Over winter break, I toured the north and south islands of New Zealand. Getting to travel abroad made me very excited in the months leading up to break, but knowing that my parents would be joining me heightened my level of excitement. I "see" them every Sunday night on Skype, but I hadn't really seen them since August.
We had originally planned a country-wide Lord of the Rings tour, but the dates did not match up. Although both my father and I were disappointed because we are fans of the series, we decided to just make our own adventure.
My parents had never travelled this far in their lives, and it took a lot of convincing to get them to go in the first place. By the end of our trip, they could not believe their initial hesitation. What we experienced and what we saw cannot be given justice in written word. I knew that New Zealand had beautiful scenery, but I did not expect to see untapped beauty and colors that should not exist in nature. The thing that struck me the most was the different shades of blue in the sky and in the water. The government of New Zealand takes conversation of its land very seriously, and as a result, the water is clean-so clean that in some places, you can actually drink right from the stream. When the blue of the lakes met the blue of the sky, it was difficult to decipher where one started and where one ended. Of all the things that I saw-Hobbiton, glaciers, geysers, colonies of seals, miles of coast, the devastation of earthquakes, and hundreds of mountains-the colors still stand out the most.
For most of our time in New Zealand, my parents and I stayed on the south island. In order to preserve the land, the roads are very sparse. Instead of going through mountains, we had to drive around them-for miles and miles. Normally, a 10 hour bus ride would aggravate me to no end, but these ones did not. I spent the entire ride staring out at the incomprehensible beauty on the other side of my window. Since returning, I still have trouble wrapping my mind around my trip. I hiked through a tropical rainforest in order to see a glacier. I visited Lord of the Rings movie sets. I saw natural mirror lakes. I experienced the ruin of Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake. I drank fresh glacier water right from the stream. Before we went our separate ways-to Taiwan and to America-my parents already decided that they would be returning to New Zealand. I hope that I am able to tag along once again.