Stories of a Traveller Girl

I’ll never forget the day I started LOTR. What drove me to it? In a nutshell, the want for freedom, the lust of travel and the need to live. So I played a pun on the Lord Of The Rings, but admit it, it’s perfectly apt when one is writing about New Zealand!

Yes, it all sounds so dramatic, but that is how I found my way in the insanely beautiful, amazingly friendly country of New Zealand. I’ll never forget the day that I left on a one-way ticket from my home country of Singapore. It was the first time in my life that I’d done anything like this.

It was uncertain, crazy, and almost an unfathomable idea to many of my family members, but it was something I had to do.

And over 17 hours later, my feet touched ground in Auckland. Everything was a new experience, from walking down to the Viaduct Harbour in the afternoon, to going to the bar in the evening for a drink. Every day was a blessing, every new place was an adventure.

LOTR in New Zealand is something very different. There is something about this country that makes you question your own life. Every lake, every river, every mountain, every road, every field, every valley, every beach – it’s not just travelling or experiencing, it’s life; life on the road.

It’s more than just visiting Auckland, having a walk along Lake Taupo, trekking at Abel Tasman or partying in Queenstown; the people you meet, the experiences you go through, the times you are alone and just looking up at the night sky, they all change you. Travelling alone in New Zealand, it changes you.

Because a travel story of a place, is something everyone can write about. But the travel of life, especially when it comes to LOTR? That’s something that we all look for through our travelling. What does LOTR mean for us, and what exactly do we find when we reach “the end”?

I’ll never forget the day I got to New Zealand, the day I truly started my own LOTR. LOTR taught me more than I could ever know. In the waves of Tawharanui, the blue of Lake Taupo, the rush of Huka Falls, the ice of Fox Glacier, the height of the Sky Tower, the greenery of the Coromandel Peninsula, I found myself. I found the girl who travels, the girl who wanted to be free, the girl who loves, the girl who cries and most importantly, the girl who survives.