New Zealand

Our journey across New Zealand’s South Island began in Christchurch. The tour was agreeably unpredictable. We did not feel like driving ourselves, so we booked a multi-day group trip and simply looked at whatever our guide chose to show us. With no driving to worry about, every hour could be spent watching the landscape pass by. The guide knew the region’s attractions remarkably well and often carried us into obscure corners in search of popular photo spots.

We began in the city with Christchurch Cathedral.

Next came the botanic gardens, whose formal gardens had a character of their own.

Then we left Christchurch and headed deep into the countryside. As the vehicle continued south, the pastoral scenery of the South Island began steadily raising its game. It is difficult to describe in words. My recommendation is to look at the photographs and supply the poetry yourself.

That evening, I took a photograph in the small town where we stayed—proof, if nothing else, that I had been there.

We joined a stargazing tour that night, leaving at eleven and not returning until one in the morning. The southern sky differs from the northern one. My knowledge of constellations was nowhere near sufficient to explain how, but the stars in the Southern Hemisphere did seem brighter.

According to the guide, the southern sky appears to contain more stars largely because the center of the Milky Way lies toward the southern celestial sky, where the stars are densest and the Milky Way brightest. For an ordinary observer, he said, this makes the Southern Hemisphere better for stargazing. We were fortunate to have a perfectly clear night. The previous evening had been covered in cloud, and every stargazing group had received a refund.

This was the sky that night, photographed with the guide’s DSLR. My phone was plainly not capable of it. The picture would be different every day—or, more accurately, every moment. The stars themselves did not change appreciably, but meteors crossed the sky frequently, appearing at random almost as though they were continually respawning. Take the photograph at another instant and it would never be quite the same.

The next day brought another full day among forests, mountains, and pastoral landscapes. We stopped at a base offering scenic flights over the glaciers, though we did not book one. In Alaska, we had already toured a glacier by helicopter, and that aircraft had even landed directly on the ice. We decided we could pass this time.

We had instead booked a later excursion on Tasman Lake, taking a boat across the glacial lake to see the glacier. More than fifty years ago, what is now Tasman Lake was still almost entirely glacier. Today the glacier’s terminus continues to retreat rapidly, reportedly by more than a hundred meters per year on average. It remains New Zealand’s longest glacier, but at the present rate, I suspect our generation may see it retreat from an immense valley glacier into little more than residual ice high in the mountains.

The photograph below shows the starting point for the lake excursion. Fifty years ago, this was still glacier; now there was no trace of it. When it comes to glacial loss, I am thoroughly pessimistic. One might stop Europeans from using air conditioning, or Californians from buying gasoline cars, but how does one stop technology companies from constructing AI data centers? And how does one stop human civilization from moving forward? Those things seem to have an appetite for energy unlike almost anything that came before.

I do not mean that human progress should be obstructed in an effort to prevent global warming. My view has always been that problems created by technological development can only be solved by continuing to develop technology; trying to turn history backward is not a viable answer. For landscapes like this one, however, all I can say is: see them while they remain.

Over the following two days, the guide took us to many more places.

First came fields of lupins, spreading seemingly everywhere.

Only when we approached them did I realize that lupins belong to the legume family. After the flowers fade, they really do produce strings of furry seed pods.

The guide then took us to a number of “famous” social-media photo spots. The quotation marks are there because I had never heard of them, though they appeared to be popular on Xiaohongshu. One was this mountain bungee site. Its setting could hardly have been better: mountains, water, and a cliff to jump from. Promotional material claimed it was the world’s first commercial bungee-jumping site. I do not know whether that was true, but that was the line. I hesitated. I had bungee-jumped before, so doing it here would not have been a first, and in the end I declined. Later, I regretted it a little. I should have gone. It was an auspicious setting: succeed and it was a fine place to jump; fail and it would become an exceptionally permanent resting place.

We also saw the Lone Tree. That is the name of the popular photo spot. As the photograph shows, one tree stands by itself in the water. Becoming an internet-famous tree is apparently easy: all it has to do is leave the group chat.

We saw the unusual sight of a two-colored lake, along with still more beautiful pastoral scenery.

After four days on the road, we finally arrived in Queenstown. Our journey across New Zealand’s South Island had reached a fitting conclusion.

For the final stop of our journey through Oceania, we reached New Zealand’s North Island. To be honest, our original plan was simply to enjoy the country’s pastoral scenery, and the South Island seemed sufficient. Yet every flight from the South Island back to the United States required a connection on the North Island, and the connection times were uniformly dreadful. Since we were going to be there anyway, we might as well…

We searched online for things to do on the North Island and discovered Hobbiton. It had served as a filming location for several movies in The Lord of the Rings series and looked well worth visiting.

I had seen every film in The Lord of the Rings series, including the later Hobbit films. I was not a devoted fan, however, and could no longer remember many of the classic scenes. That did not matter. No knowledge of the films was necessary; the village itself had enough character to justify the visit.

The first thing we encountered at the entrance was a life-size Gandalf. Many of the people waiting to enter stopped for a photograph with him.

The site organized guided tours in several languages. English tours were plainly the most frequent and could generally be booked at almost any time, while tours in other languages were harder to secure. Chinese tours were especially difficult: demand was high and departures were limited. We did manage to book one. Had we ended up on an English tour, the guide might have started making jokes about the films while we stood there understanding the words but none of the references.

The first sight upon entering the village was its sign.

Then we entered the village itself. Visitors could often be seen striking all manner of strange poses for photographs—for example, launching into an enormous leap on an otherwise unremarkable path. No great powers of deduction were needed to realize that they were recreating scenes from the films.

It was a thoroughly developed attraction, except that my phone had no signal at all and could only use the local Wi-Fi. My location-tagged WeChat Moments post very nearly failed to make it out of Hobbiton.

Afterward, we visited the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. A guide took us into the cave aboard a small boat, and overhead the rocky ceiling was covered with points of light from the glowworms. It was an unusual and memorable experience. The photographs, however, were another matter. The lights were so small that the results looked little different from pointing a camera at the night sky, and were simply not worth showing here. As an aside, these “glowworms” are not fireflies in the usual sense, but the luminous larvae of an insect.

That completed the day we had arranged around our Auckland connection. With it, our journey through Oceania came to an end.