Final Reflection On My Travels

Here is a final reflection on how I grew as a traveler and what I learned about myself in my semester abroad. If there are actually any readers, thank you for taking the time to look at my work.

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.

Taupo and Rotorua

Our last Loyola-sponsored trip, to the North Island tourist destinations of Taupo and Rotorua, rivaled our first trip as one of the best. Since I haven’t really utilized bullet points on this blog, what better time than now to give a little run-down of that weekend, item by item.

• The first stop was some glowworm caves outside of Taupo, a truly incredible site. After walking through the caves and getting a bit of a history, they put us on a boat that went through the darkest portion of the cave, and the ceiling looked like a night sky littered with blue-green stars. It was a very pretty sight. However, I couldn’t help but notice that admission was $60 (thank you, Loyola). I’m sure we got a group discount, but they made at least $500 off of our small group for a tour that took 45 minutes. What a racket! I’d love to be the guy who owned that.

• The hotel we stayed at in Taupo was very, very nice. The dinner we got there was delicious, and everyone was so mesmerized by the fact that we all had our own TV’s that we all just laid in bed and watched “Step Brothers.”
• Day two started early, and after a buffet breakfast at the hotel, we went for a ride on a jet boat out by Huka Falls in which we did all kinds of spins and our driver made it a point to almost hit everything he possibly could. Huka Falls isn’t very high, but the sheer volume of the water that goes through it is incredible. This was also the first time that we smelled the sulfur from the thermal activity in Rotorua, which I can honestly say was the worst part about anything in New Zealand.

• Speaking of the thermal activity, we got a presentation that first day in Rotorua about their tourism. The area, especially it’s fabled “Pink and White Steps” was New Zealand’s main attraction until the late 1800’s when there was a volcanic eruption and everything was destroyed. Over time, however, they developed other ways to utilize the thermal activity and make it a viable attraction. We had two separate trips to such areas, one to a thermal valley that contained a boiling hot lake and 200-degree soil, and another with geysers.

• The second night, which we spent at a hotel in Rotorua, was highlighted by a trip to a Maori village in which they put on a performance of tribal dances and gave a bit of insight into the culture of the native Maori, as well as prepared a Hongi dinner. The Hongi refers to the way the meal is cooked. More or less, they dig a hole in the ground and cook the food in there. They had everything you could possibly imagine to eat, and all of it was delicious.

• The next day was extremely fun. Not only did we get to see a sheep show, in which ten champion breeds of sheep were shown to us and we got to see one get sheered on stage, but we also got to go Zorbing. One of the simplest ideas in the world, Zorbing is where you get inside of a big rubber ball and they put a little water inside and proceed to roll down a hill. Truth be told, it was pretty exciting. Such simple thrills don’t come easily.

• On the last day, we went up the Rotorua gondola and enjoyed similar activities to the one in Queenstown, except the luge track in Rotorua was much faster and much longer. That’s all I have to say about that.

• Since it might not be worth it’s own post (and this is probably the last one), I’ll add my return trip to Rotorua about a month later in this post. A few of us rented a van and drove down to go white water rafting in Rotorua, and we ended up going over the highest commercially-rafted waterfall in the world. Of course, going over a 21 foot waterfall in a rubber raft can be dangerous, as I found out when I failed to assume the brace position and smashed my face on my kneecap when we hit the water. After checking that all of my chompers were still in place and asking several times if my nose was crooked, I sucked it up and decided that a little bloody nose never hurt anyone. In fact, it kind of made me look tougher.

Overall, this trip was much more fun than the Marae weekend if only because we were constantly doing stuff that cost money, except we didn’t have to pay for it. Also, it was nice to be with everyone without really arguing, as we didn’t have much say in what was going to happen. It would have been nice to have a longer break from the group before we went on another trip together, but it ended up going very well.

South Island Road Trip: Part 3

After our extended stay in Queenstown, we still had to keep our reservations in the small lakeside town of Te Anau. With nothing to do the next day and a lot of tension within the group, we took the opportunity to have too much to drink at our hostel.

Unfortunately, a 10am checkout means a 10am checkout and the powers that be on our trip made it a point to get to the next town, the abandoned industrial city of Invercargill, as soon as possible. Despite their urgency, we hung around Te Anau for a little while and just walked around the lake before heading towards Invercargill. After we had already arrived, we decided to keep driving to Bluff, a town 15 minutes south of Invercargill that is advertised as the southernmost town in the world. (This was our main reason for coming here. Cue my sarcastic “woo!”) Naturally, we got a flat tire on the way to Bluff and had to put the spare on, leading to another car stopping with us and ten people standing in the middle of the road telling people what should be done instead of five. Good times!

Invercargill itself wasn’t much of a destination. The hostel was nice enough, and I took the car to a tire place and got a new one put on before anyone woke up, which led to me getting yelled at for not bringing everyone along or asking the other 13 people their opinion on the matter. (Ok, so that last part isn’t true, but I was half expecting it. The particular car that got the flat’s screens and meters were all in Japanese, but while I was driving it, I’m pretty sure a red light started flashing that said something along the lines of “WARNING: SNARK LEVELS EXTREMELY HIGH.” In fact, it's still going off right now.)

From Invercargill, we took the scenic route through Catlins National Park to Dunedin and stopped at a nice little beach just to relax. The guys played a little football and the girls went for a stroll along the beach, which led to a situation that would have been the low point of the entire year, let alone the trip. Meryl had the keys to our car in her jacket pocket, and her jacket pocket had a hole in it. Combine this with our car key’s affinity for falling off of the key ring, and you guessed it, we lost the car key. With the tide coming in and a rather large stretch of beach to search, we were very lucky to have everyone help look for them -- oh wait, that didn’t happen either. (“What do you want me to do? I don’t know where she lost them.” Thank you very much!) A few people did help, and luckily, Athina found them in the only place they could have been without being washed away by the tide. We were far, far from anywhere with cell phone reception and in all likelihood, it would have taken the entire rest of the day to get AA out to get the car started if we were lucky.

This drive also provided a moment that captured the entirety of the trip well. We spent an extra ten minutes driving around looking for Niagara Falls, which someone saw in their guidebook and decided we all needed to see. After turning around a few times, we finally made it, only there wasn’t another majestic waterfall (we’d seen a few of those, and they were beautiful), but a little stream. Someone thought it would be funny to name the little babbling brook after Niagara Falls, leading to the obligatory “Well maybe this isn’t it” conversation even though the sign was right there.

That particular disappointment summed up well how the whole trip went. Instead of doing things by feel and going with the flow, all 14 of us had to stay together and stop because one person saw something in a book that caught their eye. Everything was done by the book. We stopped in every town on the map, regardless of whether we ultimately needed to. The reason we rented cars instead of doing a bus trip was so that we could split up if we wanted to, but when the time came, that wasn’t allowed.

Dunedin was our next overnight stop, with the nightlife in the South Island’s big college town serving as the main attraction. People had been “saving up” their energy to go out here in anticipation of a wild night, and needless to say, it didn’t quite live up to expectations.

The next day, however, was a lot of fun. I started off with a nice breakfast sandwich from the burger place there whose name escapes me, and then we went on a tour of the Cadbury chocolate factory. There, parked out back, was a purple, Cadbury version of the 1930 Model A Ford that I have sitting in my driveway, which was very cool to see.

From there, we went to see another seal colony, and more importantly, some penguins, but they were a three hour hike from the parking lot so we decided against that. However, we did get to see a baby sheep that had been born minutes before take its first step and promptly get knocked over by another young sheep. Doesn’t look like that little guy will be getting picked first for kickball anytime soon.

From Dunedin, we were on to our final stop, Christchurch. It was another low key night, as everyone except for Meryl and I were getting up early for a Lord of the Rings tour. We stayed behind and ended up seeing what had to be the most English city in the southern hemisphere. Set up like an old British town with the Anglican Cathedral at the center, everything in Christchurch screamed “nostalgia,” from the punting ride down the river to the Botanical Gardens. There were art museums and galleries strewn about the city and a tram to take you from place to place. The downtown area was bustling with tourists, but even so, Christchurch gave off a very quaint vibe and was a nice, relaxing end to our trip.

The next day, of course, our flight was cancelled and we had to spend the whole day in the airport waiting around. When we finally arrived in Auckland, we had a little time to prepare to go out for Rob’s 21^st birthday that evening, and the following day was an off day before our Loyola-sponsored trip to Taupo and Rotorua.

South Island Road Trip: Part 2 - Queenstown

For my first essay for out Travel Writing class, I wrote about Queenstown in a way that would make any kind of recap in the sense that I have been doing seem pointless. So without further ado, Queenstown:

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

Before I came to New Zealand, previous students told me the same things everyone hears from those who traveled before them. “It’s going to be the best time of your life.” “You’re going to come back a different person.” “Don’t even bother going to class, it’s just one big vacation.” All of that seemed to be just a continuation of college itself. I would have the other best times of my life, the other experiences that changed me, and the other occasions I blew off class to compare it with( though it’s much easier to do here. None of my lecturers or tutors know who I am).

But when I was told that it would be the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, I was overcome with an odd sensation. What was the most beautiful place I’d ever been to? Until now, 95% of all my traveling has been done in the name of sports. I’ve been to every state on the East Coast for one sport or another, but you don’t experience much beauty on the highways of America.

Then again, what is beauty to begin with? Surely it isn’t exit sign after exit sign, broken up by an occasional rest area. Is it a moment of humanity, or a breathtaking view? Is it the familiar landscape that appears as you turn onto the street where you live? Is it even that memorable? If so, then why had I gone twenty years without a memory of something truly beautiful? Probably because it was over twenty years before I made it to Queenstown.

A touristy, lakeside ski-town that barely stretches four blocks in either direction, Queenstown itself -- with its cobblestone streets and abundance of shops and restaurants, is one of the two places in New Zealand’s South Island, along with Christchurch, where a visitor can kill a day just walking around. It would be a shame if you did, though. Instead, take my experience in Queenstown, where three aerial views provided glimpses of beauty, be it aesthetic or emotional, that I could never have imagined.

On my first day in Queenstown, a small bus took myself and about a dozen other people up to the top of one of the many mountains in the area. Atop this mountain, extending across the adjacent valley to another rock formation, was a set of steel cables about the width of a garbage can. At the center of the main cable was a twelve foot by twelve foot pod that I would proceed to jump out of and free-fall for nearly ten seconds before the bungy had fully extended and pulled me back up into the air. One hundred and forty meters in the air, the Nevis Bungy offered a beauty that had very little to do with the unsightly brown rock that surrounded us in the valley or the rain-turned-sleet-turned-snow that fell from the sky. This was the raw, unbridled beauty of human emotion.

Within the tiny pod, I was overcome with an unexpected calm, which is crazy for someone who gets uncomfortable simply jumping off the back of dump trucks at work. I had a rush of nerves as I stepped to the ledge. The employee holding onto my harness behind me inched closer to the ledge just behind me and dropped the rest of my rope out of the pod. The resulting tug at my ankles caused me to look down at the foggy, rocky depths that every ounce of common sense in my body (which, I can only assume, is several ounces) was telling me not to jump towards. But before the fear took hold, the countdown started. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and I jumped. The only emotion was pure ecstasy.

Before I even really realized what was happening, I was at the top of the second bounce and had to pull the strap at my ankle that would release me into a seated position. From then on, I tried my best through the blistering wind and freezing rain to take in the surroundings that would forever frame the previous thirty seconds. Not unlike the wind that swirled around me, I was overcome with everything from pride to anger that it hadn’t lasted longer. I just wanted to jump again.

In contrast, another man in the pod was having much bigger issues. Having already told his friends that their advice (“Stop being a [wussy], man.” and “Dude, there’s chicks around, you look like a [witch].”) wasn’t helping, he was sitting in the corner by himself with tears in his eyes. He was truly terrified, and felt no shame in it. But when the time came, the man overcame his fear and leapt away from the version of himself that was afraid. He returned to the pod with an incredible grin on his face.

Now, who knows what motivates people to do what they do? Personally, I was motivated by the simple ambition to experience as much as I could here in New Zealand. However terrifying it was, the Nevis was to that point the most thrilling thing I had ever done.

But what about the other guy? Was he just doing it so his buddies wouldn’t bust his chops? Did he only go through with it because there’s a no refund policy, and he either paid for a terrible view of an ugly valley on a crappy day or for the thrill of a lifetime? I wish I had asked. But just like thousands before him, he had replaced his deepest fear - that he would jump to his own death in a cold, rocky valley outside Queenstown, thousands of miles away from home - with an intense feeling of exhilaration that could mean only one thing: that he had just truly lived. It was beautiful.

The next day, sandwiched between my aerial activities was one in which my feet were firmly planted on the ground. A gondola runs up a hillside overlooking Queenstown, providing a view of the town, lake, and the snowcapped mountains that surround it. This particular day was just warm enough to enjoy but just cool enough to snow, covering the lodge at the top of the gondola, which sat just above the snow line, with a layer of powder. While the snow on the ground behind the building was enough to make anyone feel like a kid again, it was the view from in front of the building, spanning far off into the distance, that brought out a feeling more old fashioned than anything else. I couldn’t help but feel like this was how the world should look.

Tiny Queenstown was bustling below, with more foot traffic than car traffic, and just beyond it the crystal blue lake was reflecting the multicolored mountains that disappeared into the clouds beyond them. And while the prices in Queenstown betray that it is a tourist destination, the reality is that there’s no modern equivalent in America. A place like that would have expanded, with condo after condo and motel after motel sending the city limits sprawling outwards. But here, there’s nowhere else to build. Literally surrounded by lakes and mountains, the only flat ground is already developed. This was Queenstown in its most expansive form. Complete with natural, breath-taking scenery and a downtown area as quaint and comfortable as any, Queenstown was civilization in all of its unbastardized glory. I’d say it was beautiful, though it could just be my own lamentations on a world gone bad.

Still, that pessimism was erased on the backside of the lodge by a scene that can only be described as Neverland. It seemed that no matter how old the people I saw appeared to be, everyone was a child at heart that day. A family of five was having a snowball fight by the door, and right as I stepped outside, the mother ducked and a snowball intended for her from her son flew past my ear and, with a low thud, exploded onto the building. Now, it’s easy to not get mad when you don’t get hit, but I wasn’t just a bystander to a snowball fight (in fact, I was bystander and participant in several. With fresh snow on the ground, who could resist such a youthful, wholesome impulse?) No matter what happened before or since to that family, I was a bystander to a moment of true happiness in their lives.

And that’s before I even got to the luge courses. Carved out of the hillside was a pair of paved tracks to luge down (for a fee, of course). Sitting on a black plastic cart with only a set of handlebars to control your speed and direction, the luge was nearly as successful as the lure of snowballs at turning grown men back into boys. You moved deceivingly fast on the course, and the reckless attitude you were allowed to drive with (because unlike a car, you can’t die if you crash on the luge) harkened back to a day where there were no real consequences for anything. Instead of the responsibilities of every day life, all you had to worry about was trying to control the smile on your face as the wind blew its chill onto your face. For however long you were up there, it seemed impossible not to feel like a little kid again. Beautiful

However, the most unique kind of beauty is the one that is observed free-falling out of an airplane at 12,000 feet. The mosaic of rolling green pastures sprinkled with cows and sheep, the true blue lakes and white-tipped mountains that grew larger with every second was breath-taking. Of course, that’s not the first thing you see when you’re about to sky dive. The first thing I saw as I was swung out of the plane by Phil, my instructor was the heavenly tops of the clouds. It wasn’t until I was 8,000 feet lower (a mere 40 seconds later) that the parachute was deployed and everything slowed down, allowing me to take in the outskirts of Queenstown in all of its natural splendor.

But there was more than just the beauty provided by Mother Nature herself on this, bar none the nicest day weather-wise of our trip. The calm that followed the freefall, in which Phil and I just spun around, was indescribably tranquil. He had done this hundreds of times before, but wasn’t above pointing out little points in the landscape that he thought interesting, such as the uneven line that separated the trees and snow across the mountains. I knew that from that moment everything in my life would be looked at from a different perspective, not only because of what I saw, but what I heard.

Phil was an Aussie who was only a couple of years older than me, and our conversation on the slow descent down to the ground was one of the deep, life altering variety that you only seem to have with total strangers. Phil wore another set of footprints on the beaten path back home, graduating from university and then doing a bit of traveling before he settled into a job. On holiday, he and his buddies did a tandem sky dive, just as I was doing, and the experience changed him. After having that much fun, how could he possibly go home and sit at a desk for the rest of his life? It was impossible, so he decided to come back and become a skydiving instructor.

Now don’t tell my mother, because I’m sure she would have a heart attack if I told her that his story had an effect on me, but how could it not? This is the type of life changing moment that happens when you blow your comfort zone to bits and start truly living life. Because once you become a part of the rat race, it’s hard to get out, so why rush it, especially when you can make good money jumping out of planes and providing other people with life altering moments. What he did for me was beautiful.

So like a good friend, I’ll tell everyone I know who is coming to New Zealand in the future about the things they can expect. Sure enough, I’ll fall into the cliches about “the time of your life” and such, but hopefully I remember to go a little deeper as well. I’ll tell them to always be looking for something beautiful, because you never know when you might witness something that changes you forever.