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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Destinations: New Zealand
Godzone Quest (cont.)


	I'll take you there: the ubiquitous Kiwi taxi (Pat O'Hara/Corbis)

IN NEW ZEALAND, resourcefulness starts at birth—or pretty close to it. One night, just outside Auckland, I went to a small gathering at the house of Mark Jones and Sally Rowe, longtime friends of Graham Charles, the Kiwi photographer and adventurer who accompanied me on my 2,000-mile road trip throughout the North and South islands. To keep his smart and scrappy two-year-old daughter, Jessica, entertained, Jones took her upstairs to the two-story climbing wall and placed a colored pencil about eight feet up, on one of the holds.

"Go get it," he said to her.

In 30 seconds flat, Jessica threw from a crimper to a big jug and had the pencil in hand. She needed it to continue coloring.

I asked Peter Hillary, who has climbed Everest twice, why he thinks Kiwis are so keen for life on the edge. He laughed and said, "We want action for ourselves. We don't want to sit around listening to other people's yarns."

At Hugh and Mandy Cameron's Otematata sheep station, their 17-year-old daughter, Olivia, kept a massive bale of surplus wool sitting on a blue tarp in the middle of the dining room; in order to earn the US$585 she needed to go to kayaking school, Olivia clipped off the usable portions to sell them for about US$2.75 a pound to a local trader.

"Kiwis grow up with space," says Dave Moore, 32, an adventure-sports instructor from Christchurch. "You don't feel like you're one of a zillion people. You can feel like you're quite good at something early on." According to Sport and Recreation New Zealand, a trade organization, the average Kiwi takes part in five sports and active leisure pursuits during the year, and the most zealous take part in a dozen such pursuits per year.

Five years ago, Lisa Shymkus, 45, moved from her home in New Mexico to a house on Tasman Bay, with her husband and two kids. "My kids can walk to school on the beach," she says. "They're expert boogie boarders and kayakers, and they start every day at school with fitness. That's unheard of in America."

The premier wilderness-skills school in New Zealand, a rite of passage for many North Island teens, is the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Set on 175 acres at the edge of Tongariro National Park and tucked away in the bush, the rustic OPC campus feels like a step back into simpler times. Its well-worn paths link basic student bunkhouses, seventies-era A-frame staff housing, an indoor pool for kayak-rolling classes, a sprawling ropes course, and a modern low-slung main lodge with picture windows overlooking 9,175-foot Mount Ruapehu. The students, ages 14 and older, learn far more than how to make a good s'more. Since it was founded in 1972 by mountaineer Graeme Dingle, about 100,000 students have passed through its program, fine-tuning their skills in everything from whitewater paddling to mountaineering. Instructors have gone on to guide Himalayan peaks, make first descents of South American rivers, and pull off the first sea-kayak traverse of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The latter feat—an insanely dangerous undertaking—is just one notch on Graham Charles's adventure résumé. The former head instructor at OPC is a lean six foot two and has pushed his luck innumerable times, including a near-fatal bike crash, a near drowning, and several other near misses. In addition to his 2002 Antarctic Peninsula expedition, the 38-year-old had a five-year career on the national K1 kayaking team, was a competitive multisport athlete, and paddled the country's gnarliest rivers for his 2002 guidebook New Zealand Whitewater.

His own bid to become an opportunity entrepreneur is a project called Adventure Philosophy, an ongoing series of hardcore expeditions that combine an old-fashioned DIY sufferfest ethic with an idealistic belief that adventure can promote personal responsibility, environmental protection, and inspirational education. The three-man Adventure Philosophy team of Charles and former OPC instructors Mark Jones, 40, and Marcus Waters, 38, followed up its Antarctic voyage with an equally hairy sea-and-mountain traverse of Tierra del Fuego; meanwhile, in conjunction with its sponsors, Adventure Philosophy has doled out thousands of dollars and tons of gear via Good for Life Scholarships, which are awarded to young Kiwis with their own expedition dreams.

When I visited OPC, a group of college students from the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, were taking a weeklong course. I watched five or six of them launch like monkeys from the Big Swing, part of a heavy-duty ropes course that looks like a cross between a medieval fortress and a Polynesian jungle. Scott Paterson, a lanky 19-year-old, had the proper Kiwi take on OPC. "Ah, it's really good, eh?" he shrugged. "It's basically life."

"Everyone's pretty much hard out here, so you just follow their lead," added Paul Ronevich, 20, an American exchange student. "In America, it's all about a faster car and a better job. I came here to get away from that mentality, and now I don't want to go back."

"Yeah, I've been to the U.S.," Paterson said. "And it's like all the kids are wrapped in cotton wool. They need to get release."

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