A long way from home: walking across New Zealand

Photograph by Xander Dixon

Here’s the thing: if I wasn’t already from New Zealand you would absolutely, without a doubt, recommend it to me. A brushstroke of land in the remote Pacific, outlined by rugged coast. Volcanoes and glaciers. Rolling farmland and vineyards. Soaring mountainranges. A home to remarkable birds and ancient lizards, where the air is clean and none of the creatures are poisonous; where there are hiking and cycling trails, and a laidback pace, where having no shoes on is socially acceptable. “Oh my God,” you’d tell me, reaching out to clutch my arm, “you would love it.”

But I left. Two decades ago, at the age of 22, I strapped on a backpack – not unlike the one I was carrying now – and moved to London, a city that had called to me for as long as I could remember. Maybe it was all the music I gorged on. Or the movies. Or the comedy. Or the books. But it wasn’t one singular beacon; I was simply a bored, frustrated young person terrified of becoming a bored, frustrated adult. I wanted to see the world – no, I wanted to be a part of it. To experience a big, whole life, bigger than where, and who, I was.

My family had seen me off at the airport, all of us milling around, awkwardly; there were tears, of  course, but I don’t think anyone was surprised I was heading overseas. My parents had always been supportive – go, live your life! – and, for better or for worse, had never anchored me to anything.

Where I come from we don’t have the “gap year” – a term that always sounded like killing time before one’s real life began. Instead, New Zealanders have their “OE”: overseas experience. Leave home, go forth, see what’s out there. Many return, happy to be home, but at least a third do not. Because for us, the experience was where our real lives began.

This comes packaged with guilt, of course. Guilt for leaving. For staying gone. For thriving elsewhere. When people ask: “Do you think you’ll ever move back home?” I feel the sting. Was London not my home? Did I have to belong to where I was born? And the question I posed to myself: why wasn’t New Zealand enough?

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s when life’s questions become too hard to untangle, you go walking. And that’s what Te Araroa – “the long pathway” – offered. Five months, two islands, through every kind of terrain. From that remote headland, there was nothing more to do but begin.

My first four days were spent alone, traipsing one long highway of sand. Known as Ninety Mile Beach, it is, in fact, more like 50, but perhaps whoever named it had also walked it with 14kg of gear strapped to their back. I carried everything I needed to sleep, cook, eat, hydrate, ablute and endure the full spectrum of conditions; a mobile home. I trudged forwards, sea to my right, dunes to my left. From time to time I would spot wild horses, prancing freely across the sand.

The first night, my tent pitched on the quiet edge of a bay, I stripped off and ran into the sea, the cold hitting me like a whip, both soothing and highlighting sore muscles and patches of skin already reddened from the burden of the backpack. This was my country, but I was just a visitor, an outsider with an insider’s accent. The waves broke against me as I pleaded: Let me feel at home here. Maybe then the questions wouldn’t bother me. Maybe the guilt would soften.

Onwards through the Northland forests, where torrential rain turned the dirt path to streams. Over the baking heat of Tongariro National Park, traversing volcanoes, moon-like craters and turquoise lakes, steam emanating from the surrounding rocks. At night I rinsed the red dust off my skin in the pool above a waterfall, not quite believing any of this was real.

For three days I paddled a rented kayak down the mighty Whanganui River with a group of four other hikers in open-topped canoes, a constant downpour soaking through even the hardiest waterproof jackets. In the evenings, dry-barrels untied and dragged up the hill to the night’s DOC (Department of Conservation) hut, our foul-smelling wet things were hung up in front of the fireplace, everything from socks to undies draped over a tired-looking clothes airer, steam and stink rising off them like exorcised spirits while we played cards around the table.

The friends I made on the trail seemed to fall into two camps: New Zealanders, who were all for travelling but couldn’t imagine calling anywhere else home. And then expats and visitors, who were surprised I had chosen to live in a different place to what felt like paradise to them – but who admitted their own pull to leave wherever they grew up. Like me, they had grown too large for the pots they were first planted in.

In December of 1994, a class of rowdy 12-year-olds emerged from a bus in a mountain car park, ready for an overnight camping trip in the Tararua Range – a character-building exercise in our last month of primary school. This was true mountain wilderness: exposed, relentless and unforgiving. Steep-sided trails of thick mud through dark, dense forest, with gnarled tree roots that grasped at boots. Peaks that seemed to whip the sky into a constant vortex of bad weather, so hidden by cloud that from the ground you could only see the tops about 10 weeks of the year. Even early Māori tribes on the opposing valleys decided it was too much to battle over and left it for the gods, naming its highest peak Pukeamoamo: “Hill of Desolation”.

I recall nothing about how I’d prepared for or packed for that class trip, but I know I took my journal because I still have it, my experience documented in real time: “Freezing! Saw a dead sheep. Walked for three bloody hours, now in tent. SCARED! And it’s raining.” The next day’s entry: “Woke up in the middle of the night when the tent fell down, had to hold up the pole ALL NIGHT! Water seeped in from all the gaps. At 7am we packed up and walked three bloody hours back in the rain.”

My feelings about the great outdoors had, thankfully, completely changed since then, and now, 30 years on, I was heading back into the Tararua Range. This time I wasn’t alone; there were five of us, which in hiking terms is considered “safety in numbers,” but which basically meant that if anything went wrong, at least there would be witnesses. We picked our way upstream in clear, waist-deep rivers, scrambling up steep tracks, treading exposed ridgelines so high you could see all the way to the coast, and through ethereal “cloud forests” of ancient trees wrapped in furry moss.

At night, in the huts, conversations revolved around important topics, like the most ingenious trail snacks, and which long-drop toilets had the best views. Hut life was becoming its own kind of belonging: by the light of our headlamps we’d cook, eat, wash, and talk about our day, a momentary kinship that felt like home, if only for a night.

By the time I reached Wellington, two months into my walk, the ridgelines felt far behind me. The city where I grew up hadn’t changed much – the wind still blew in from the harbour and cut through the city streets, charming little wooden houses clung to the hills. Walking through the inner city with a heavy pack, I saw memories everywhere, and ghosts of my younger self – that restless girl who felt so adrift within herself, who couldn’t let go of the feeling there was more out there, and at the same time was shamefaced for thinking so. She couldn’t connect with the laidback local ambitions of her peers. She wanted to become a writer, and she wanted a life to write about. To her – to me – New Zealand had always felt so small; not by any tangible scale, just a general air of limitation. Whenever my plane from London lands in Wellington airport, the sight of those houses on the hills stirs the same knot of feelings: nostalgia, affection, suffocation, guilt. And I swallow them all. Growing up, my friends and I, with nothing much to do, would catch the bus out to the same airport and watch the planes take off. Even then I knew that if I just got on one, the whole world would open up.

I’d been living in the UK for 12 years when I became a British citizen. My mum, kindly, has never asked me to return to New Zealand – nor expected me to – but here she drew a line. “You can’t go being British when you haven’t seen half your own country,” she’d admonished, and on my next visit back to New Zealand she organised the two of us to take a road-trip around the South Island: 10 days driving from the untamed, weathered West Coast, to Akaroa’s French settlements on the east, and back up in a loop. It was like discovering a whole other country right on the doorstep. I suppose that’s exactly what it was.

Now, a few years later, I was back in the South Island, this time alone and on foot. For a country that had always felt so small to me, crossing it through the backcountry it loomed bloody enormous. Especially here, where the terrain was wilder, harsher, less populated than the North Island. The Richmond Range was the first crucible of sorts: I faced tough climbs to the rocky spines of its Rintoul mountains and near-vertical scree slopes down that launched my heart into my mouth with every skid underfoot. Standing alone on those knife-edge summits, I had a word with myself: surely it was time to let go of the guilt. Sometimes you can’t see something clearly until you’ve been away from it long enough. You’re here now. It was the leaving that made you.

By my third month, my body was noticeably changing: bruised and scraped, muscles more defined. I rented a bike to cycle the two-day section alongside hydroelectric canals, hitchhiked with some Welsh tourists to skip an arduous section of road, and spent a night beside Lake Tekapo – a dark sky reserve where my mother and I had stopped on our road trip. The night we’d come there was too much cloud cover for stargazing. This time I crept out in my long johns and stood by the shore in the dark, looking up into a sky so dense with stars it felt like I could fall into it.

The trail sent me a week off-grid into Nelson Lakes National Park, home to deep mountainous backcountry, the world’s clearest lake, and the infamous Waiau Pass, an Alpine crossing with a reputation as the trail’s biggest challenge. The morning I set out towards it, alone, the clouds closed in, reducing visibility to a metre and making each step ever more calculated, my surroundings unknown. I sidled up steep walls of shale towards the peak, blotted with snow. I had done hard things before, I reminded myself – I’d moved to England with nothing but a stubborn sense that I could carve out a life. Halfway up the 800m climb to the summit, knees burning and back sweaty, the clouds broke, and I could see across the valley I’d just come through, the braided streams I’d crossed, and the massive, cerulean sweep of Lake Constance, the biggest Alpine lake in the country.

The descent was tough, but now I was running on elated adrenaline. Down, down into the valley on the other side, stopping only once to peel off my socks and soak my feet in the ice bath of a stream. That night in a tiny hut, the air outside thick with sandflies, I made a mug of tea on the gas cooker and looked out at the mountains I’d successfully crossed. That’s when it hit me: I would not be here at all without that stubborn, awkward girl I’d tried so hard to shake off.

It was April now. Autumn in the southern hemisphere. The leaves were turning yellow and the days shorter; mornings darker and requiring warmer layers. A night camped in a lumpy field and then crossing a sheep station, where large signs advised trampers not to linger, wary flocks watching on from a grassy hillside before suddenly bolting en masse. They made me think of airport goodbyes at the end of every trip to see family, fighting back tears in the gift shops, stroking merino wool socks with sheep on them and feeling bereft. Each time reminding myself that guilt and grief are not great foundations for building a life.

Up before daylight to begin the dreaded Longwood Forest, marching through swampy forestry, famous for its perpetual muddy bogs, deep enough to swallow one’s legs to the thigh (which they did, often). I was entirely walking with others again, now, and we shared camaraderie in the struggle and filth, the near-hysteria of exhaustion when we passed 40km. It was dusk when we emerged, our bodies held upright by ibuprofen and adrenaline. A bloke with a pick-up offered us a ride to the rural tavern with rooms and we climbed into the trailer, giddy with euphoria.

The final stretch was mentally brutal, a trudge through ugly, industrial stretches either side of the city of Invercargill’s urban sprawl. Along wide beaches, where the trees and tussock grow sideways due to the relentless winds that blow straight up from Antarctica. The gusts pushed me backwards, as if trying to keep me here. Whether I stayed or not, though, wouldn’t really be a measure of home. Because home doesn’t have to be a specific location: in fact, maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe you need more than one place to contain all your contradictions; the parts of yourself that need to be known. Out here in New Zealand’s wild landscapes I had found a place to belong, wherever I lived. Perhaps home was nothing more than the feeling of belonging to yourself.

The trail now turned with the curve of the bluff, closing in on the southernmost edge of the country. Somewhere in the distance was the end of the trail. There a yellow signpost would be waiting for me, markers pointing in all directions, to other destinations – each one another possible life lived, another self met. I carried on towards it.

Additional photography: Eliene Albers; Claire Nelson