paul capewell’s blog

I’m currently embroiled in the not unpleasant task of leafing through diaries, notes and photos from the trip Mum, Dad and me took to New Zealand ten years ago. The trip was from 5 December 1999 to 5 January 2000, was my first to NZ, occurred during Dad’s long 6-month sabbatical which took him to many other far-off and exotic lands, and happened when I was 14 years old. As you’ll have established, we spent Chrtistmas and New Year’s in NZ.

As my first trip to NZ, anyone who knows me today would instantly assume it must have been rather a formative trip. In actual fact, while I’m sure it definitely sowed some seeds, I view the trip with mixed feelings. There are vast chunks of it I simply don’t remember. There are one or two memories from it I would rather forget. But I’ll admit that the vast majority of what I can remember of it was a magical, incredible experience. I’ve never once felt ungrateful for this wonderful opportunity I was given at such an appropriate age.

Sure it meant taking some time off school, but taking a 14-year-old to New Zealand, via a 3-day stay in Hong Kong, will really broaden his horizons. I learnt a hell of a lot that trip, about geography, money, travel, people, and lots of subtle stuff like how vast and diverse the world is. And much more, I’m sure.

I’m sure some Aotearoa DNA was transplanted into my own at that point too – must’ve been drinking the glacial river water on the South Island that did it…

Anyway, I was taken rather by surprise when I realised that this rather significant trip was ten years ago to this month. Surprised mostly because I’m usually pretty good about upcoming anniversaries. But nonetheless, being home for Christmas is enabling me to trace what memories I have of the trip, comparing with Mum’s, leafing through aforementioned notes and photos, and I can pick Dad’s brain on Christmas Day too.

It was a weird time for my parents. I was very aware then that they were either on the verge of breaking up, or at least that this trip cemented the inevitable in my naive head. It was a weird time for me too. I wasn’t a particularly happy teenager, and those teenage years were as rough and confusing as they are for most kids. So for some reason I look back to times like these, feeling as though they are somehow taboo – that talking to Mum and Dad about this trip, for example, mightn’t be the done thing. But the more I think about, the more I realise that there’s no reason to feel this way. Besides, we’re all (I think) old enough and tough enough to ignore the shitty stuff from back then, and just focus on the interesting, amazing, lovely stuff that happened to be going on at the same time.

Enough of the emo stuff – it’s Christmas after all! Part of the obsession with the dates has been me trying to establish where I was, when. I’m a fan of anniversaries, as I say. If my calculations are correct, we were in Twizel ten years ago today. This small town between Wanaka, Lake Tekapo and Mount Cook, near the southern tip of Lake Pukaki, was the base for a day trip to Mount Cook Village, taking in some gorgeous blue skies and amazing terrain.

I also remember (and have photos of) the sunset on one of the nights. I have a feeling it will have been Summer Solstice too – the longest day, a mirror image of the northern hemisphere’s shortest – and I remember us calling home to my sister Jeni, who was braving a particularly cold winter back in Buckinghamshire with my now-brother-in-law Paul and a broken central heating system. I felt rather smug, in that stereotypical 14-year-old-boy kinda way, that I was having a lovely summer while my big sister was freezing her arse off. I imagine I will have made that feeling known too, the cocky little sod that I was.

As well as this recollection, I also know for sure that we went on to Timaru – a rather boring but pretty town – to spend Christmas Day. I guess we weren’t able to get to Christchurch on time, because this would surely have been a better place to be on such a day. (I actually spent Christmas in Christchurch a few years later, in 2003 with Ian.)

Christmas in Timaru is a hazy memory, of driving round looking for anywhere that was open, finding an Italian restaurant that was completely empty but for the extremely OTT staff – and then promptly driving on to find some pies at a dairy to take home to the motel. I also remember popping to the beach, ostensibly so that mum could paddle her toes on the beautiful summer’s Christmas Day.

Other dates from the trip are a bit sketchy. We have photographs of most of the key locations. And we have notes taken from the places we stayed. But more details are consigned to fading memories, and I will do my best to extract them from our collective brain. I want to do this for my own reasons, as much so that I can scan in the vast majority of the photos we took on the trip, and get all the metadata in order.

I’ll probably refer to this trip some more at a later date, but for now I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on it as it was ten years ago to the month.

Dad and I – in Greymouth, I believe.
(It’s comforting to know that even ten years ago I had a paunch and a stupid stance.)