Twenty-five years ago, this week, I dipped my toe over the equator and set foot in New Zealand for the first time. I’d spent three years in Luxembourg and was still smarting from the end of a relationship that caused that city to be filled with ghosts. I planned to move back to Ireland after a long time abroad to start my life again. But I had a mate in Christchurch and he convinced me to come south first and sample life in the Land of the Long White Cloud.
I can still remember that first
drive down the coast from Picton to Christchurch. The Pacific Ocean licking the
coast on my left-hand side while the Southern Alps rose majestically in the
distance. It started an itch that I scratched several times before I finally
talked my wife into moving here.
Many people assume I moved here
because I have a Kiwi wife, but the truth is that I was the one who was keener
to move here when the opportunity arose.
I crashed on my mate’s couch for
a few weeks on that first trip. Spent my first ever Christmas away from my Irish
family and then in January 1996 set off on my odyssey around the South Island.
My chosen mode of transport was Kiwi Experience, a company that has been dragging
backpackers around this fine country for years. At thirty, I was probably the oldest
person on the bus. Most of my fellow travellers had just finished Uni and were
trying to discover themselves before entering the working world. In most cases
Dad had given them five grand to help with this search. They were generally
posh and entitled and full of tales about finding beaches in Thailand that no
European had ever seen before.
The older ones were working class
like me. Nurses and teachers in their twenties who had saved up enough for the
trip of a lifetime. I tended to bond with them more. But my best mate on that trip was a German guy
called Andreas. He wore a wide brimmed hat that made me think of Puddleglum from
the Narnia chronicles in one of those wonderful moments that triggers happy
memories from your childhood.
We had a few raucous nights on
our way around the South Island and he left a poignant message in my diary “to
my only friend who thinks beer is more important than oxygen.” That pretty much
sums up that trip.
It’s also the fifth anniversary
of our move to New Zealand. I’m now married with a nine-year-old daughter and the
world has changed a lot in the interim. I used to pass the queue of back
packers on Queen St waiting for the Kiwi Experience bus to pick them up at 9am.
Most of them were as young as that crowd back in 1996, bleary eyed from a night
on the Auckland tiles, or from a long-haul flight from God knows where. In the
old days, we all had battered back packs. These days it’s all designer suitcases
and high-end casual clothing. But their eyes were still full of the wonder that
comes from breaking the umbilical cord from your family and travelling to the
other side of the world.
There are no queues for the Kiwi
Experience bus now of course. No cruise ships filled with American tourists in
the harbour. No mini buses outside posh hotels dropping off Chinese Tourists.
New Zealand closed it’s borders
back in March when the pandemic started roaring. Kiwi citizens and business
people willing to endure two weeks in quarantine are put up in posh hotels,
which has at least has kept that sector of the hospitality industry going. Kiwi
Experience is trying to attract locals to take a tour around their own country
but I don’t see any of their buses around and the back packer hostels are boarded.
As I walked up Queen St this morning
and passed the bus stop where the big green bus used to stop, my mind was drawn
to all the young people who weren’t there. The ones who had reached the stage
of their life that my companions and I had reached back in 1996. All those memories
of broken relationships that needed to be banished. All the years of hard work
that needed to be rewarded with a long-haul holiday. All those friendships that
needed to be celebrated with a common odyssey. I booked my trip in September
1995, convinced that only a trip to the other side of the world would banish
the ghosts that haunted my mind. Many others would have made a similar plan at
the end of 2019. They may have a thirst for adventure, a quest for discovery or
a need for escape. Whatever their motivation, they would have stumbled into a
travel agency and booked the trip of a lifetime.
And then Covid arrived and left
them stuck in the circumstance they were trying to escape. For most of us,
Covid is an inconvenience that keeps us tied to the location we planned to stay
in anyway. Most of us weren’t planning to go anywhere, so not being able to go
anywhere is no big deal.
But at any time, there will be a
small percentage of people who need to escape. Who are curious about the light
that shines beyond these woods and need to go and see what makes it shine.
I was one of those people in
1995. Lost within the world I lived in and desperate for change. I can’t imagine
what it would have been like if I’d been told to hold to put my life on hold
for a year back then. Apart from anything else, my contract in Luxembourg was
about to expire and I might have found myself there for a year without a job.
I feel sorry for those young
people now. The world is a theme park and they are restricted to just one ride.
