52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Chapter 32: New Zealand

In Which We Come To An Enchanted Country Full Of Hikes On The Other Side Of The World, And We Say Goodbye

It was the final challenge, and in real time I could feel my heart quicken.

Standing in front of the final summit of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, the winds were gusting past 70 kilometres an hour as small pellets of ice fell from the clouds surrounding the hikers on all sides.

Over the previous two weeks I had hiked more than 100 kilometres. However, this was the steepest ascent, the windiest ascent — and the last ascent.

After this, I would see the famous blue lake surrounded by craters and volcanoes, followed by a gentle walk down mountains and forests, followed by a final train ride to Auckland, followed by a few days in the big city, before going home.

I had travelled the earth, and had just one more difficult thing to do.

So made thematic sense that my heart would race and my breath would become short. In the moment though, this mild combination of a panic attack and being overwhelmed at the symbolism wasn’t particularly appreciated.

As other hikers passed me by, I took a second to look around. I reminded myself everything I had done in the past year, and how many times it was new and different and sometimes difficult.

Every day was a quest, a chance to discover something new, a series of short puzzles to solve before taking in a new piece of the human experience.

This quest was colder and windier, but that’s really all it was.

According to my iPhone app, over the last year I have averaged around 16,150 steps a day. Which means that across six continents and 52 countries, over the past year I have taken nearly six million steps.

The eight hundred or so of them that climbed that final summit were probably the shortest and most cautious.

And maybe the most meaningful.

How do you know where the perfect place to end your trip is when you haven’t even started it yet?

That was my riddle in early 2023 as I planned out the final couple of months of this journey.

(Yes, you could argue you should let inspiration and intuition strike while on the road, but I think you know by now that was a non-starter for me)

I had flights of fancy — a freight ship across the Pacific? A cruise to Antarctica? Island hopping over several weeks? — yet the more I researched New Zealand, the more I fell in love with the idea of finishing here.

For one, it was the most convenient, with direct flights to Vancouver and plenty of connections to different Australian cities.

More importantly, it would give me a different type of experience to wrap things up.

Due to its island formation and position on the tectonic plates, the country has stunning geography, with rainforests and beaches and mountains and volcanoes and so many other biomes smushed together on its two main land masses, which never get more than a couple hundred kilometres wide.

So getting to see a lot of interesting natural wonders in a short time frame is fairly doable. Plus, over the decades New Zealand’s government has developed 11 “Great Walks”, well maintained treks that take several days but have huts and campsites laid out at strategic points along the way.

I was planning on getting into hiking during this year, but hadn’t planned any multi-day excursions during the first 11 months — mostly because it would add a very onerous layer of packing complexity to things.

At the end though, where I would only have to lug around a specialized backpack and sleeping bag for a couple of weeks, from Queenstown in the south to Auckland in the north?

That would work. That would provide a real wow factor.

That was enough to make New Zealand the 52 country.

As I digged into how to make the final leg work, I realized centring a New Zealand trip around multiple Great Hikes would prove a little more difficult than the country lets on in its marketing campaigns — particularly if you’re wedded to the notion of never renting a vehicle.

New Zealand resembles British Columbia in a lot of ways — with similar geography, temperature, population size, language and culture, even a beautiful ferry route — which was also appealing when I considered ways of decreasing culture shock when I returned home.

And like B.C., transportation options are relatively scarce. There are three limited (if beautiful) rail lines, a few buses that go between cities a few times a week, and…well, that’s pretty much it.

In a way, that added to the joy: a final caper, a chance to flex my planning muscles, needing to find private shuttles to the parks and make sure they lined up with the limited buses and trains, while also creating windows to buy the gear and hiking food needed for all these excursions.

It kept my mind active and focused on the task at hand, at a point in the trip where more and more of my attention was being pulled in different directions. There was few tasks left to figure out, the things in Vancouver needing to be arranged upon my return was growing, and my brain couldn’t help but be nostalgic about the past 12 months.

So the backpack got purchased and the shuttles were found, and the hikes happened and they were phenomenal. My only major error was not considering that my shoes had really reached the end of their life cycle — though my feet survived after realizing putting on a second layer of socks provided necessary padding.

After starting this year not hiking at all, and huffing and puffing to get through 5km in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, to do three hikes of 30, 50 and 30 kilometres respectively was a great triumph, to say nothing of the spiritual nirvana that New Zealand’s nature provides.

To wit, here are many photos of them.

Hike 1: Routeburn!

Hike 2: Abel Tasman!

Hike 3: More of the Northern Tongariro!

As for the cities?

Like, they were fine. Wellington punches well above its weight for a region of half a million people, there’s good transit in all the cities, I had no complaints. My final four days in Auckland were incredibly peaceful, and I really enjoyed not having to use much brain power while I spent most of the time wrapping things up.

You don’t go to New Zealand for the urban experience, yet there are no serious faults with any of the major population centres (though like much of the English-speaking world, there’s been a massive spike in prices, and subsequent tensions around development and density in recent years). You can certainly use them as your base for a few days without getting bored.

It was all perfectly cromulent, but with the end so close, nothing in Wellington or Auckland could compare in my mind to a stroll along the Steveston waterfront as the smell of the fish market gets stronger on a sunny weekend.

Or the tranquility of Pacific Spirit Park on a cool fall day, when the clouds are low and the forests keep secrets before everyone else arrives.

The Shipyards District as families and tourists and workers wander through food trucks and street performers and ice rinks.

A farmer’s market at Trout Lake. A warm evening of baseball at Nat Bailey when the real highlight is the sushi races. Mt. Pleasant murals and Kits people watching, weekend staycations to New West and Port Moody, wandering the food court at “The Amazing Brentwood”, snarking that anything in Burnaby calls itself “Amazing”, but admitting that “The Very Good Brentwood” would be accurate enough.

The sun coming out in winter after days of rain, when as William Gibson wrote, “it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sun-lit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie.”

And especially the first place I’ll go when I get home, on the Stanley Park seawall, right past the Lions Gate Bridge, when the full ocean opens up and the pavement bends out of view.

A world of possibilities, just waiting to be explored.

honestly in any other context the cities would have been perfectly nice

I don’t know how this story ends.

I’m sitting in Auckland International Airport, where in a little bit I’ll begin my 13 hour flight home to Vancouver.

In a physical sense, I know in the short-term what I’m returning to — moving back into my apartment, dinners with friends, a birthday party, two slideshow presentations about this year, restarting my job next week, slowly unfreezing my old life in the weeks after that.

Mentally? I have no idea what’s coming next.

How will I adapt to normalcy? Can I put forward the same passion for a story about childcare regulations in transit oriented neighbourhoods after I’ve watched the Pyramids at sunset? Will I be able to dedicate my brain to children’s birthday parties or filing taxes without desperately wishing I was in a town square in Europe or a hike in New Zealand?

And what will I think about my city?

A year of seeing virtually every “world class” city on earth has made me more aware of Vancouver’s strengths and flaws — but from a distance.

How will everything feel when I return? When I do another story on housing affordability, will my thoughts on our shortcomings curdle into cynicism? When I walk the seawall on a clear winter day, will my appreciation be deeper than when I took it for granted?

I don’t know. After a year of learning about the rest of the world, I’m just as fascinated to find out answers about home.

So if I can talk directly to you for a second, without any writerly distance, here’s what’s going to happen.

In a few weeks or months, I might put out a new post about my souvenirs or some other aspect of this trip. I might also use this account to do the eclectic mix of Vancouver and British Columbia-based journalism that was my passion before this year.

Generally though, I’m going to spend the next while easing back into Vancouver, and writing the book about this year (coming out in the first half of 2026!). I’ll be talking to experts and applying a more journalistic lens to some of my observations and feelings about the cities I’ve visited, and what makes them good or mediocre.

The book will begin with me leaving Vancouver. It’ll include parts of the travel diaries I’ve been publishing over the last 12 months, but will also include broader travel essays, interviews with people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to big cities, and very important rankings about trains and cuisines and other things that will definitely not make anyone angry.

Then, the book will end with me returning to Vancouver, and discovering what I find and how I feel.

Joseph Campbell’s archetypical hero’s journey begins with a call to adventure, and ends with the protagonist returning home, having changed.

What happens after they get home? And does that change how they viewed the original journey?

After 52 countries in 52 weeks, I have no idea.

But I can’t wait to board this plane and find out.