Exploring the highs and lows of travelling, from local buses to faraway elopements.
Nothing is more universally suggested, yearned for and celebrated as a life experience than travel. People who have travelled love to talk about how it changed their lives or opened their eyes or was just the most fun they’d ever had.
People who haven’t travelled will cite it as the first thing they’d do if they woke up the next morning a millionaire.
And people who didn’t travel as much as they thought they would, list it as a regret on their deathbeds.
There’s something about finding yourself in a completely new and foreign environment that invites a broadening of perspectives and a cooler version of your everyday self to emerge. People are different when they travel. Maybe it’s simply that people are different when they’re not working, but I think that’s only a small part of it.
In short, few people say they don’t want to travel. Maybe they’ll say they want to travel less than they used to. Or maybe the way they want to travel has changed (there’s a reason cruises remain stubbornly popular). But it’s a rare breed of person who has no desire to experience another place.
Which is why The Spinoff is dedicating a full week to travel, both near and far, extravagant and basic, life-changing and delightfully dull. We’ll look at how New Zealanders travel differently now. What travel looks like with kids, parents, a climate crisis, pets.
We’ll have stories of My Greatest Trip and an examination of when travelling feels like a competition. What are the best holiday books of all time? And how can I not be a dick when camping this summer?
While all this is happening, Wellington editor Joel MacManus will be undertaking a near-impossible adventure: travelling from Stewart Island to Cape Reinga using only public transport. He departed this morning and will be live-blogging every day of his journey until he reaches the top of the country. Follow along on his unrecommended journey here.
Travel Week is supported by our friends at AA Travel Insurance. And while the next bit may read like a customer testimonial, trust me when I saw it was written even before they signed on as a partner.
And that is my one good tip for travelling: get insurance.
I travelled a fair amount in my early 20s, and never once did I buy insurance. What did I need it for? I was blase enough to not care if I changed plans and couldn’t get a ticket or accommodation refund. I travelled extremely frugally anyway so insurance felt more expensive than what I’d paid to go in the first place. When I spent months in America as a 21-year-old, I occasionally wondered what would happen if I fell and broke my arm or ankle. I’d see a story about a $30,000 bill for a tourist’s broken arm and worry, but I had a simple plan: if I broke a bone in America, I’d just book a flight home and stock up on painkillers until I could see a doctor here. I was young and dumb and was lucky to not have a health emergency for six months.
Like all insurance, it’s so easy to dismiss travel insurance right up until it’s too late to get it.
In 2018, my parents went to Samoa to spend time in my mum’s childhood home and do some work on the place. They didn’t get travel insurance because we are cut from the same cloth and probably it felt to my mum like she was going home. You don’t need insurance to go home. But two weeks later, she had a stroke in the middle of the night and the hospital in Samoa didn’t have the equipment needed to care for her. Suddenly we were all thinking and talking about travel insurance. And my siblings and I realised most of us never bothered with it.
An emergency airlift to Wellington hospital and a house deposit to pay for it later, my mindset changed completely. Since then, I’ve never travelled overseas without some form of insurance. Have I ever had a need for it? No. Will I ever forget how much medical care is outside of this country? Also no.
In December, I’m travelling to Japan. I have been to Japan once before and it was in the midst of burnout in 2019, having tacked on three more nights to a journalism conference I’d been to for work. I planned absolutely nothing and knew absolutely nothing about what to see or do. When I decided on a whim to catch the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, I arrived without a plan and ended up sprinting up the famous Fushimi Inari-taisha (the shrine with the big orange gates) 20 minutes before it closed, taking in exactly nothing on my run.
This time, I have a spreadsheet with an itinerary, pins on Google maps and ramen apps ready to go to plan every meal. I don’t know which approach will result in a better trip, but it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’ll be in a new place with no responsibilities, waiting for a cooler version of myself to emerge.