This page is an addition to see if I can make my site link to my travel blog Facebook page. This is the third day of “attempt and when enough is enough – walk away”. Its part of my Zen training to remain calm and collected in times of tech challenges and remember at all times to be kind, even to my laptop.
Bike trail towards Kinross
Its certainly spectacular scenery in this part of the world and its great to be able to enjoy it. Every where we went the staff were amazing, friendly, open, and engaged. All of a sudden our country seems like a aquarium rather than a fishbowl. Its not just that there are so many places to be and so much to see but like anywhere we have been in the world, its amazing the different people you meet.
It felt like everyone had a story to tell and time to tell it, there were so many people from somewhere else and then those born and bred locals. Those who ahhhh”d and awed over our home in the Bay with great fondness, many who had never had the privilege of getting there and those who purely followed the winter from one side of the world to the other. There were those who had just got in and those who had never got out.
There are once busy tourist spots deserted and sitting empty with nobody home. You can’t help wonder where all the people who worked here went and when and if and how they will come back.
One story sticks as it’s just that reminder how sometimes “timing is everything”, we never really know what’s around the corner and the last 4 months have been a reminder of that. We met a really lovely “nearly” kiwi lady originally from the UK. Her and her partner have lived here for years. They have jobs and houses and friends and live’s here in NZ. They applied for citizenship last year, filled out the forms, paid the money, ticked the boxes and are now somewhere in the pipeline of time blocked by the weight of bureaucracy and the unknown. Timing is everything.
They had headed of on a long planned overseas holiday in February. It was a holiday in the Maldives and then to the UK to visit her sister and meet her new niece, catch up with family. Towards the end of their trip she goes to visit her Mum and he goes to visit his. They are booked from different destinations back to NZ, same day but seperate planes. Her plane leaves 5 hours before his. She phones him as she gets on the plane, “things are getting scary, it will be good to be home, see you soon”. She is on the last plane that will arrive in New Zealand before the border closes. Timing is everything.
Now she is here and he is there and as she says its tough. They are locked inside a process, stuck with no way forward in the foreseeable moments whilst the realities of money, mortgages, jobs, all weigh heavier by the day. I know its just one story amongst the many and there are so many worse off and so many better, but the stories are real whether in our fish bowl, aquarium or giant seas its the people you meet and the stories they tell that can leave the greatest impressions of all.
“Its not just about what you see its the people you meet along the way.”
Shot over Jets (but not at the moment)
My photos taken in this photographic wonderland are not that great. The light is watery and I never use filters so it is what it is. It matters not as somewhere, sometime, in hindsight when I am turning the pages they will ignite a feeling of the moments lived and breathed and shared and the notion that I always hold true. I am a lucky girl.