Posts tagged New Zealand
Hello 2019; Goodbye 2018
At this time of year I’m reflecting on the year that has just closed and setting goals for the year ahead. We find ourselves at a cross-roads again, waiting to see what will come next for us. Although we’ve been here before, and we know that it does work out eventually it is challenging to sit with the uncertainty now. A friend reminded me in a New Year tweet that every year has its good things happen and bad things happen, even when our social media bubble leads us to believe that everyone else lives in a world where only good things happen.
We continue to live purposefully, focused on family and friends, love and laughter, good health and fitness and meaningful work. We’ve made sure we spend time with those we love, including a family holiday with Moira’s children and their partners in Rarotonga to celebrate a significant birthday. Not to mention – moving to Christchurch to be closer to Ross’ family.
We’ve also made excellent progress on our health goals, as we both feel fitter and more toner than ever before in our lives. We spend a lot of time in NZ’s beautiful outdoors which is good for our mental health as well as our physical health. We love to explore places, both familiar and unfamiliar,. Since a third of New Zealand is in National Park, tramping boots or an off-road bicycle are great assets when it comes to exploring.
It’s the third of our priorities -interesting and worthwhile work which has delivered challenges in 2018. Various people with better knowledge of recruitment than me tell me that it is quite common for the job search to take a year. I really hope not. In the meantime, I’m learning a lot through the process and using the time to reflect and refine my CV and career goals and to think about preparing for the next stage of my worklife.
I’ve had two important coping mechanisms. One is exploring New Zealand purposefully – as one friend put it – behaving like a tourist in our own land. We do find ourselves approaching the task of exploring seriously – planning a schedule, doing a major walk or cycle ride every day unless the weather is truly awful, digesting what we have seen and recording our impressions in photographs and words. In 2018 we’ve explored the Coromandel by bicycle, toured Northland, and then spent 6 weeks mostly on cycle trails as we made our way south from Auckland en-route to Christchurch. In the South Island we’ve chased the sunshine all the way to Southland to walk the Humpridge Track and then all the way to the northernmost point of the South Island at Farewell Spit to learn about the wildlife there. Google Maps captured where we’ve been and it shows how much of New Zealand we visited during 2018.
My other coping mechanism is to spend time on creative pursuits. This year it has mostly been knitting, although I hope to get back to blogging about our travels and creating photo books to help us digest all that we have seen and learnt about our natural environment and history.
We expect 2019 to continue our journey of focusing on love and laughter. Hopefully with the addition of an interesting job for Moira early in 2019. And just as much exploring and creativity as possible.
Goodbye 2016
2016 was one of those years that turned out quite
differently from how it looked a year ago.
For us it was a year of transitions, as we lived in Myanmar, moved to
Yorkshire and finished out the year in sunny New Zealand.
We had some wonderful family times in Myanmar, Cambodia and Bangkok early in the year and in Scotland and Yorkshire later on.
Ross and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary in early February. The hotel staff at the Park Royal in Nay Pyi Taw where we lived at that time, were so very kind to us and helped to make it a wonderful celebration. We had decided long ago to take a longer trip to some of our favourite places in honour of this significant anniversary. Our trip began before Easter with a few days in Venice, followed by 2 weeks of walking in Malta, 2 weeks of cycling in SE and NW Sicily and a week exploring volcanoes. We finished up with a week with Rebecca and Jean on the Isle of Skye.
By May we were heading back to Myanmar to say goodbye to our many dear friends, write final reports and pack our belongings. We had put down a lot of roots in our three years in Myanmar and it was hard dragging them up.
Fortunately we had something to look forward to, as we were going to live and work in Yorkshire for 5 months. Our jobs as Assistant Managers at Eastfield Lodge were better than we had ever dreamed. We loved looking after the guests and the house, and the work-life balance that gave us time off most afternoons to explore the beautiful Yorkshire Dales on foot or by bicycle. It was great to be in the same time zone as Rebecca and Jean and we enjoyed time with them both in the Dales, as well as in Edinburgh.
Our year has finished on a high note with a NZ odyssey of walking and cycling in the NZ summer. We have fallen in love with our beautiful homeland all over again and loved finding new delights in places we thought we knew well already. At year’s end we are in lovely Te Anau, surrounded by high mountains and wonderful rain forest.
World Wanderers
We are often asked about what the drivers were for our choices about the way we live.
Back in 2011 when we began our journey to a nicer life we focused on:
• Relationships with family and friends
• Improving our health through increased fitness and reduced stress
• Meaningful, worthwhile, challenging work whether or not it paid well
• Travel to interesting places
We began to live in a much smaller space, and to concentrate more on experiences and a whole lot less on material possessions. We worked together a lot of the time, and undertook a range of assignments in NZ and abroad because they interested us.
Five years later, the key focus areas have remained the same for us. We have refined our travel goals, and choose to travel more slowly most of the time -cycling or walking so that we interact with the locals and absorb more of the smells, sounds, and sights around us. We tend to return more often to the countries we love and explore new regions.
A key driver for us arose from family and friends who had died or contracted serious illnesses before their time. We worried about running out of health before we ran out of money, and not having enough energy to enjoy any retirement years together. We wanted to ensure that we did the active travelling while we were able to really enjoy it. We had always dreamed of living and working in another country to learn more deeply about another culture.
In the past 5 years we have lived and worked in Christchurch, Myanmar and Yorkshire in the UK. We have travelled to many parts of New Zealand, Lebanon, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Scotland & London, Finland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Vietnam, UK, California, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, India, Malaysia, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Namibia, Japan, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Malta, Italy, Laos and Lesotho. Some of those trips were work, some to attend conferences and others to cycle or walk or just to experience the people and places. While we lived in Myanmar and Yorkshire we travelled extensively, exploring the cultures as fully as we were able.
Family, friends and health goals remain at the top of our list. We will continue to spend time and energy on keeping in touch with family and friends and work at keeping in excellent health. We are unlikely to travel quite so much in the future, but are not ready to hang up our travelling shoes just yet. What 2017 will bring in the way of interesting, challenging, worthwhile work is as yet unknown – for sure, something will transpire to inspire us