In December 2013 on my second visit to Australia, Chris and I took a side trip to Queenstown and Christchurch, New Zealand, in the South Island, visiting spectacular places in between, and we did a day trip to Milford Sound. Four years later in September 2017, we did a second trip to New Zealand together, but this time to the North Island, and visited Auckland, Rotorua, and the surrounds. That was as a side trip to Hamilton Island up in Queensland, Australia, for his cousin’s wedding. And today, we flew into Wellington on the southern tip of the North Island, to explore this area, with a planned day trip to Nelson in the South Island on Tuesday to visit his cousin, her husband, and their baby. I feel lucky to have visited this gorgeous country three times now. We’ve been lucky and privileged to visit a lot of beautiful places in the world, but no matter where else we go, New Zealand is always on top of the list for one of the most beautiful places on earth to me. It has this combination of stunning mountains, pristine, almost electric blue waters, and bright, colorful flora that just make almost everywhere you go outside of major urban areas feel like they could all be postcard snapshots. While I enjoyed our Auckland/Rotorua trip, our first trip here to Queenstown and Christchurch in the South Island remains the most picturesque visit in my memory. I couldn’t get over the color of the water, the varying shades of deep purple of my favorite mountain-esque lupine flowers, and the mountains covered in show — all against endless bright green.

Many of the places that I think to be the most beautiful on earth are marred by being very volcanic… and thus susceptible to earthquakes given they exist on fault lines. I still remember the chills I felt when we visited Christchurch in December 2013 and saw all the damage that still remained from the 2011 earthquakes that hit them. One hundred eighty five people died in that earthquake, and many important buildings were destroyed and became a bunch of rubble. I remember this indoor theater that went down to the ground… but the entire seating area was exposed to the air. Crumbled cement was still everywhere and in massive piles.

Wellington is the capital of New Zealand, the third largest city by population in the country. It’s often nicknamed as “Windy Welly” because it’s the windiest major city in the world. It’s located in the “Roaring Forties,” right in the pathway of the strong, consistent westerly winds found in the Southern Hemisphere, and the funneling effect of the Cook Strait; it experiences average wind speeds of 22 km/h (17 mph). We experienced the crazy gusty wind already within a day: we’ve had some close calls with losing our hats amongst all three of us! There’s a reason people say that when you coming to Wellington, you may want to leave your umbrellas and hats behind.

Wellington is also considered a cultural capital of New Zealand because of its eclectic dining scene and strong cafe culture. The quality of their coffee is often compared to Melbourne’s, which is widely known for making very good coffee. Wellington also has a lot of notable breweries and is just an hour-plus drive from Martinborough, a famous wine region in the North Island particularly known for pinot noir. Our first meal here was at a Vietnamese restaurant, where we had a really delicious Hanoi-style pho (the beef is marinated and cooked separately, then dunked into the hot broth, unlike southern style pho, where the meats are mostly raw and unseasoned, then added to the broth to be cooked), a duck stuffed banh xeo (highly unusual to have duck in a banh xeo, but very welcome!), bo luc lac (Vietnamese shaking beef – likely one of the best versions we’ve ever had). We also had a Vietnamese iced coffee and an egg coffee, which so super indulgent, thick, and rich that it was pretty much like a caffeinated dessert.

After our first meal here and first caffeine, I had a feeling that this segment of our trip is going to be particularly delicious. But then it got even better because after lunch, we went to Kaffee Eis for a gelato stop, where we shared a cup of feijoa and Black Doris plum sorbet! Black Doris plum is a local plum to New Zealand, and while that was delicious, for me the real star of the show was feijoa. Feijoa is also known as a pineapple guava and is New Zealand’s unofficial national fruit. It’s native to South America, where we’ve had it, and so it was funny when we found out how beloved it was here. It’s not easily available in markets, and we heard that most people just grow it in their backyards! The flavor is very much like guava but with hints of pineapple, hence it also being called a pineapple guava. The outside of the fruit is smooth and green like a guava, and the inside is an off-white, beige-like color with lots of seeds. The pulp is almost like jelly. This feijoa sorbet was just like the fruit, just blended with some sugar added to it. It was like pure frozen blended exotic feijoa bliss.

When we fly from New York to Australia, we cross the International Date Line, which means that we lose an entire day: we leave on the evening of December 8, and December 9 just disappears, as we arrive the morning of December 10. During this record-long 17.5-hour flight from JFK to Auckland (that’s the on-paper time; the actual time was closer to 17 hours), I was able to watch two movies, dabble in a few TV shows, eat two full meals, and sleep a decent night’s worth of sleep. I arrived in Auckland feeling really refreshed and awake. Of the two movies I watched, the first one I dove into was Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. I’ve been a huge Downton Abbey fan since 2021 when we started watching it (yes, I realize I am extremely late to the fan club). The entire series is so good, and the writing is absolutely hilarious when it comes to how snobbish and classist the Crawley family can be. In the movie, Lord Grantham and his eldest daughter, Lady Mary, are in London, considering downgrading their large London home for a much smaller London flat. As they are viewing a potential flat, Lord Grantham walks down the hallway and questions why there is a family who would live above them, and then another family living under them. He groaned about it, muttering that it felt like a “layer cake of strangers.” It was clear that he was struggling to wrap his head around understanding modern apartment living. He even says that the idea of unknown people living so close to him was “extraordinary.” He asked what they were to do when they would want to “go up to bed.” Lady Mary responds, “You don’t go up (to bed), you simply go along (in a flat)!”

I laughed out loud at this, and quite hard. I’ve spent my entire adult life living in apartments in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and so I always struggle at the idea of people who live in large homes and have too much space. To me, it always feels like wasted space. Who really needs that much space simply to live and exist?

As I laughed at this, though, I am reminded that it is all relative. Everyone’s version of “normal” Is quite different. I even thought about recent conversations I’ve had with Chris when we’ve talked about our opinions on business class in-flight service across our recent flights on British Airways, American, and now Qantas. We both agreed that BA in-flight service was pretty good, American was subpar (as to be expected since U.S. airlines are always terrible for service; even in business class, it feels like everything they do for you is a massive favor), and Qantas service was excellent (as is to be expected based on historically proven excellence). I could imagine the two of us having this conversation in public, and how some passersby could hear us and think we were two complete, utter snobs who were totally out of touch with reality. But the truth is: this is our lived reality, and well, we’re allowed to have opinions about it, are we not?