Given that three quarters of New Zealand’s population live on the north island, hitchhiking here is – if it’s possible to believe – even easier than on the south island. I set off from a suburb outside Wellington and was picked up before I’d even stuck my thumb out by a man bearing a grudge against the English for stealing his girlfriend thirty years ago (she preferred Chiswick over him). He asked me to give the place a good kicking from him.

Several rides later I was left standing in a particularly awkward spot, and a car pulled over thinking I was going somewhere quite different. The driver, ‘CJ’, realised my problem and offered to drive me to a better spot. Then offered to go the long way round to her town. Then offered to take me all the way to the next town. And then offered to drive me right the way to my campsite. After half an hour we turned off onto a small gravel road, over a wooden bridge and into a beautifully lush, deserted camping ground. But CJ wasn’t happy leaving me there, and insisted she would pay for a hotel room for me. She was middle aged and absolutely tiny, so I thought I’d be alright accepting – and did so in a state of grateful disbelief. Back in Hunterville we found an old railway station which had been turned into a boutique hotel, and she paid for my room and breakfast. I felt so bad that I tried to thank her by buying her a drink, but she then bought dinner! We sat in the bar watching the farmers drink and looking at photos. She found the whole thing hilarious and a great adventure. There were three things in her life: horses, dogs, and planes (she worked at the flying school and knew them all). I suppose it was an adventure for her – and me.

So I spent a night in luxury! I was the only guest in the hotel and had everything to myself: the rooms and corridors with thickly carpeted floors, understated wallpaper and fluffy towels, the rose garden and a country kitchen downstairs. I couldn’t read behind the polite face of the owner – who knows what she was thinking.

Hunterville is the sort of place the army stops off at for 10 minutes to use the toilets. There were statues of sheep outside the town hall, the museum was only open on Friday afternoons, and the shop windows displayed posters for some sort of extreme man-dog festival.

I carried on north, lured by the volcanoes of the Tongariro National Park. Mt Tongariro, Mt Ruapehu and the wonderfully unpronounceable Mt Ngauruhoe (aka Mt Doom in Lord of the Rings) are considered embodiments of ancestors and their stories by Maori. They are sacred, but were given to the government in the 19th century as a way of protecting them. Part of the park will soon return to management by the local iwi, but for now it’s just run like a national park (though one with dual world heritage status).

The volcanoes are still active and the last eruption was in 2012. Every evening during my walk we would sit down for a hut talk and be told what to do in case of sudden volcanic activity. There were maps dotted around highlighting the areas that have been affected by volcanoes in the past 27,000 years, meaning they are still hazard areas. But it was clear that, despite the enormous devastation of the landscape around us, everyone is desperate for an erruption. Flows of rocks and lava have created a kind of desert moonscape, leaving behind slopes of pumice and sulphuric streams. The scenery is dramatic enough to make it New Zealand’s most popular day hike, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to pass walkers with Lord of the Rings music blaring out their phones while crossing these barren mountains, but it was.

We’d had the best long range weather forecast of the year and Mt Ngaurruhoe stood so close. I teamed up with a Belgian and a Swiss girl to walk, and talked to a ranger about how best to climb the volcano. It was a steep two hour climb up a 45 degree ridge of rocks, and by the time we got to the top we were in cloud. But we could still sit on the bright red rock and peer inside the volcano to see the crater. It was all solid and stable, but felt incredibly alive.

The descent felt even more alive. Skating down the scree was fun, without a doubt, but dangerous, especially when there were other people below. Each footfall would dislodge hundreds of small rocks, but it was the big rocks I hadn’t prepared myself for. I watched a large stone slip so slowly, willing and not quite believing it would carry on. But it sped up and suddenly the rock was tumbling down and everyone was screaming out to people below, who leaped out of its way. Seconds later the rock had disappeared somewhere out of sight. But one of the men who had jumped aside had fallen over, hitting his head on a rock and badly cutting his knee. I went to see if he was alright and made sure he got down safely, but nothing could get rid of the feelings of guilt and horror at having almost killed this man. It was one of the most terrifying moments I’ve had, watching the rock bounce down the mountain towards everyone. A reminder of how dangerous mountains are, even on the best of days. And what happens if you climb a mountain that is so sacred to local Maori that some won’t even look at it.

A few days later, still recovering from the drama and intensity of the volcanic landscape, I was walking alongside the highway, trying to behead as many flowers as possible because I’d stupidly headed away from the nearest town and there wasn’t a single lay-by to start hitchiking. I was cursing myself, but had a feeling that such bad luck would pay off soon.

Sure enough, when I eventually found a suitable spot I was picked up in under a minute. Soon afterwards, just as I was waving goodbye to the driver, and turning the wave into an out-turned thumb, a van immediately pulled over. The driver was a middle aged Maori man. He was working, transporting high-end art and other expensive objects in this unmarked white van, which was actually alarmed and couldn’t be left out of sight. It was slightly hard to believe, but we really did go to a museum and I helped him by periodically checking on the van and unloading some paintings at the back gate. He knew all about the large public artworks around the city and had stories of how he’d packed and delivered them all. He also had stories of working for millionaire collectors who would fly him in their helicopters to install artworks on their private islands, stories of how to look after $60,000 crates of wine, and of being the innoccent intermediary (never a spy) between feuding galleries.

As we were discussing where I could pick up my next lift, he announced he had a one chance offer – I could spend the night at the hotel he was staying at (no ulterior motive he promised) and it would be paid for by his business. It meant having to go in the opposite direction down to Rotorua, but he was heading up to Auckland anyway and would be able to take me right the way there. It was a very tempting offer.

Rotorua is the centre of geothermal activity in New Zealand so the whole place stinks, and in the public gardens there are lots of pools of steaming, bubbling water and mud. It was very atmospheric and felt quite healthy. We arrived at the hotel, and it turned out to be a 5 star spa resort. I had my own suite and personal spa, with complementary bottle of wine. We had an expensive takeaway for dinner and some excellent New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir. The following morning I went for a morning swim in the pool, sat in my dressing gown in the sunshine drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, and then went out for a very fancy brunch (the most delicious eggs florentine) – all paid for by the business of course.  I was dropped off right in the centre of Auckland, and I checked into my hostel where the bed was unmade and only a brown, stained pillow sat on the bed, pipes gurgled all across the ceiling, and overloaded extension cables were strewn across the beds and floor.

So that was the end of hitchiking, and I’m glad it was because it really couldn’t have got any better than that.

Maori legend tells of the great ancestors arriving in Aotearoa/New Zealand from Polynesia by canoe.  Over 1200 years later, I’m sitting in the kitchen of a family descended from Uruao, the first man to settle in the city of Nelson. Opposite me sits a large, dark-skinned woman with an intricate tattoo covering her right arm. Her grey hair is pulled back into a loose bun, and she would be the epitome of the kindly grandmother were it not for the fiery words being spat out. She is describing the confiscation of her iwi’s (tribe) sacred land by the Church of England, which used it to build an orphanage where ‘malnourished’ Maori children (including her father) would be brought. Twenty years ago, seeing the land finally returning to the iwi, the former pupils, now white-haired, wept. Today the orphanage is rumoured to be haunted with the sound of children crying.

She goes on to describe how her father fought in the First World War, but, unlike other pakeha (non-Maori) soldiers, received no farmland on his return. The kitchen in which I am sitting is his family land, handed through the generations. It is reasonably large, but houses three families. Outside, everyone’s children (with Maori names like ‘Tane’, which translates as ‘god of the forest’) play among the chickens and orchards.

The matriarch of this family is feisty, astute and wicked. She’s married to a European and says this is the only way to beat the white man. They continually shout at each other (‘why you looking at me like that?’), but say that the only way to deal with differences and problems is to talk about them – and they really can talk.

She explains the work she does for the iwi as a board member: after the establishment of a special body in 1995 to deal with Treaty of Waitangi claims, the various iwis put forward their claims for land, repeatedly. Eventually, land began to return to their iwi, piece by piece. Not always the same land, not always good land, but still land. I start getting lost when she goes into details of leases and commercial redress. Once they received this land, they created an iwi incorporation to manage it: a financial, commercial arm of their work funds the other cultural and social arms of the trust. The Maori board members are businessmen and lawyers, and work hard to earn money. Some of the trusts are enormously wealthy, but this one is relatively small – worth a mere $250 million. She describes how the trust gets phone calls from pakeha outraged that their elderly parents now have to pay thousands of dollars for their leases when previously they only paid a few dollars a year. The trust is sympathetic, but it’s not their concern: the commercial arm must operate commercially if it is to survive. It’s harsh, but I can’t argue without bringing up the obvious hypocrisy.

I was taken to the Marae, the tribal meeting ground, and was formally welcomed alongside a group of visitors sent by the government to discuss proposals for a new Maori Land Service. The ceremony was all in Maori and I was pulled through it by holding hands with another woman. We entered and sat on one side of the room. The chair opened the meeting and a man got up to introduce us, after which the women of the local iwi stood and sang. Then someone from the visitors got up and said something, and the women in our group stood and sang. The welcome closed with a prayer, an envelope was surreptitiously handed around the room with money from the visitors, and we were greeted with the hongi, an exchange of the breath of life by touching nose with nose. We drank and ate, and then the real business of the hui (meeting) began. Although everyone could speak Maori, they clearly found it easier to speak in English.

The proposal presented to unify all Maori land services into a single entity is a good one in principle, but the details are controversial, to say the least. Everyone spoke, very articulately, and we broke into smaller groups to discuss specific scenarios. It felt entirely democratic – the way politics should be. Except that all the suggestions were rejected (it couldn’t be government run, and it couldn’t be run be current Maori organisations) and no one could come up with any better suggestions – they just refused to choose between two unlikeable options. The poor man in charge was left with nothing positive. But it didn’t help that he was who’d had to reveal that the iwi chiefs had met and agreed on one proposal without consulting or informing anyone else, which put everyone in a bad mood. The whole discussion and situation was extremely hard to follow, especially with all the Maori words and acronyms, and without understanding the tensions between groups, trusts, tribes, families and personalities, and all their histories. Yet the atmosphere was warm and open, and the discussions were practical and very engaged.

At the end, in typical Maori fashion, we drove the man leading the discussion back to our house because he was the estranged husband of the matriarch’s sister, and father to the troublesome niece who was now being tamed by boarding school. The next morning I was told in great detail  about his lurid love life and bitter divorce.

The six days I spent living with the family was great fun, and eye-opening. They were incredibly friendly but formidable: intelligent, clued up, resourceful, passionate, and relentless. The way they’re ruthlessly pursuing their agenda, training their own armies of lawyers and businessmen to fight from within, and completely integrating European and Maori values, is undeniably impressive. Since that week I’ve met and talked to other Maoris who tell slightly different stories. This is just one I experienced and was moved by.

I wasn’t allowed to take photos of the marae. These photos were taken in Rotorua, Auckland and on my walks.

Hitchiking is famously easy in New Zealand, but it’s also a competitive sport since there are so many people doing it. Luckily there are enough friendly people to pick us up. Nearly all of my lifts have been from tourists, which is slightly disappointing, but good for photo stops. I’ve had lifts from a Chinese couple who couldn’t speak English and would stop in the middle of the road to photograph sheep, young working-holidayers who wanted to tick off ‘picking up hitchikers’ from their bucket list, two Czechs whom I bumped into five times, a German who talked about EU politics incessantly (fifth item lost: one earring), a Californian ‘hippy-redneck’, and so many others in between.

Hiking here is known as tramping, and what a tramp I’ve become, camping for weeks without a shower or clean clothes (I’m surprised anyone still gives me a lift). Everything is so expensive that when a German giving me a lift offered to let me sleep in his car (we’d already spent two days together – he wasn’t a total stranger), I was very happy to lie across the front seats. That simple act of generosity, however, had infuriating consequences. I’d thought we were sleeping by the public toilets so, disgusted by their smell, I took my boots off and put them under the car. But we were actually going to sleep somewhere less obvious, and so drove off… leaving the boots behind, of course. The following morning the boots were gone. Those lovely comfy brown hiking boots that have been the affectionate subject of so many photos. I wandered around barefoot in the rain, asking every person and vehicle I saw, going into every motel and backpackers and campground, but still NO BOOTS!!! Sixth item lost (this one was hilarious, but hurt).

As we drove the 60km to the next town I wondered if I really needed shoes in my life. This journey was supposed to change me: maybe I could now be one with nature, my connection with Mother Earth pure and direct. It would be much healthier, and I might even turn into a Hobbit. But there was the good old voice of German reason next to me (are you eating enough vitamins to stay healthy?). Finally arriving in Westport, I bought a new pair of boots (pale blue, so now I look a total dork) and was, in fact, absolutely delighted to be well shod once more.

It felt like a turning point. I have reached a low, and could go no further. I, Iona, am a tramp no more.

But I’m really enjoying tramping. I did one of the official ‘Great Walks’, the Routeburn, a three day alpine trek. The weather got more and more abysmal. By the last day, soaked to the bone with nowhere to spend the night, I was cursing all kiwis and wishing the rain would turn their already fuddled brains to mush, and thinking how New Zealand really was the arse of the world. The mountainside had turned into a continuous series of waterfalls which was feeling increasingly dangerous. A marked flood detour had become swamped and to get back to the track I had to clamber up the waterfall. Definitely exciting and one of the highlights of the walk, but tense.

I reached a hut and tried to dry myself. There was a group of people on a guided walk. What ponces. Their huts have sofas, en suite bathrooms, kitchens and spas. All they have to carry is their lunch. Every time I saw one of their luxury huts I just stopped and gaped and gazed in envy. It really felt like we were the lowest of the low next to them. But we all expressed our moral and physical superiority, and as we huddled around the stove we tried to convince ourselves that our experience was the more authentic. In doing so, I befriended an On the Road-reading Trump-refugee from Colorado who, in a moment of boredom in his tent two days before (having failed to bring any entertainment), had eaten all his food and was now starving. I gave him some oats, but nothing else. He had to learn his lesson.

The weather improved. In the sunshine, everything is forgiven and forgotten, and it is heaven again. I hitched to the Milford Sound with my favourite Czechs (they just happened to be passing, and just happened to be going on the same boat trip – says something about how original my itinerary is). It was ridiculously overcrowded and buzzing with helicopters, but still really lovely: a fiord with mountains and waterfalls everywhere, and dolphins swimming and jumping alongside us.

On the way back we stopped to watch keas, the only alpine parrots in the world. They are extremely friendly, inquisitive and intelligent, and you can even play with them. But because they are so endangered and tourists feed them, they do whatever they like. They enjoy eating rubber (and asphalt, apparently), and so they will jump on or inside cars and start attacking aerials, tyres, window frames and anything else. And all the owners, or usually hirers, can do is watch!

The following day the weather was even better. Still feeling annoyed at having missed the famous views of the Routeburn, I decided to turn back and do the whole walk in a day. It was 12 hours of walking (with pack) and I was quite hysterical by the end, but the views over the Southern Alps were totally worth it.

The view that first time round looked like this:

turned into this view:

Amazingly, at the end I managed to find a lift to a campsite. Three very blond Swedish girls then suddenly appeared and offered me dinner – it was like a miraculous angelic appearance, exactly what I needed, since all my matches were wet and my stove wouldn’t work. They were in Queenstown for the usual extreme adventure reasons. They each had their own challenge: one was going bungee jumping, one was getting a tattoo, and one was going on a date.

Carrying on along the West Coast I encountered weather, weather, weather. Rain, cloud, mist, wind, sun(burn), ice, rain, rain, rain. I went in search of glaciers (glayshers I should say) and passed depressing signs like ‘In 1750 the glacier was here’. Even in 2014 they were quite a bit closer.

Being a tramp was fun while it lasted. I would get into a car and say, grandly, ‘Anywhere’. I would steal toilet paper from public toilets, even the soap from the sinks, would eat the leftover food on tables, and simply turn my socks inside out every morning. There were some beautiful moments – sitting drinking icy beer by a spectacularly blue lake of melted glacier, watching a hedgehog rummage through the rubbish in my tent, cooking pancakes by a lighthouse in the spray of waves from the Tasman Sea. But it’s tiring. Wandering the streets barefoot in the rain is too much for me. Maybe I’m a wuss, but it’s just not very fulfilling. I’m sure there are better ways to discover New Zealand.

Come, come to New Zealand, land of pristine wilderness and rugged adventure, say the adverts. So everyone comes flocking. And now it’s difficult to get a view of any glacier or lake for all the tourists posing for photos in front. Conversations with other travellers usually involve some complaint about how many tourists there are (without a hint of irony). Tourism is New Zealand’s main industry and it really does feel industrial, like we’re being managed, farmed, harvested, and are domesticating the landscape. But there is a reason everyone comes here, and it’s not hard to find your way off the main track and into the wild.

The first thing I noticed, and still can’t get over, is the colour of the water: bright turquoise rivers and lakes glowing with mineral energy, or icy grey rivers flowing with the milk of glaciers. Quite different from the crystal turquoise waters of Tasmania. Behind the water always lie mountains – the real things (they put Australia to shame), with snow-capped peaks, and growing at meteoric rates.

At the foot of Aoraki/Mt Cook, the tallest mountain, I think I found a lost paradise: a glade of raspberries, redcurrants and gooseberries among foxgloves, lupins and tall grasses, encircled by lichen encrusted trees. In the distance stood the glassy peak of Mt Cook, and as I gorged on fruit in the sunshine, the valley rumbled with the thunder of falling ice.

That night, camping below the mountains, the wind picked up and a gale grew. My tent billowed and shook, the roof pressing down to brush my sleeping bag, the walls huffing and puffing with the exertion of staying up. Sleep was impossible. A loud, distant roar would anticipate ferocious gusts.  All I could do was lie there and hope my weight would stop the tent blowing away. In the morning I took cover in a nearby shelter where the people whose tents had broken were sleeping. It was no hurricane, but I’ve never felt winds like them: inside the shelter, the wind through the air vents was enough to blow out my stove, and the draft coming up the toilet was enough to stop you needing to use it. What, I asked a lost-looking climber, can you possibly do in weather like this? Go to the pub. So I got the first lift out as fast as I could.

This is what most of the views have actually been like:

The weather this summer has been foul (they promise it’s not normally like this). Rain, wind, rain, wind, rain, wind. There’s something apocalyptic about it. The world’s storm is hitting hard, the glaciers are disappearing. But it feels somehow appropriate for New Zealand, which rose from the waters through earthquakes and volcanoes. Before the arrival of people, everything that grew here blew here or flew here. It’s a world of ferns, mosses and exotic birds.

Fleeing the chaos of holiday parks and campervans for the rainy calm of the forest, I took a boat across a small river and began an overnight walk, with only the birds for company. Fantails would nervously hop closer and closer, peeking out from behind branches until we were staring at each other in silence. The path became flooded and walking became wading. I reached a river and saw orange markers telling me to cross it. There was no bridge, but the markers were unmistakeable. I held my camera up high and walked in up to my waist, feeling exactly like the adventurers I dreamed about when I was nine, with my pack on my back and explorer’s hat on. Then as I was climbing up the river bank I realised I’d forgotten to take out the pieces of paper in my pocket, including my map. So much for being the proper explorer.

There’s a fantastic system of backcountry huts right the way across New Zealand, often beautiful wooden sheds with fireplaces and plenty of candles. This one was at the edge of the forest by the shore of Lake Manapouri, and I had it all to myself (and the mice). The next day I had to cross a three wire bridge across a large river, a kind of tightrope walking exercise with the help of handrails. It was so much fun – and the sort of thing people pay tons of money for on their kiwi adventure tours, but here I was having my own proper little adventure all for free, in the real wild and with no safety protection at all!

The next hut was a real hunting hide out and full of gun magazines. I headed up towards a lake and my meditation was interrupted by a half-eaten rat, feet poised in a crouching position and tail alert. I froze, then noticed a pair of pale blue eyes peeping out from the grass. A small kitten lay there, terrified. How the hell did a kitten get there – it’s miles from anywhere, across a river, and there aren’t supposed to be any mammals here. I continued on, wondering how I could believe what I was seeing. And then I came across a massive green skull (a moa skull, from that giant extinct bird?!), and was convinced I was hallucinating. Too much isolation, too many berries, too much water in my shoes. There are all sorts of rational explanations now of course, but it was a useful excercise in self-doubt and challenge to empirical norms. I think I must be absorbing the land mysticism which is so much a part of modern Kiwi culture. It’s a strange country and we’re doing strange things to nature.

Christchurch, the ‘Shaky City’, is a giant building site. Almost six years on from the earthquake, the city is slowly rebuilding and adapting to its new life. Pavements are closed, streets are lined with orange traffic cones, and where buildings once stood there now sit car parks or open squares of rubble. I knew there had been a big earthquake, but I hadn’t really realised how much of an impact it had had – the city has almost disappeared. It’s a powerful reminder that cities aren’t as eternal and stable as they might seem.

There are hints of what it once looked like: the River Avon winds along between Oxford and Cambridge Terrace, with punts being driven by men in straw boaters and striped blazers. Between the willow trees and ducks stand small palm trees. A few neo-gothic buildings remain, and one street of old French-style shop fronts survives.

But otherwise the city has gone. At the centre stands the cathedral, the spire completely collapsed, leaving a gaping open front. The scaffolding which was put up to support the tower (but which only caused it to collapse completely) now stands redundant, barely touching the ruins. A congregation of pigeons lives among the wisps of plastic and broken wooden beams. Just outside the barrier is a small chapel-shaped viewing platform made of plants and flowers, with an orange traffic cone for a spire. While legal battles force this old cathedral to stand frozen in its collapse, a new one has been built out of cardboard and shipping containers.

It was shipping containers that came to the rescue in 2011. Shops, banks, service centres were temporarily housed in them. And they still are. The central mall is a maze of shipping containers – most buildings are yet to be rebuilt. And people have really taken to them. Amongst the gardens and murals that have sprung up in the countless parking lots are shipping container cafes. Everything can be moved around as pleases. It all gives the city a kind of colourful, jigsaw feeling – of making do, and in great style.

Life goes on. The international busking festival was taking place so the streets were full of fire eaters and unicycle riders and hand standers, and always with massive crowds. I found a lovely farmers market on the bank of the river, where at lunchtime the construction workers (there are a LOT of them) sat among the ducks. And shipping containers are perfect for street food, so there’s heaps of lovely food.

I decided to incarcerate myself in jail – a historic one though (nothing to do with the sniffer dog at the airport that wouldn’t stop clawing my leg). It only stopped being a prison in 1999, and one cell still has drawings on the wall from one of the last inmates. They’re slightly sinister but drawn like sad graffitti, messages to future strangers. ‘ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME’ and ‘NOVEMBER 99 – THE LAST DAYS OF AN ERA’. The small cells and large open central space actually work really well as a hostel. It also seemed to give everyone an aversion to locking doors – ironically (or deliberately?) it felt one of the least secure hostels I’ve stayed in!

P.S. Sorry there aren’t more photos. I’m trying to do this while camping and it’s hard to find computers!