Those First Steps

I think that everyone, no matter how much or how little they have travelled, have experienced one moment that has made them think “I want to do this forever.”
At least that’s what happened to me when I took a helicopter ride up to Fox Glacier in New Zealand.

All I could see below me was white, the white tips of the mountains, the white of the snow-covered glacier, and the white of the clouds, their flatness stretching on in every direction around us. The helicopter landed in the middle of the flat plain of the glacier, and we were given the all clear to climb out. It was pure silence standing there. The air was still as all of the wind and clouds were below us. I jumped just about every time someone shuffled their feet. Everything about the place – the silence, the vastness, the isolation – were things that I’d believed for years, that we are all taught to believe, meant danger. They are at least something we’re meant to be cautious around. But after getting over the stun, due to feeling like I was on another planet, I only felt peace.

The glacier was about the size of two football fields sitting next to each other, and my sister and I made it our mission to run the length of them. I don’t even remember who started running or why we were running but it felt so freeing. Every sense in my body was telling me not to do it.
‘You’re running on ice,’ my mind would say, ‘What if there is a thin spot? What if you fall through?’
Your brain can only picture images of people falling through ice and swimming back to the surface only to find it has already refrozen. Even your brain knows that nothing this beautiful can exist without a catch. But it does, and that glacier was proof.

I ran as close to the edge of the glacier as my legs would allow. The clouds were only a hundred or so metres below us. The most striking thing about them was if you looked out across them they didn’t stretch on around the curve of the globe but instead ended in a sheer drop some distance away. It almost made you think that the edge of the glacier wasn’t as far as you can could walk, that the clouds were so flat that you could possibly walk across them…

I was glad then that I still had my senses. We could only stay about five minutes, but that was it for me. While the rest of my family enjoyed it they considered it more of a tick on the bucket list than anything more incredible. But that experience changed travel for me. Those were my first few steps.