Don’t Go to New Zealand
I wanted to love New Zealand. I bought my flights here in a passionate tizzy, psyched to see my sister and to explore the land that sparked a thousand movies. I wanted to bounce around various pieces of gorgeous scenery, communing with nature and losing myself in the reflections of lakes under mountains and long stretches of blue-green sea. I wanted to love every single day of the three-month visa my American passport got me upon my arrival in a gorgeously 21st-century airport.
I was nervous about leaving South America—about leaving a language, a set of cultures, a general way of being that I’d fallen in love with—but I was excited to find all of the things I’d missed: good service, sarcasm, public water fountains.
A month into my New Zealand adventures, I realized that I’d found some of what I had missed and some of what I had come to look at. But that I’d also found an unexpected, unwelcome sense of malaise that made me want to pack up and leave.
I didn’t do that—I stuck it out another three weeks and did a big loop of the South Island—but I did make plans to head back to South America earlier than anticipated, moving my flight up by a month and a half. And before I felt comfortable doing that, I worked through the difference in my expectations and reality and corresponding feelings of shame and self-doubt.
My experience in New Zealand basically came down to this: beyond its natural beauty, New Zealand has nothing to offer that I can’t find cheaper and more easily at home. The people haven’t been particularly welcoming or interesting (but have been surprisingly racist), a cultural identity either isn’t present or is super similar to mine as an American, and the travelers that this part of the world attracts have interests that overlap a lot less with mine than those I found at the same latitude, 10,000 kilometers to the east.
I don’t mean to offend this country (though clearly, I probably am, for which I do offer my condolences; if New Zealand immigration control finds this blog and wants to put me on a blacklist I’d understand), nor do I want to tear apart the nice memories that other travelers (and friends!) have of this place. If you liked it, hurray! But I didn’t, not really, and I’d like to explore why.
Because, as Ally so wisely told me over a calming WhatsApp voice message that greatly helped me ease my frustration and guilt over not clicking into the Kiwi life: you don’t have to love every place you travel. That’s half the point of traveling. Figuring out what you like, and what you don’t; where your tribe is and where it isn’t; how to use what you learn to adapt on the fly and make better choices. My tribe is not here, and that’s okay.
The Non-Bad
Before I go into a moaning lament like some tragic Greek heroine, I’ll 1) warn you, so you can skip my negativity if you so choose; 2) tell you some of the things I did really like about New Zealand.
Positive number one: the chance to travel with my sister. My memories of our month together are precious to me, even if neither of us was wildly in love with our surroundings. The chance to travel with her—really travel, and really live, sharing a bed and 400 cows to milk and the pressure of finding a ride and an affordable dinner—was so valuable, and helped us grow our relationship so much. We had stuff we figured out together and fun stuff we did together and annoying stuff we bitched about together. And I got to come through the other side, knowing her better and appreciating her more. That’s been wonderful. But it’s also relatively New-Zealand-agnostic, so let’s move on.
Positive number two: a dope female prime minister setting the standard for what working motherhood looks like. Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, gave birth while in office, took six weeks of paid leave (let me remind you that the United States remains the only country in the developed world that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave1), and returned to work, her little baby always in the background of her press conferences, being tended to by her husband (who is the child’s full-time caretaker). Her husband and child travel with her as she jets around the country, fulfilling her duties and stepping out of meetings periodically to breastfeed. It’s inspiring and badass, what she’s doing, and it’s even better because it’s so normalized here. The New Zealanders I’ve talked to about it have responded to my curious questions with a general attitude of “so she was pregnant and now she’s a new mom and she’s working and leading our country—so what?” I think back on all of the commentary surrounding Hillary’s run (and that crops up any time any woman is in the running for almost any seat in government) about her emotions and whether she could control them enough to be our Commander in Chief. Or the conversations I have with my female friends and coworkers who are weighing the effects of having children on their career—how pregnancies might impact promotions or perceived competence. And here, in New Zealand, you have literally the most powerful person in the country lead while pregnant, then publicly take maternity leave, and then return right back and continue working with a newborn in tow. I love it.
Positive number three: it’s really safe, which means you can hitchhike with ease, which is something I’ve always wanted to do, didn’t always feel comfortable doing in South America, and have gotten to do a lot of here. It taught me a lot about the New Zealand psyche, and also about myself.
Positive number four: it’s a well-developed first-world country that has nice things like free healthcare. Sometimes a little hard to get ahold of, sure, no one’s perfect, but by and large, New Zealand citizens get looked after. (And visitors, too! I went in for a quick check-up while I was in Christchurch, and my nurse told me that if there had been anything wrong—if I’d needed a prescription for an infection or something—the government would’ve covered my treatment. Thanks, government!)
Positive number five, and the most important one: it’s stunning. We know that beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, and that applies to landscapes, too, but whatever it is you’re looking for—gushing waterfalls, glistening lakes, glacial pools, snow-crested mountains, rolling green hills, salty cerulean water, long stretches of warm sand—New Zealand has for you. And more likely than not, it’s well-maintained, well-marked, and there’s a well-paved road to get you there.
So it’s not all bad, I promise. It’s actually a really special place. And if you’re from here, I can imagine it checks a lot of boxes for you. And if you’re not from here, but maybe instead from a country with a different kind of natural beauty—maybe the desert or maybe the tropics—and you want to explore somewhere new where you can practice your English, I can imagine this is a really wonderful place to go.
But if you’re American (or Canadian or British or also generally just European), going to New Zealand is a waste of your time and your money. Get yourself to Banff or Yosemite or the Alps instead.
The Bad
Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. I’ll break it down, like I did the positives.
First, New Zealand’s not that special. Its beaches aren’t the most beautiful in the world; its icebergs aren’t the biggest; its fjords aren’t the most gorgeous; its mountains aren’t the highest. It is cool that such a little place has all that diversity, sure, but places on the same longitude—Chile and Argentina, for example—have the same diversity stretching the length of their borders, and usually in more impressive forms. I saw Perito Moreno in El Calafete and stood, slack-jawed, at its face, listening to pieces of it cleave off and splash in the crystalline waters below (this, after an easy $5 bus and a $10 national park ticket to get in); the two most famous glaciers in New Zealand, Fox and Franz, are now only directly accessible by helicopter, as they’re receding; I spent $250 to fly over them and walk around them a bit, and while it was a cool experience, the sights themselves entirely paled in comparison. Lake Pucón isn’t any less beautiful than Lake Tekapo; Bariloche is just a better, cheaper, Queenstown; the mountains around Santiago are more impressive and easier to get to than the ones in Tongariro. New Zealand’s quite proud of their Southern Alps, but the real Alps are bigger (Mont Blanc trumps Mount Cook by over 3,000 feet) and more striking, and they take you through six different countries with six different cultures, versus just the one. And I’m comparing New Zealand to other countries I’ve been to, but I could just as well compare it to the United States itself; we have California, which has basically the entire diversity of New Zealand packed into one state; we have better mountains and ice in Alaska than the Fiordland contains; we have Yellowstone and Yosemite and Zion and Acadia and Denali and Sequoia (and I could go on) with their own impressive treks and climbs and walks. In fact, seeing all New Zealand had to offer gave me a lot of desire to go back to my own country and explore it better, and appreciate its sea-to-shining-sea swaths of beauty, and be extra proud about it all because it doesn’t proclaim itself to be the Mecca of landscape views (even though it might be, in terms of simple awe-inspiring power).
Now, cost. To get to this fairly non-unique place, you’re looking at a flight that will last 10+ hours (13, for me, from Santiago) and cost you at least a couple thousand dollars, and then when you get here, you’ll immediately start bleeding money. Want to buy a pepper (or capsicum, as they call them here, clinging on to the last vestiges of their English-colony vocabulary because they’ve been unable to cultivate a culture of their own)? It’ll cost you NZ$5 minimum ($3.75). A liter of gas? NZ$2.30 ($1.50, which means it costs $90 to fill up your Ford Focus). The cheapest possible hostel dorm rooms will run you NZ$22 ($15) a night, but as soon as you get into tourist areas (aka the South Island), those’ll jump to NZ$35 minimum ($23). Even sleeping and eating cheaply—eight-bed dorms and cheese sandwiches for lunch—I was spending about two thirds of my daily budget (which was $50) before even beginning to look into activities, which are, again, painfully dear. A day of skiing in the North Island cost me NZ$260 ($172); that included some investment items, like googles, so I paid less when I went for a day in the South Island (about $110), but still, that’s between two and three days’ budget in just one day’s activities. And I skipped most of the expensive ones! Skydives go for around NZ$300, bungees NZ$200, and daily fees for some of New Zealand’s Great Walks (multi-day hikes that require reservations at Department of Conservation-maintained huts) can reach NZ$190. Per day! To walk yourself and all your stuff around in nature, not a flushing toilet in sight!
Even on my cheapest days in Queenstown, where my only activities were walking around the lake (free) and going to my favorite bakery for a carrot cupcake (NZ$4.50) and I otherwise ate food I’d bought in the supermarket two towns over (since the Queenstown one charged $5.99/kilogram for apples!) and cooked myself, I couldn’t get my daily expenses below NZ$45/day, since the cost of accommodation was so high. My day trip to the Milford Sound, which cost NZ$140 for 8 hours of bus travel, 90 minutes of a boat trip, and honestly underwhelming views of some blue water and some grey cliffs, obviously blew my entire budget out of proportion. The cost of food I could sometimes understand; New Zealand is an island and has to import a lot of its food (though strangely, even locally-produced things like milk were more expensive than I was used to paying in New York City). But the cost of lodging and activities was so frustratingly high. Clearly there’s sufficient demand to warrant such prices, but my wallet was crying almost every day of my six weeks in New Zealand.
So you see why Marta and I opted to hitchhike. (I didn’t even get into transportation costs, since I avoided them, but my options were basically: buy an old car or campervan for around NZ$4,000, invest in insurance and registration and inspection, hope it didn’t break, and try to sell it for what I paid at the end of my trip and the beginning of the high season; rent a car and pay around NZ$35-55 a day; or spend between NZ$300-600 on a multi-hour flexible bus pass.) The high prices are also why Marta and I opted to do a week or so at a farm stay, since it let us stay in one place and spend nothing for a few days, giving us the flex in our budget to go skiing or go see Mamma Mia 2 (where we spent NZ$32 on tickets, even with our student discount, and another NZ$20 on snacks, even though we bought them at the grocery store and snuck them in to avoid paying the theater markup). If I had stayed in New Zealand for three full months, as I had been planning to do, I would’ve had to do more farm stays (pretty much the only Workaways available, since most of the hospitality or childcare jobs went to people on working holiday visas) in order to not go completely broke.
And although I did certainly sometimes find myself in the company of nice New Zealanders, I was by and large unpleasantly surprised by the attitude of Kiwis. And most of the Kiwis I was interacting with I met in hospitality, service, or tourism backgrounds—hostel managers, restauranteurs, tour guides—who I would’ve expected to be extra welcoming and kind. I think I expected to find something more akin to Canadian friendliness or at least British wit than the dim, bad-attituded folk that met me across both islands. A few representative examples: a volunteer church docent (volunteer! church! docent! what three words could better suggest a kindly disposition!) told me, when I pulled open the door at 9:59 a.m., that I reminded him of his wife in my irritating attempts to make the world bend to my desires (…the church didn’t open until 10) and that he wouldn’t dare barge into my house, so why was I barging into his (I reminded him the house was Christ’s and we walked away). A pizzeria owner didn’t listen to my order, brought me the wrong pie, and instead of fixing it, slapped a plate of my desired toppings on the table and told me to just replace them myself. A bus company refused my request to return on the same bus I’d booked, but a day later, even though that bus was completely empty and I wasn’t going to be using my original ticket. Several hostel receptionists couldn’t figure out how to troubleshoot a faulty wireless router, a grocery store clerk wouldn’t let me use the store loyalty card even though I’d already registered for my own and my email wasn’t coming up in the system, no waiter or waitress ever brought me the food I’d ordered, with the specifications I’d ordered, while it was still hot and appetizing (we could sometimes get two of the three, but never all three). Again, maybe it comes from a general fed-upness with tourism (over 3 million people visit New Zealand a year, and the country only has 4.7 million citizens of its own4When I asked New Zealanders I came across questions about their country, like what their flag represented or how their houses of government worked, I was surprised by the lack of knowledge and moreover, lack of curiosity as to the right answers; it’s not only other countries they’re ignoring. Many of the Kiwis I met were extremely quick to sort people into racial categories: for instance constantly complaining about “the Chinese,” who, to them, were “cluttering up tour buses” and “refusing to speak English in shops.” One of the farmers we worked for told us he never accepted Central or South Americans because they are all lazy, and I overheard a few Kiwi guys try to pick up a black American by asking her which African country she was from.
Does all that sound familiar? Does it sound a little like I left America at its worst—rude, crass, stupid, racist—and found a more expensive version of it (albeit with free healthcare) here in New Zealand? It was a sad, ironic realization, let me tell you.
Next: culture. New Zealand doesn’t have any, and for a traveler who needs more than just pretty landscapes to feel fulfilled, it’s heartily disappointing. They have the Maoris, but to learn about Maori culture, tourists have two options: 1) pay upwards of NZ$70 to enter one of the various Maori Maraes (cultural centers) scattered around the country, which you can only get into as part of a tour and where you’ll eat a Maori hāngi, or traditional barbecue, and watch “traditional dances” put on for your benefit and your benefit alone—so another version of the new-age colonialism (shoutout to Tracey for that phrase) that I tried so hard to avoid in Ecuador—or 2) go to the one decent museum in all of New Zealand, Te Papa Museum in Wellington. Does it sound like I’m being melodramatic? I’m not. There’s just not enough art or history in New Zealand to warrant more than one. Each small town may have a couple of rooms about their specific history—I saw scintillating exhibits on bottle collecting fads, mining accidents, and railroad construction—but the only good museum is in Wellington. It’s three floors, one per discipline—history (featuring New Zealand’s only real entry onto the world stage, a battle in WWI at Gallipoli where 3,000 NZ soldiers died5); natural science (and the hundreds of native species killed off by white people); and art (an incredibly beautiful, incredibly well-done, incredibly interactive set of exhibits that were as good or better as similar attempts I’ve seen in New York or London). That one museum is fantastic, really it is; I couldn’t recommend it more highly, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough for a country’s lump sum culture and history to be able to be able to be fully explored in an afternoon.
Oh, and the “no culture” thing goes for food, too. New Zealand’s most famous culinary calling cards, the jewels of its crown, are meat pies, fish and chips, and pavlova. I’ll let that sink in a minute. Meat pies—puffed pastry stuffed with stew, developed to be a cheap solution to farmers’ empty stomachs and cold hands at lunchtime. Fish and chips—okay, truly a delicious dish, but just plumb stolen from England, and those poor chaps have no real food culture of their own, so just leave them their fish and chips, will you? And pavlova, a delicious merengue-based dessert, but possibly stolen from Australia (the debate rages6). There are a handful of good restaurants slinging Eurocentric classics and a couple of American-inspired burger chains that are worth the NZ$14/patty they ask for, but there’s not really anything new to try. New Zealand left my mouth just as disappointed as my brain. The eyes were happy, but happy eyes do not a happy Kath make.
Only two more complaints, I promise:
Fairly hypocritically self-congratulatory stance on ecological intervention. New Zealand, like every other corner of the world, was one thing before humans came, and another thing after their arrival. The first humans to arrive on the islands, Polynesian explorers who probably first arrived in the early 1300s and became the tribes now known as the Maori7, first scarred the natural environment by burning native forest to scare out the birds that had evolved to be huge and flightless due to a plethora of food and a lack of natural predators. They also introduced non-native species like rats and dogs, which were the first predators that many local bird species had ever encountered. (New Zealand’s only native mammal species are bats.8) That continued, leading to the extinction of some endemic plant and bird species, and was worsened by the arrival of the Europeans (Dutch navigator Abel Tasman was the first European to sight New Zealand, in 1642, and Englishman James Cook was the first to navigate and map it in 17699), who brought more non-native species like cats and possums, which infiltrated the native forests and further decimated the native bird population by eating their eggs. Fast forward to now: New Zealand has vowed to be “predator-free by 2050.” That means not a single possum, stoat (a kind of weasel, I gathered), mouse, et cetera to be found. Admirable, maybe. But how are they doing it, you ask? Well, they’re dropping 1080, a poison, all over national parks and forests. They’re also setting up traps and baits, but the Department of Conversation says that the problem is too grand to be solved in those one-off ways, and that dropping the poison is necessary to protect native birds and frogs.10 The 1080 is killing the desired interlopers, yes, but it’s also occasionally killing pets (usually dogs who come across an infected mouse or rat carcass and lick it or eat it) and sometimes hurting the very bird species it’s trying to save (the native New Zealand alpine parrot, the kea, is notoriously curious, and in the first few years of 1080 application, two dozens keas were poisoned after investigating and ingesting some of the bright-green poison-baited cereal.11 But it’s not even all of that that rubs me the wrong way. It’s that New Zealand and its Department of Conversation is completely ignoring the hugely detrimental affects that other introduced species—namely sheep and cows—have on native plants, birds, and fish. Over 43% of New Zealand’s land, most of it formerly native forest, has been converted to pasture or dairy farms,12 which has destroyed breeding ground for native birds, and the toxic run-off from dairy farms has poisoned 60% of New Zealand’s rivers and creeks, making them unsafe to swim in (yet alone drink from, which in turn poisons the fish that live there and the birds and other animals that drink from them)13. But sheep and cows account for almost all of New Zealand’s agriculture-based GDP sector (about 4% of the total)14 economy, so New Zealand doesn’t have plans to eradicate them, even though they are 1) non-native and 2) harmful to local, native species, which was sufficient reason to get rid of all the possums / stouts / rats / mice. I’m not a stout-hugger, but capitalism-influenced environmentalism masqueraded as pure altruism on behalf of some poor birds rubs me the wrong way.
Last but least: depressing lack of backpacking community. Now wait—this could be because my two months in New Zealand were during the late winter / early spring of August and September, and the most backpackers (and tourists in general) come in the summer, from November to January, so maybe I just didn’t have sufficient sample size to come out with a positive estimation of them. But still. I found almost none (notable exceptions of Israeli Shiri and Danish David, who I met while hitchhiking, and Spanish Mariona, who you heard about as one of our farm-rescuers) of the magical backpacking connections that I came to expect in South America. None of the warm wonderfulness of meeting someone at your hostel, or who’s sitting next to you on a tour, or who you’re in line behind at a cafe, and starting a chat that turns into a conversation that turns into spending a few hours or days or weeks sharing stories and adventures. I didn’t need to find more of the lifelong-connection-soulmates I found in Colombia, but I was hoping to find the same general sense of camaraderie that popped up in every South American country I found myself in. I didn’t, and I’ve diagnosed that gap as a difference in the type of traveler who is attracted to New Zealand.
Many of the people I met fell into one of two camps. First, they were here on a one-year working holiday visa, usually with a partner or friend (I met very few solo-working-holidayers); they’d bought a campervan and when I met them, were either based in one city for a few months, working and thus unable to really explore, or they were on the “holiday” part of their trip, already set with their companion and their transportation and their plans, and not really open to changing them or interesting in adding someone else to them. (Also, they were totally okay with shitting in a plastic box that constituted their doctored-up campervan’s “self-contained bathroom” and going several days and/or weeks without showering; our standards of hygiene probably would’ve also preempted us from getting along.)
Second, they were here for a relatively short period of time (2-3 weeks), usually with their best friend, usually on vacation from an English-speaking country like England or Canada or the States; they were in seek of beautiful landscapes, absolutely no difficulties with language or cultural assimilation, and witty Instagram captions. They usually had a pretty tight, pre-planned itinerary (either with a campervan or a bus pass) and didn’t really have the time or interest in meeting new people, either.
Both those types of trips are well and good—better than good, lovely!—but not really in line with my plans, interests, or preferred way to travel (loosely, slowly, soaking in each place).
So there you have it: I found the nature impressive but not unique; the cost of living shockingly high; the people not particularly friendly; the haughty attitude towards conversation two-faced and ironic; and the other backpackers not my cup of tea. Again, I realize how privileged I am to be able to travel like I’m doing and to have had the experiences that are bringing me to the conclusions I’m finding here, and if you love New Zealand, I’m thrilled for you! But I don’t, and I realized that about three weeks into my trip, and I was at a loss as to what to do about it.
What’s a Dissatisfied Backpacker to Do?
Coming to the conclusion that I didn’t like New Zealand felt like a first step, but what was the second? (Aside from do a deep dive into why and write about it, because that was a given.) I didn’t want to move my flight up. It felt like it would be giving up. Like failure. I’d committed to spending three months in this country, and leaving early (not to mention paying hundreds of dollars in flight change fees to do so) didn’t feel like an opinion.
But then I thought about why I felt that way. And I realized that leaving early wasn’t failing. It wasn’t giving up. It was coming to terms with things I couldn’t control, figuring out what I needed to do about them to be happy again, and executing the change of plan, without self-judgement or frustration. (That process of realization was greatly assisted by conversations with some very smart people, like my dad, and Diego, and Ally, and Megan.)
I’m not good at walking away from things I’ve committed myself to. I really don’t like it when I feel like I failed myself.
A small example: when I was last in Buenos Aires with Diego, and we were planning a little get-together for our (early) birthdays, I’d planned to make a carrot cake for all the people that were coming over. But by the time that Diego and I got home from the grocery store with all the ingredients (and the incredibly hard-to-find powdered sugar for the frosting), we only had an hour before our first guests were due to arrive—barely enough time to shower, get ready, and decorate the apartment, yet alone bake and frost an entire cake. Diego pointed that out, and instead of seeing that he was right and accepting the change, I started crying. I had really wanted to serve carrot cake and show off the dessert capabilities of everyone’s favorite root vegetable! And I’d researched the best recipe! And we’d found all the ingredients at last! We were so close! I beat myself up for not having planned better, for being the kind of hostess who wouldn’t have cake for a birthday celebration, for not being a lightening-fast carrot-shredder who could’ve whipped up the batter in minutes. And what did that get me? An unfun, confidence-shredding pity-party that reduced the time we had to get ourselves and the house ready to a measly 45 minutes. I continue to struggle with this unrealistic, inflexible approach to life, and probably will for a while, and it definitely made me think, at first at least, that I couldn’t leave New Zealand early.
But just like before the birthday party—when not following my original plans actually made the evening better and way more relaxed—I tried to accept the fact that my situation had changed, recognized that I had agency to respond to it, and considered the new information.
So what options did I realistically have? I wasn’t ready to go home to the States yet; too much travel bug still in me. I could’ve booked a flight to somewhere near New Zealand—Australia was the obvious choice, or maybe Fiji or Samoa or even southeast Asia, though that would’ve stretched the definition of “near”—and spent two months exploring before returning to fly back out of Auckland, but after such a dud of a backpacking experience in New Zealand, I didn’t want to go chase more of the same (as I imagined waiting for me in Oz) and I didn’t have the energy to set off to a completely new place. (Plus, I didn’t want to leave New Zealand without seeing the South Island, which I estimated would take me, minimum, two weeks, which would’ve left me with only six weeks to do somewhere like southeast Asia, which sounded way too rushed, even if I’d had the desire [and the tropical diseases immunizations] necessary for that trip.)
I found myself kind of burnt out, wanting to recharge my travel batteries but not yet ready to go home and retire them completely. And also in love with someone who lives in Buenos Aires. And also with a surrogate family in the Galapagos and another in Uruguay. And also with a ton of residual wanderlust for places in South America that I never got to on my first circuit there (like Iguazu, Rosario, Mar de Plata, and Salta—and that’s just in Argentina).
And I realized that that residual wanderlust came from how South America made me feel. It was rarely about what I saw there (even when what I saw was incredible—world-wonder-worthy Machu Picchu or the view of Fitz Roy after a four-hour climb). That feeling came from a magical combination of who I was with—lively locals and open-minded, fun travelers—and how I felt—cognizant of my privilege, a little uncomfortable, always learning. And how easy that combination was to find. On a hike in Chile or a beach in Uruguay, I loved getting inside a different culture and seeing who I was in it, and what I could learn from it. The food and the views were great bonuses.
So I decided to go back to Buenos Aires, and spend more time with Diego. I’ll be based there for a few months (I want to be home for Christmas). I’ll travel around Argentina and Uruguay (and maybe Brazil?), I’ll work on my Spanish (I have signed up for a few weeks of intensive, four-hour-a-day group classes—if I don’t come home in December dreaming en español, I’ll be disappointed), and continue writing, both for this blog (my lil baby!) and also in the freelance editing and writing work that I started doing about a month ago.
I bought a flight (all $600 of it—once I hit $601 freelancing, I started breathing again) and I leave tonight for Buenos Aires. I’m so excited to be back in a city (and a country, and a continent) that I love and that gives me so much energy, and to get to be in the same place as Diego (FaceTime is great but does not a relationship make).
And having decided to pull the plug on a full three months in New Zealand, and do a shortened six-week circuit instead, I found that I had new energy and excitement about the time I had left here. Knowing I had an out that I was excited about helped me to really enjoy my last three weeks in the South Island, to worry less about money, to just accept that I wouldn’t get the cultural newness I was hungry for and to instead double down on the mountain views.
And they were pretty incredible.
So goodbye, you ungodly beautiful little country with your pricey produce, slapped on top of a line of active volcanos that are themselves slapped on top of two overlapping tectonic plates. May you not destroy yourself too thoroughly when you have your upcoming gigantic earthquake. Your few decent citizens don’t deserve to die that way. And the legions of hikers and campers and lazy English speakers who are coming your way don’t, either.
Off to Buenos Aires I go!
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