The Prodigal Traveller Returns
I've spent the last four years chasing sunsets across Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and everywhere in between. But something shifted when my mum rang me up last winter, her voice all careful and small, asking when I was coming home. So I booked a one-way ticket to Wellington and told myself it was reconnaissance—another story, another adventure. Really, I think I was just homesick.
The first rule of solo travel is that you're never really alone. The second rule, which nobody tells you, is that coming home is the hardest place to be solo. Home is where people expect you to stay the same.
I rented a beat-up Mitsubishi Delica van in Christchurch and pointed it south-west toward Fiordland. My plan was loose: eat well, move slowly, and do at least one thing every day that made my stomach flip. On day two, I found my first yes.
Floating into the Mist
Lake Te Anau sits like a mirror in the spine of Fiordland, surrounded by mountains so steep and green they look photoshopped. I'd booked the Scenic Cruise & Guided Walk on Historic Motor Yacht Lake Te Anau Scenic Cruise & Guided Walk on Historic Motor Yacht Lake Te Anau partly because it was there, partly because I wanted to see if I still remembered how to follow a guide instead of being one.
The motor yacht was smaller than I expected—intimate, really—and our guide, a woman called Aroha with laugh lines and tattooed arms, knew the lake the way you know your own kitchen. She motored us toward the South Fiord while the morning mist sat heavy on the water, and I stood on deck with my hands wrapped around a thermos of coffee, feeling like I was the only person in New Zealand who understood silence.
Then we walked. Through native bush so thick the light goes green. Past trees older than European settlement, their roots pulling at the earth like they're trying to remember something. Aroha pointed out a massive kahikatea, a totara, a rimu—trees my grandmother could have named before she learned English. She talked about the land and the people of it in the same breath, the way you're supposed to, and I realised how much I'd missed that way of knowing a place.
Somewhere between the rock formations and the mossy boulders, I stopped trying to write the story in my head and just lived it.
Terrified at Altitude
Wānaka, two hours' drive north, sits at the edge of a lake that looks like a painting of a lake. It's the kind of place that makes you want to do something ridiculous, which is exactly why I'd booked myself onto Wildwire Wanaka- Level 1 (2 Hours) Wildwire Wanaka- Level 1 (2 Hours).
I'm not afraid of heights. I'm terrified of them. There's a difference. One is rational; the other is the kind of fear that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go.
The cable ascent runs alongside a waterfall—the world's highest one of its kind—and when I first looked up at it, clipped into a harness that suddenly felt far too thin, I genuinely considered backing out. The guide, a cheerful bloke named Marcus, took one look at my face and said, "Good. The scared ones always make it."
He was right. Somewhere between the second and fourth bolt, my hands stopped shaking. By the summit, I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. The view was incidental; the point was that I'd done it alone, with my own two hands and a heart still hammering against my ribs.
I sat at the top for twenty minutes after everyone else had descended, just listening to the water and my own breath, feeling like I'd climbed out of something larger than a cliff face.
Wine, Whakapapa, and Finding Home
The next morning, nursing forearms that felt like they'd been through a blender, I met my guide for the Express Wine Tour & Māori Culture Wānaka 'Express' Wine Tour & Māori Culture Wānaka. Three hours, two wineries, and a history that went back a thousand years before grapes were ever planted on this soil.
Our guide, an older man called Hone, moved between talking about Pinot Noir and the ancestors who'd held this valley before anyone was making wine from its grapes. He didn't separate the culture from the land—it was all one story. At the first winery, we sat on a deck overlooking the mountains while he talked about Māori settlement patterns and the whakapapa, the genealogy, that connects people to place. At the second, the wine was good (I won't pretend I know enough to describe it better than that), but it was Hone's stories that stayed with me.
He told me about the time his grandfather walked these valleys, about the names of the peaks that aren't on any English map, about the stories embedded in the landscape like river stones. And suddenly I understood what I'd been doing all these years—I'd been running from a country full of stories, looking for stories elsewhere, when the deepest ones were always here.
History and Ghosts in Dunedin
South again, to Dunedin—the Edinburgh of the South, all Gothic architecture and brooding coastlines. I'd booked the Heritage City and Larnach Castle Van tour with Historian Guide Heritage City and Larnach Castle Van tour with Historian Guide on a recommendation from another traveller I met in a hostel common room. Gregor, our historian, collected stories the way other people collect stamps.
He took us through the city with the kind of attention to detail that makes you see a place you thought you knew. Murders, shipwrecks, colonial ambitions, the people buried beneath the stone—all of it woven into a history that felt alive and contested rather than safely locked away in a museum.
Larnach Castle itself is a riot of Victorian excess, built by a banker who wanted to prove something and ended up proving only that you can buy a lot of stone and turrets but not much happiness. But standing in those rooms, listening to Gregor talk about the families who'd lived and loved and died there, I felt something I hadn't felt since coming home: a sense of belonging to a lineage of complicated, strange, deeply human people.
The Lakes Show Me North
Back to Rotorua, to the geothermal heart of the North Island. I'd heard the Explore The Lakes Tour Explore The Lakes Tour was small-group, which meant no tour bus nonsense, just eight of us and a driver-guide called Rangi who'd grown up in the region and wanted to show us the real story.
We skipped the tourist-trap geysers and went instead to the lakes that few visitors find—places where the water steams and the earth smells like ancient fire. Rangi talked about the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera like he'd been there (his great-grandfather had). He showed us where the villages had been buried, where people had rebuilt, how a landscape shaped by catastrophe becomes a landscape of memory and resilience.
On the last lake, at sunset, I finally understood why I'd come home. I hadn't been running from New Zealand. I'd been running because I thought home had to be one thing—static, small, safe. But home is a story that keeps changing. It's a country that's still being written, and I'm still part of that writing.
Coming Back
I turned the Delica north toward Auckland, five days older and somehow younger. My forearms had mostly stopped aching. My heart had stopped racing quite so hard. But something in my chest had shifted—a settling, a permission to belong here without apologising for having left.
The next adventure isn't away. It's back.
