Ramblings

More ready than ever to leave Auckland, I boarded the coach with the driver making some passing remark about my choice of snacks smelling out the cabin. To hell with it! I’d paid for this bus and if the other passengers were blessed with the fragrance of Thai Sweet Chilli then I would happily receive their letter of thanks later. The journey was an immediate eye-opener. The Auckland landscape does not come close to the images of New Zealand you see on any article ever published about the place, ever. Less than ten minutes on the road and the cityscapeContinue reading “3. Rotorua”

The time of year I had chosen to arrive into Auckland was an another one of my impeccably bad calls. The final Sunday of the Christmas break before those sensible enough to not have given up on their jobs returned to work was hardly going to be the time to be tearing up the streets, red paint in hand. This realisation could not have hit me harder at any other point than whilst ambling around at 6:30AM, my stomach clearly attempting to eat itself, trying desperately to make it anywhere that would be offering food before I passed out inContinue reading “2. Auckland”

The bloke on the other side of the coach made it incredibly difficult to concentrate on the doubts I was having. The combination of his sobbing into the seat in front and very vocalised eating habits were not at all conducive to focussing my mind on the situation I had put myself in. I wanted to think about all the individual goodbyes I had had to make, the embraces that, for all I knew, could have been the last, the faces I might not see until they were almost twice as old again. But that god damn animal would notContinue reading “1. Leaving”

“Where am I?”“What am I doing?”“What the fuck was that!?” Those are some of the questions I routinely find myself asking. Even before I left the comforts of the UK they would form a daily interrogation of unease at what my life had become. ‘Go to school, go to University, get a good job’ is the mantra drilled into me and countless others from a young age; a sure-fire way to happiness for the rest of your life, apparently. Looking back, I doubt the collective of lizards chanting that mantra ever believed it could be a successful pursuit for happiness,Continue reading “Being Lost”