the best things in life are for (almost) free.

This weekend, I felt the need to escape the city and get some fresh air, see a bit more of New Zealand and,most importantly, try out my new [pink] walking boots.

As pink as walking boots get..

I found myself and a few friends heading to Kaitoke National Park,about an hour away from Wellington (admittedly, we didn't venture far. Probably wise as I was driving), where they have filmed scenes from the Lord of the Rings.

As you might expect, it was green. And pretty rainy. All the same I thought the  place was beautiful in the only way that I'm learning New Zealand can be, much in a way that many parts of the UK are.They don't try to too hard to be stunning, they just are magnificent in their settings. Understated WOW factor, I find to always be much satisfying than the obtrusive and obvious WOW factor.

Like I said, it was very green.

At one point along this Ridge Walk (which we definitely came nowhere near to completing) we came to a break in all the greenery and had a view of the valley. In that moment, I was taken straight back 5 years when in the Amazon. (one day you'll forgive me for my place-name dropping..) It was something to do with all the trees and rain I think. But the view was not dissimilar to a mental photograph I had taken of one of my favouritie views whilst travelling,(the mental photograph,in case you're wondering, was in the Amazon over looking the Cloud Forests. (yes, I am name dropping again, please forgive me.) But this got me thinking, did I actually appreciate the stuff I was seeing and taking in? I don't think I ever did until I came back. It was like a major time delay on the intake of such beautiful things and things that really made me think, my god- when will I ever see anything like that again? In fact it's probably only now that I realise that I will probably never see anything like that ever again. Especially because my mental photography skills are particularly lacking.

Like, right now, I am so much more in awe of the stuff that I'm seeing, or I'm that much more proud of myself for taking the leap to the other side of the world than I think I was 5 years ago. Admittedly, it's more of a hop, skip, jump and a 30 hour plane ride away than a leap but you get the gist of what I mean..

I think that maybe I'm just that little more mature and therefore more aware of the things that I'm seeing. And when I say mature, I definitely just mean older.

Just a pink-ish sunset.. sensing a theme yet?

The thing is, the best things in life are often the things that cost next to nothing. Okay so this argument is a little flawed because I did have to fork out a pretty hefty amount to get here in the first place- but I was really very happy at taking a walk just outside of Wellington last weekend, or just having dinner with some friends- or going to some crazy hut restaurant with some belly dancer dancing in between the tables crowded full of half drunk twenty-thirty somethings wishing each other happy birthday and demanding speeches from strangers to celebrate these non existent birthdays.(you really cannot make this stuff up). It's the simple things in life that often are the most satisfying, or the most memorable simply because they were so surreal.

I feel like I'm getting much more out of this big "trip", this time round, and I still haven't worked out why, but in the meantime, here's another picture that I took with an actual camera as it's much more reliable than my memory..