would agree.
These three weeks were about more than natural beauty and learning a bit about New Zealand’s indigenous people. Our three weeks inside a campervan were a highly distilled analog for this entire trip and all that comes with spending 24/7 together. The kids fought almost every night at bedtime, crammed into the lofted and uncomfortable campervan beds. The whole vehicle smelled of farts and wet hiking boots by the second day. And rainy days felt pretty claustrophobic. But we played board games, shopped for groceries, cooked meals, and did the daily things families stop doing together when kids hit double digits. Sprinkle in some epic walks, waterfalls, glaciers, and a helicopter ride and it adds up to why we decided to do this thing in the first place.
