351 | We Were Strangers Once :: Christchurch, New Zealand, 2012

On the first day of the tour, we accidentally left one person at the hostel in Auckland, and had to turn back 30 minutes later to retrieve her. Thankfully that was the only time it happened, and it remains one of my favorite travel experiences.

I thought my most recent trip to Norway was just ok. The country was beautiful, the company was great, and I really don’t have anything to complain about. When I look back on the trips I thought were amazing though, one thing they all had in common was the unexpected. Those were the experiences that stood out the most, and our road trip through New Zealand was filled with them.

There were a couple of things that made our group unique — the first was that we had 2 tour guides, because one of the guides was about to leave the country, and the other one had a leg injury, so they decided to combine forces. The second was that our entire tour group consisted of solo travelers (from 10 different countries no less), which made it incredibly easy to mix as a group. The tour guides were amazing, they found all these random things for us to do to make the long drives fun, like silly games that we played for the entire 2 week period. There was a time when we were fervently searching for bathtubs along the route (that was a thing here), and another time where we must immediately do 5 pushups for saying certain words like “I” (I had to do some on top of the glacier in crampons). When we were at a seaside village Verve brought us a lobster his mate just freshly caught and boiled, and we ate it sitting in front of the bus. There was also the time when Mikey cooked a full feast of lamb BBQ for us at the hostel. We adorned the bus with Christmas decor from the dollar store, spent Christmas Eve on the beach and had a secret Santa party the next morning. Then we found these two dudes wearing LoTR costumes walking around the lake, and invited them into our group picture 🙂

Some of us still keep in touch to this day, but we all know that was a once in a lifetime experience unlikely to be repeated.