Travel Notes S0E1 5 Lessons learnt from New Zealand
Originally published on Medium on July 15, 2018.
Better late than never
So I ran away from world back in January 2017, landing in New Zealand for 6 enjoyable weeks exploring the South Island.
I should have written something a year ago but time is fickle, yet still with reflection I’ve five lessons from exploring this amazing country.
1. Plan enough to enable the next decision
I booked my ticket on a Thursday to fly out the following Monday…. followed by my travel insurance, a hire car, an AirBnB for my first night and…… that’s it.
Even with all the time in the world and unlimited headspace I dislike making plans unless they are 100% necessary. By planning you are enforcing a framework on your trip/work/experience which can’t help but influence your thinking and choices when you’ve yet to have achieved the minimum amount of experience to make those decisions.
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.” Douglas Adams
In the spirit of agile; plan just enough to learn what needs to be learnt to enable the next decision to be made with confidence.
2. Strangers are just friends you havn’t met yet
My second night in NZ I Bivi’d next to a lake a few hours west of Christchurch. As shadows lengthened a bunch of locals arrived with motorboat, proceeding to shoot across the lake on water skis.
Watching from camp, beer in hand I felt a pang of jealously. Yet it was unnecessary since in short order I was yelled at to jump to join them. Never having water skied before, it took a few goes to get up, but up I got. The crew left me a few hours later with extra beers in hand and a telephone number if I came back that way.
This level of friendliness happened again and again on my travels; go into every social situation with an open mind and heart and you’ll be amazed by the responses you get back.
3. Self confidence is good, but should be tempered with experience
I arrived at the Mount Cooke national park late in the day. Talking to the park rangers, there was an incredible ‘non-tourist’ route across the glacier which was usually a three day trip. Having recently completed a winter skills course in Scotland I was full of confidence that I could overcome any obstacle with ease, even if I was solo.
So off I went, hired crampons and ice axes in hand with a plan to make it round in two days (I mean… how hard can it be….).
It turns out pretty hard.
Day 1; I followed the waypoints towards a tiny hut for the night. About a mile out, the path disappeared downwards towards morain with a steep shingle slope. By the map it looked like the hut was just around the corner so I should reach it by staying level…. Until I slipped, sliding maybe 70metres down the scree to the bottom.
With fading light I was forced to crack out an ice axe and half hack foot and handholds out to clamber back up the slope. I’d missed a waypoint earlier on… lesson learnt?
Nope…
Day 2 started fortuitously, climbing to the ridge line which traversed to the glacier. I met a group around lunchtime who’d advised that I’d see their footprints on the glacier to follow across. Following the ridge line it narrowed to a thin crack of a route and down below I could see (what I thought were) the aforementioned footprints. Since according to my map the ridge line didn’t widen out and I thought I could see a path down defending below I made my decision.
A bad one it turned out…. Since as I descended a gully the rock got looser and looser, and the face steeper and steeper…
I reached a point where I couldn’t go back up, and every movement threatened to drop me off a vertical 30metre cliff. I was bloody lucky to make it out of there…. A scaring lesson that just trusting your instincts only works where you’ve the experience to inform them.
4. It’s a scarily small world at times
Hiking around the coast in the Marlborough sounds, I stopped for lunch and a swim in a tiny bay near a hut. The inhabitants of this hut were (in typical Kiwi fashion) chilling out with beer and food in the sun.
Following my dip I wandered over to say hello and was essentially captured for an extended lunch since I just HAD to try the local fish they’d caught that morning.
Exchanging stories it came up that one of the ladies maiden name was the same as mine. We dug into this deeper… and deeper and deeper… same name, from the same town, with immigrant parents of about the right age of family members who’d left Blighty 50 years before.
I still can’t be 100% sure but going back to my family tree I’ve some confidence that I did find a long lost family member randomly in the (relative) wilderness of NZ. I love the power of happenstance sometimes….
5. A change of environment can teach you much about yourself
One of my overwhelming memories of this road trip was having zero desire to be around other people more that absolutely necessary.
I was perfectly happy with me, myself and I (plus a bunch of audiobooks) driving, hiking and biking my way across the country.
In retrospect this was very much a response to having become dependent on many many loose and tight friendships as a mental crutch to dealing with some very stressful and tough times. With that chapter of my life closed, my mind was yearning to re-balance in some way, to find peace & quiet, to not have to deal with the mental weight of others around me.
“Sometimes, you need to be alone. Not to be lonely, but to enjoy your free time being yourself.”
By so utterly changing the scope of how you live for a time, you allow yourself to process your past experiences consciously and subconsciously, to analyse your past actions and come back with new insights. Hopefully for most it won’t be as dramatic as my situation, but it taught me why regular breaks away from your day to day life are critical for good mental health.