After four months abroad and over a month of reflection, it’s safe to say that my semester in New Zealand was the most unique experience of my life. Having never flown farther than 2 hours from my house and never really traveling anywhere for pleasure, it was a big leap for me to decide to spend all of that time halfway across the world. However, by throwing myself into the proverbial fire, I have learned a great deal about myself as a person and a traveler.
To say I am more of an independent traveler cannot be proven completely true, as I spent the semester with a girlfriend who doubled as my closest friend and travel companion for the entirety of the trip. The week that she was in the South Island with her family while I was back in Auckland was, if nothing else, the weirdest of the semester. But other than that, having someone to share such a wonderful experience with only amplified it.
Still, the independent traveler idea came to mind after I handled traveling with a dozen other people for two weeks rather disastrously. This isn’t to say that it can’t be done; in certain circumstances, it can. If we had had a bus driving us around and a guide calling the shots, it would have been no problem. But who wants to do that? Part of what made the solo trip that Meryl and I took to Australia so memorable was that it was ours. There was nobody telling us when we had to be awake, where we had to go, or what we had the choice of doing. If we wanted to just go for a stroll and look at some stores, nobody was there to stop us. Hell, we even took a nap, something I’m sure can’t happen when you travel with other people. The less egos and ideas to accommodate, the better off any trip is.
While this is the case, it truly makes a difference, at least to me, to travel with a companion as opposed to just a friend. Friends can get along fine playing ping-pong or going for a walk to grab some dinner, but it takes more than a friend to be able to travel with someone. Though it can work, eventually interests change and it becomes of a competition of who gets their way at the other’s expense. To travel with someone who you share a relationship with, be it romantic or otherwise, makes everything more collective and enhances the experience for all involved.
I also realize that I don’t like to feel like I’m not in control. Even the illusion of control works for me. Part of this stems from high school, where I had a lot of responsibilities between sports, campus ministry and student government and expected the best from myself at all of them. While I never planned any road trips, I was behind many other things and, to put it simply, I had a problem when people assumed responsibility for anything and didn’t execute well. Now, this isn’t to say I’m perfect. In Australia, I thought I forgot our voucher for our Great Barrier Reef cruise (it turns out it was in my bag all along) and we had to go from desk to desk at the wharf seeing which one had our reservation. These things happen. But it’s an entirely different animal when you let yourself (or someone close to you) down as opposed to a group of people who you don’t really know and who have no loyalty to you. Perhaps I’m not as forgiving as I should be, but that’s just how I feel.
In terms of the things that interest me while I travel, the idea of seeing and doing things that cannot be done elsewhere is probably at the top of my list. Even the small beauties, such as seeing the Pancake Rocks or the Boulder Beach, or the sun setting over the mountains outside of Queenstown, mean a lot because they’re impossible to replicate. All of the naturally occurring beauty in New Zealand really interested me and played to my affinity for the outdoors that I developed over the summers at camp, and the landmarks in New Zealand provided a great deal of enjoyment to me.
The other part of that is the actual location of where I experienced them. There are a number of things, such as skydiving, bungy jumping, white water rafting, etc., that I did in New Zealand and will never be duplicated, no matter how many times I do any of those again. I’ll never be in the pod ready to jump with the people I was in New Zealand, nor will I ever be in the plane with the two Kristens, both scared out of their mind, about to be flung out of a plane with a strange man attached to our backs. Likewise, the rafting was an experience unique to New Zealand; we prayed to the Maori gods for protection and permission to use their river, and had an incredibly funny guide. The same can be said about snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, going to an All Blacks game, and any number of things I did while I traveled. The experiences that meant the most to me were ones that were wholly unique to the area that I was in.
Perhaps this is why I didn’t put as much value into the nightlife as expected. At Loyola, my favorite moments are spent out with my friends, but it just didn’t carry the same weight in New Zealand. Any number of things, from the fact that we didn’t have a terribly fun group to the fact that I didn’t enjoy many of the places we went, could have had an effect on this, but ultimately it came down to the uniqueness of the experience. Only that I was legally allowed to be there was special; the rest of the time, I was kind of just waiting to go home and trying not to spend too much money.
To that point, my semester in Auckland also proved that I’m not really a city person. Truthfully, I can tolerate Baltimore because where we are doesn’t feel too much like a city, but I’m much too lackadaisical to be thrust into a city full-time. While this can be limiting in my future travels, I think that it is good to know about myself and a good starting point in terms of gauging what I want to do in the future. While I assume that it won’t be until Europe that I actually see architecture fit to be admired, any other destination will be booked for its organic, rural attractions more than its cityscapes. I’m seriously considering the teaching program in Thailand after graduation for that reason. Cities, to me at least, are nearly interchangeable. I pictured Auckland to be like Seattle, though I’ve never seen Seattle and assume I would be much more impressed by it than Auckland. The point is that I can make such an assumption. The landscape in New Zealand isn’t anything like the landscape in Thailand or Africa or anywhere else. Natural beauty occurs everywhere but never the same way in two places. For that reason, I hope that in my future travels I can see as much of the world in this sense as is possible.
Though I had my fair share of gripes about my abroad experience and one true regret (missing New Zealand’s winner-take-all soccer match with a trip to the World Cup on the line), the experiences and knowledge that I gained over the course of the trip is by far great enough to cancel any of that out.
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