So, I’m Moving to Belgium

Well, life happens so, in the end, I didn’t go home, instead booking another flight to another country: New Zealand. I arrived just after my 23rd birthday.

Again planning just to go for a short while, it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with this far-south country and I ended up applying for a working holiday visa on which I spent a year working and traveling. It's truly a brilliant scheme that allows young travelers the chance to see the world and make a bit of cash to fund that dream while they’re at it.

I explored the South Island on a bus tour for my first month in New Zealand, hiking, exploring, wandering, reading and discovering.

After that trip, I settled into to the rhythms of life in Kaikoura, a small town of just over 2000 people a few hours north of Christchurch, to work, ponder, reevaluate and figure out what I wanted from life. I settled into a steady pace of working in a restaurant in town in the day time, working (and occasionally managing!) a hostel in the evenings and exploring the surrounds and local wildlife in between.

Winter began to arrive in June, a month I have for my entire life associated with summer and, with more than three months of being in the same place, I became restless to travel again. A few weeks earlier, a Tinder match (you read that right) and a 4am conversation due to heavy rain storms lead to Nico showing up in Kaikoura to meet me. He initially booked four nights at the hostel I was working and ended up getting a job there, too. We spent three weeks together at the hostel getting to know each other.

The bug to travel didn’t go away and soon enough, Nico and I embarked on a chilly, beautiful, eye-opening and lesson-learning winter roadtrip around the South Island, sleeping in the car, bundling against the cold and taking in the gorgeous views. They say the best way to know if it'll work with someone is to travel together. I knew it would work from day one.

In the beginning of March, just a few days before Nico's extension visa was due to run out, we packed our bags, moved out of our apartment, finished our final days at work and flew to Samoa for two weeks in the sunshine. It was around this time that the COVID-19 crisis was picking up, which made our trip to Samoa strange as we often found ourselves to be the only travelers at the various places we stayed.

We returned from Samoa two days before New Zealand closed the borders to all foreign nationals and entered into an unprecedented time of varying levels of lock down. New Zealand extended all temporary visas which would allowed us to stay put until late September. Initially, we spent the first few weeks in our van, social distancing as recommended. As the levels ramped up and level 4 lock down loomed on the horizon, we found ourselves struggling to find a more permanent place to spend what would be nearly two months of 'stay home'.

A phone call from an old colleague of mine saw us spend the first ten days of lock down living on her orchard, still in our van. A chance encounter at the local grocery store saw us move into a flat attached to a local's house where we enjoyed comfort, our own shower, privacy and wifi! We ended up living there for two months.

We had flights booked to Belgium at the end of April - this flight was cancelled as Emirates ceased flying and Belgium closed their borders, too. So, once lock down eased, we decided that, with no set departure date in sight, we would pick up where we had left off and moved back into our van to explore the North Island.

We spent two months on the road, traveling slowly, enjoying each place, feeling no pressure to rush on to the next thing and enjoying the fact that there were barely any other tourists with whom to share New Zealand's beauty in. We visited places that normally see thousands of people a day and would oftentimes be in the company of just a handful of others. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I'm so glad we decided to stay in New Zealand for lock down.