Land Of The Long White Cloud

Friday 19th March 2010, 2.45pm, Rainforest Retreat - Franz Josef.

'Everything here is more magnificent. It's wild in a way that England isn't. If you are looking for what the poets used to call 'the awful' - a sense of awe - that is what you find in New Zealand.'
- Sir Ian McKellan

Alright, I'll give you what you want, I'm ready to talk about the scenery. Everywhere I look there is a mountain. Not just one, but a towering family of them forming the backbone of the Southern Island. In front of me, behind me, in my peripheral vision, right next door to the lodge or miles away in the distance, these giant, omnipotent forefathers of New Zealand crowd around me filling the sky with ground. Since Wednesday morning I have been gazing all around me wide eyed and open mouthed at the incredible topography and unmatched natural beauty of this country.

Not just mountains either, but vast still lakes the colour of Blue Lagoon cocktails, black sand dunes, rolling golden and rusty hills, active volcanoes, evergreen forests, tumbling icy waterfalls, plains of red grape vineyards and yellow rose bushes, snow-capped peaks, coved beaches with steep cliff faces and gargantuan grey waves, seal colonies sleeping on black stone boulders, limestone caves, sperm whales dipping above and below the tumbling sea, albatross gliding over a lighthouse on a craggy rock bay, and the long white cloud 'Aotearoa', laying atop this fiercely captivating country, the ceiling to this unspoilt Garden of Eden.

One of my friends who did the Kiwi Experience herself a couple of years ago advised me to buy a travel pillow for the long journeys, before promptly telling me to scrap that idea because I wouldn't want to sleep anyway - 'the scenery is too beautiful to sleep through.' Laura was right, as she so often is. Being on the bus and looking out the window feels like an activity in itself. I don't even know how to begin to describe it to you, but watching Lord of the Rings might help. Nothing looks real. It is so epic, so ferocious, so primitively dramatic that I constantly feel as though I'm standing in front of a huge painting, rather than a landscape that could ever actually exist. This is creation on a new scale, New Zealand is the soil of God's imagination.

This soil is in a constant state of flux, organically shifting itself to new proportions. The whole country lies across 2 massive fault lines, in the South the tectonics push together buckling the land upwards causing the mountain ranges. If it weren't for the erosion from extreme weather conditions, scientists have predicted that the Southern Alps would be 20 kilometres higher. To give you some perspective on this, Mount Everest stands at 8.8 kilometres above sea level. In the North, the Pacific Plate slides under the Australasian Plate, the friction of which causes volcanic eruptions and hundreds of earthquakes every year. There are upwards of 3000 glaciers, they have snow storms which wipe out power and block roads for upwards of 2 weeks, rainfall in some Southern areas reaches 10 metres a year - in England we get an average of 14 inches, about 36 centimetres. Flooding takes out homes, covers highways, causes avalanches. The East Coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, weather conditions inland range from -15 to 35 degrees centigrade, on the South Island's West coast there are only 30,000 inhabitants on 600km of road. In the whole country there are 4 million people... and 34 million sheep.

Let me say that again for you. In London alone there are 8 million people. In the whole of New Zealand there are 4 million people and 34 MILLION SHEEP. Sheep outnumber humans by nearly 9 to 1. If they weren't so friggin' stupid they'd be running the place by now, monkeys would have clearly already staged a takeover bid. I guess what I'm trying to communicate to you is what a harsh, tough natural environment this country is to live in. It's a land where altitude and the elements rule, where human beings put up, shut up or ship out, and where lamb roast dinners are in plentiful supply. You'd have to be pretty hardy to live in the countryside here, as most Kiwis I've met have been, but oh it would be worth roughening up a bit for views like this every day. It's as though the land has gracefully allowed them to stay, permitting a few residents here and there to make homes for themselves on the sparse patches of workable ground it has set aside for human intrusion; the people do not make the country, the country makes the people.

I'm sat outside our lodge on a wooden bench, surrounded by rainforest. Directly in front of me is a mossy mountain range scattered with glaciers and there's a ring of fog sitting on the warm air, clinging to the slopes. If everywhere on Planet Earth looked like this, we never would have treated it so badly.