It was my 25th birthday and we were out for a drink when the news broke. “Riiiight” hollered the bartender, stepping out onto the pavement, “We’re going back into lockdown – from midnight!”. A groan rose from the crowd clustered under the strip heaters. Glasses were banged on wooden tabletops and beers drained as a line began to form at the bar, its occupants determined to make the most of their final night.
After more than a year of unimpeded freedom, covid had arrived in the South Island. For the next month, life became a series of oddly familiar routines once again. We dug through the garage for broken lengths of wood, old car batteries and half-used paint tins, stepping with them onto the bathroom scale and labelling our makeshift weights with duct tape and a gold sharpie. Pots of soup bubbled on the stove all morning and two-hour walks along the lakefront suddenly became the perfect lunchtime digestif. For a month, everything was comfortable, quiet, and suffocating. Any belief we had that things were getting better proved misguided and fanciful, our hopes of a return to normality dashed.
The great thing about long walks is that they give you time to think, and once we had gotten up into the forest, away from the neighbours on family bike rides, we began to talk about what to do. We – my girlfriend, Madi, and me – agreed that we didn’t want to stay in Wanaka and the more we talked, we realised that remaining in New Zealand or hopping the Tasman to Australia was not an option either. We needed to find a place to go.
Moving overseas seemed not only farfetched but impossible, just as it had for the past 18 months. But as we searched for a solution over the coming days, it was apparent that the latest lockdown had actually simplified our decision. Prior to that, every plan had been conditional: on lower case numbers, open borders, and a return to the world as it was. Over that month, we realised that we couldn’t wait any longer – we just had to go and trust that everything would be okay.
Yet across the Pacific, there was a place that was open, affordable and willing to welcome us for up to six sun-drenched, Spanish speaking months – Mexico.
The sensible destination for two restless Kiwis in their mid-twenties was London. We both had friends and, in my case, family living there, could easily get visas, and just as easily join the stream of young grads flowing over for their first taste of the Big Wide World. However, luckily or unluckily, London held exactly zero appeal for both of us and was quickly dismissed as a possibility. Our new home would have to be somewhere less conventional.
Since we both worked from home, Madi had started researching countries with generous tourist visas, with the intention that we could become digital nomads and work while we travelled. It was a deeply New Age, 21st century idea but one that meshed well with my globetrotting, boyhood fantasies. At that time, South-East Asia was still largely closed off and Europe far too expensive for two freelancers six months into their careers.
Yet across the Pacific, there was a place that was open, affordable and willing to welcome us for up to six sun-drenched, Spanish speaking months – Mexico. Neither of us had ever been, or knew anything about what to expect, which made it the perfect destination, an antidote to the sameness of our lives and the secure little bubble we had been stuck in for the past two years. We called our parents on FaceTime and told them the plan. “We’re moving to Mexico!”. “That’s fantastic!” they all responded, “When are you going?”
It is May now and in a few weeks we will be setting off, ten months after we made the decision to leave. As somewhat anxious and overly-prepared travellers, there is very little we haven’t planned for. In spite of that, there is so much to come that an itinerary will never capture. In a little less than a month, we will be waking up in a new bed in a city we have never visited, to a view we have never seen. I will still wake up every morning and make a pot of coffee, the same as I do back home, but I will pour it into mugs that are not my own and listen through the window as the streets I have never walked fill with the noise of people I have never met.
I cannot wait.
Words— Nick Ainge Roy
