New Zealand · A travel discovery
One-Way
Tickets.
Two working-holiday visas, one-way tickets, no jobs waiting, and a tiny old yellow hatchback for exploring New Zealand.
Read the story ↓ONE-WAY TICKETS
NO GUARANTEED JOBS
The decision
Not long after we got married, my wife and I started talking about moving to another country for a while. We settled on New Zealand.
We were at a point where we could do it. I’d been involved with a biodiesel startup that hadn’t worked out with my partners, and I knew I wanted to keep trying new things. I also wanted the experience of living somewhere completely different with my wife.
We discovered and applied for working-holiday visas, quit our jobs, sold most of our cars, and put our belongings in storage. Then we took one-way flights.
The first two weeks
We didn’t know anybody in New Zealand. We had a possible job lead and a vacation rental studio apartment booked for our first two weeks. We didn’t have work arranged, or much of a plan beyond getting there and figuring it out.
The job lead didn’t work out. We looked for something else and eventually both found work. We rented a 220 sq. ft. apartment for a while, stayed in a spare room of strangers that made us feel like family, bought a car, and did our best to immerse ourselves into the Kiwi life. We even ended up with a calling at church.
For six months, New Zealand was where we lived.
The little yellow car
Our car was a tiny yellow 1984 Honda City E. We used it to explore the country whenever we could.
We took five or six separate road trips, about thirty-three days of travel in total. The longest was nine days. On most of those nights we slept in the car.
A Honda City doesn’t have much room for two people to sleep, but we took out the back seat, leaned our seats all the way back, and made it our tiny motorhome. I have photographs of that little yellow car beside mountains, lakes and stretches of open road. It went a lot of places with us.
Along the way
The 1984 Honda City during one of several road trips in New Zealand.
A separate selection of five landscape photographs is also available in Through a Lens.