tristan riley

New Zealand is so small and quiet. I can walk across Christchurch, population 300,000 and dont see anyone in the street. Its like I never went anywhere, which is why next time I will holiday with a video camera attached to my head.

Here are some statistics. In 491 days of travel I took:

142 bus trips between 2 and 18 hours
28 train trips between 2 and 17 hours
10 boat trips between 1 and 12 hours
270 taxis, bus or train trips less than 2 hours,
motorbike taxi, bicycle rickshaw, pony cart, pickup
truck, minivan (not counting metro, very short bus
rides or rides with my friends)

I spent
6 days riding motorbikes
22 days riding bicycles
14 days trekking

I stayed in 138 different guesthouses and hotels.

As for the restaurants…. perhaps more than 400.

The total cost of my holiday was about US$10000 dollars not including airfares. This is incredibly cheap, about US$20 per day for everything (including processing photos, 6 internal flights, visas etc etc).

Ive returned with money in the bank, which makes feel sad. So many times I didnt buy a souvenir I liked because it was too “expensive”. I look at what little stuff I did bring home and feel even more stupid. With this much money I could travel longer, but already my trip was too long.

I feel completely changed as a person. Ive seen new depths of human suffering, and reached new limits of my own emotion. Ive been more joyous, grumpy, exhausted, amazed, hungry or lost than ever before. Now I feel terribly sad and melancholy that its all over and I see New Zealand very differently.

The world seems covered in concrete, wasteland, haze and smog. The few wild places I saw were rugged mountains or uninhabitable desert. I saw no place more beautiful than my own home in Golden Bay, or Australia’s Cape York.

One thing gives me hope. People I met in each country were so incredibly kind and generous to me. Verywhere I went people helped me, bought me breakfast and cups of tea, took me into their homes and smiled. I feel that no matter what problems befall humanity, we will keep going… and growing.