Kiwi Experience

 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.