During the last few days of 2013, I decided to pack up my life in San Francisco and go to New Zealand for ten weeks. The idea of traveling to New Zealand had existed in some abstract form in my mind for more than a year, but I still didn’t know much about the country beyond common knowledge, like that the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed there, and that everyone said it was incredibly beautiful. When I booked my flight to Auckland, I didn’t really know where I’d be landing.

And I still didn’t really know where it was when I did land, at 5AM on March 4th. I’d spent the overnight flight asleep, still exhausted from moving out of my apartment after I’d sold all of my furniture, boxed up everything else I owned, and left with a few shirts in my backpack. Four days later, I was standing on Cape Reinga, at the northwestern tip of the North Island, when I finally realized it: where I was. I could see a white lighthouse, and beyond that, two shades of water. The blue-green was the Tasman Sea; the navy blue, the Pacific. That’s the same Pacific, I thought, but this is the other side of it. I’m on the other side of the world.

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