MARCH 23, 2021 – Forty years ago this month I embarked on a solo trek around the world. Traveling alone, I was never lonely. Without today’s technology, I navigated via guidebooks, paper maps, and total strangers, whom I learned to size-up quickly by their eyes, posture, and corners of the mouth.
Though I chose destinations—such as the Himalayas, Samos, the Lofoten Islands—for their stunning scenery, wherever I traveled, the best memories were of people.
I started in New Zealand, where I spent a full month, mostly on the South Island—the Milford Track, the Remarkables (mountains), and Mt. Cook National Park in the Southern Alps. Even in sparsely populated NZ, I met many wonderful people—Kiwis (New Zealanders), and long-haul travelers from overseas.
They were experienced globetrotters, wonderfully curious about the world. We shared meals, hostel facilities, bus journeys, ferry trips, ski-plane and sea-plane rides, hitch-hiking lifts, and trekking paths.
For years I could remember many details of every day in country, right down to what and where I’d eaten and the names and hometowns of the dozens of people I’d met. For a while I corresponded with some of those sojourners. Every few weeks a long letter on tissue-like paper would arrive from some far-off land. I’d then pull out my own stash of tissue-like writing paper, and pen a long reply. I can hazard only a guess as to what happened to those people of the distant past. In many cases, their names and faces, along with the details of my month in NZ have vanished from the folds of my memory.
But what I’ll never forget about that time in NZ had nothing to do with NZ—or even planet earth.
For several days I’d set up “base camp” at the youth hostel in Mt. Cook National Park. The surrounding facilities were sparse and Spartan—a small campground across the road from the hostel, a small convenience store up the same dusty road a hundred meters or so, and beyond that, the park headquarters housed in a modest building with an office, common room, a little gift shop, and a small auditorium.
One evening, a feature film was showing in the auditorium. After dinner, a group of us from the hostel, joined by friends who were staying in the campground, strolled up to the park building to catch the movie. The sun had slipped behind the mountains, but only a star or two had yet appeared.
I don’t remember the movie, though I it was a recent release and held our attention. As we exited the building, someone looked up, stopped hard, and gasped. In the next instant, all eyes gazed skyward and our voices leapt with astonishment. Spread across the heavens was a display beyond the brightest stars of the silver screen. The Southern Cross assumed a starring role, and filling the dark void of space was more stellar light than any of us earthbound creatures had ever seen.
Nowhere since have I witnessed such a celestial display.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
