So that’s it. 66 lifts and 4542 kilometres worth of hitchhikes, 140 hours and 380 kilometres of hiking later, I’ve finished my ten weeks in the country I’ve wanted to visit ever since I can remember. The country I discovered on a globe when I was a little kid, spinning the world around, putting my finger on the United Kingdom, and pretending to dig a hole through the earth until I found the opposite side to where I was standing. I guess it was something about exploring the ends of the earth that drew me in – the unknown, the remote, the seemingly unreachable. New Zealand was this magical land that I formed in my mind and later heard about – a place where the mountains stretched to the heavens, where the seas ferociously collided, where the birds sang sweet songs, and where the unknown was to be explored.

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