Wha Kaupeka: Four Seasons in New Zealand

Oh Bugger it! Why don’t we just go and live there? Next morning we left our home behind and set off on the first leg of our great antipodean adventure. This is the story of a ‘grown-up gap-year’ spent in New Zealand. A melting-pot of recollections, reflections and abundant digressions, it is, by turns, tangentially informative, subjectively insightful and forthrightly irreverent. The author recounts, with frequent characteristically acerbic asides, the trials and tribulations, highs, lows and flat spots of stepping ‘outside the box’ and thirty years back in time, into a new life on the other side of the world. Along the way, he touches upon a diversity of nebulously related topics, amongst which teaching, long-distance walking, bureaucracy and drinking beer are recurrent themes. Anyone who has ever harboured a desire to seek out distant horizons will relate to the inherent urge to ‘up and go’ encapsulated in this account. Anyone who has never felt such wanderlust may find themselves re-evaluating their perspectives. Reading this book is unlikely to change your life but it just might change the way you think about it.