Travelling in New Zealand

There comes a point in travelling when you don’t know where you are, and I seem to have reached it. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Wellington. And yes, yesterday was Tuesday. I got up at 5.45am to catch the Trans-coastal train from Christchurch to Picton, to connect with the Inter-Islander ferry to Wellington.

A dark, foggy start in Christchurch soon became a sunny, clear winter day on the Pacific coast. New Zealand never fails to amaze. The scenery is almost too picture-postcard perfect to be real.

The Cook Strait was its usual self - a deep swell running through the channel from ocean to ocean, and the wind ‘blowing like buggery’ as  I overheard someone say on deck behind me.

I’ve missed the Tuesday poem deadline, but I’m struggling to keep up with deadlines of any kind. Everything is upside down here, the night sky, maps, time, my life. It was my birthday on Sunday and you suddenly get a feeling of time slipping away behind you. Yesterday I was interviewed over the telephone by a journalist for a New Zealand magazine (Eleanor Black for Next) and I was barely able to be coherent!