The Illuminated Vagabond

VIDEO: Vagabond with a Home…

Paul — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 08:43:25 +0000

It’s been over a year of radio silence. The Vagabonds have, unfortunately, become contributing members of society, albeit in two different countries other than their homeland, which is no small task. I guess reality eventually has to settle in. Traveling friends go home to work, to study, to marry… One slowly settles into a daily routine. While the thrill of the New is always alluring, always calling, it is actually nice to have a space of your own once again, if only to regroup and get your bearings. It’s nice to see the same smiling face every day. Oh, and it was a relief to pay off the accumulated credit card debt as well.

We have been lucky really. Saying you want to find a ‘proper job’ in a foreign country, and secure all of the necessary visas to do so is a constant uphill battle. We are still the immigrant workforce. I have absolute respect and admiration for the immigrants from ‘less fortunate’ countries, and especially the highly skilled workforce of other countries whose credentials aren’t of a ‘high enough standard’ to be recognized. I still fondly remember the engineer who I cleaned toilets with side by side. I’m sure there are plenty of talented people who struggle daily to survive, and provide for their families by taking work well beneath them.

Here is a modest peak into our humble abode and the town we currently call home, Hamilton, New Zealand. While it’s taken me ages to actually cut this quick piece, when I watch it I actually think, “Hey, I wouldn’t mind living there!” One of our favorite getaways, Raglan, makes a cameo at the end. We are happy to have such wonderful places on our doorstep.

We are lucky. We are fortunate. No matter where we hang our hat, we are loved.

Here’s to a hopeful rejuvenation of Illuminated Vagabond in 2012!

Little pleasures

VIDEO: “Why Hamilton?”

Paul — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:44:53 +0000

Among some of the common questions I’m asked such as, “Where are you? When are you coming home? Are you still in New Zealand?”, I’ll add another one “Why Hamilton?”

Since moving to Hamilton I’ve wanted to put together a video that gives people a glimpse of where I am and what it’s like here. Well, when a group of my students at Waikato Institute of Technology did their documentary assignment about Hamilton, I figured why recreate the wheel?

These guys did a great job at answering the question “Why Hamilton?”

Thanks to Davis Boyce, Director, for providing permission to post this video.

A month of images in the Land Down Under

Paul — Wed, 04 May 2011 05:30:37 +0000

One month in Australia is hardly enough to scratch the surface of this vast and varied continent. But I knew this going into it, and focused my time on Melbourne, the southern coast (the Great Ocean Road and Kangaroo Island) and the Outback. I was hoping to fall in with a cool group of people soon after arrival and jump into a campervan on the open road. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen quick enough for my liking so I ended up booking 4 back to back tours with Groovy Grape for a reasonable all inclusive price. This is a pretty good find on a backpacker budget. 3 meals per day, transportation and accommodation all in one, and the more tours you book, the bigger discount you get. I ended up doing the Sparkling Chardonnay Package for about $1500 AUD which included the 3 day Great Ocean Road and Grampians National Park, 1 day Barossa Wine Tasting tour, 2 day Kangaroo Island Wildlife Safari and a 7 day Desert Patrol into the Outback and Uluru. As is usual with these kind of tours, your group and your guide can make or break the experience. I’d say I was fairly lucky to have mostly good backpackers and pretty good guides as well. I would have liked the first guide on the 3 day Ocean Road to have been a bit more involved with the group, but you can’t have everything all the time. Because of the huge size of Australia, expect to have some days with a LOT of driving if you book some of these tours that cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. I’d say with each of these tours there was a pretty good balance of travel vs activity, with only a couple days of long (i.e. 5 hours or more) driving times. Overall I was quite pleased with the Groovy Grape experience, and would definitely recommend their tours for the budget or time restricted traveler.

View Australia Image Gallery

Vagabonds go their separate ways

Paul — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 04:13:48 +0000

After spending a spectacular year working and touring New Zealand, the vagabonds have parted ways to continue their travels. Christina has gotten a working holiday visa for Australia, and is currently setting up shop in Melbourne. Stay tuned for some great Aussie articles coming from her– right Christina? I, unfortunately, am too old to get an Australian working holiday visa (the cut off is age 30), so I had to leave New Zealand after my one year visa expired on Feb. 1. I spent the last month in, well, Australia! It was only a 3.5 hour flight from Auckland to Melbourne, and the price was right, so it was a logical choice. It was good to catch up with Christina and have a few pints as well. I’m currently back in New Zealand on a 3 month visitors visa. With a few irons in the fire, I’m hoping to secure more permanent employment, and perhaps stick around for a while longer.

It has been an wonderful year, and we’ve seen and done some amazing things. The travel bug has certainly bitten us. With a little planning and luck, hopefully the vagabonds will continue to show you some beautiful pics and useful articles. Hopefully we will inspire more to become Illuminated Vagabonds.

After spending a spectacular year working and touring New Zealand, the vagabonds have parted ways to

continue their travels. Christina has gotten a working holiday visa for Australia, and is currently

setting up shop in Melbourne. Stay tuned for some great Aussie articles coming from her– right

Christina? I, unfortunately, am too old to get an Australian working holiday visa (the cut off is age

30), so I had to leave New Zealand after my one year visa expired on Feb. 1. I spent the last month in,

well, Australia! It was only a 3.5 hour flight from Auckland to Melbourne, and the price was right, so

it was a logical choice. It was good to catch up with Christina and have a few pints as well. I’m

currently back in New Zealand on a 3 month visitors visa. With a few irons in the fire, I’m hoping to

secure more permanent employment, and perhaps stick around for a while longer.

It has been an wonderful year, and we’ve seen and done some amazing things. The travel bug has certainly

bitten us. With a little planning and luck, hopefully the vagabonds will continue to show you some

beautiful pics and useful articles. Hopefully we will inspire more to become Illuminated Vagabonds.

Laneway music festival Auckland

Paul Nelson — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:00:00 +0000

With some time to kill in Auckland before heading to Australia, I decided to check out the St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival held in the city center. I hadn’t seen any live shows since leaving the US a year ago, so the thought of over a dozen bands, some of which were old favorites (Blonde Redhead) and new favorites (The Foals) had me anxiously awaiting showtime. I missed the first couple openers, but after that I’d have to say I enjoyed all but one of the acts. And I’m not even sure which band it was because the lineup changed last minute. Blonde Redhead and The Foals, of course, were awesome. And while I’d heard of, but not heard, most of the other bands, a few really stood out that day. Holy Fuck, as their names suggests, makes you go “Holy Fuck! That’s awesome!” With a combination of perfect drums, warped vocals and a bunch of lo-fi meets hi-fi instruments, it had even my swollen purple toe dancing along. A few others that kept the day moving: Beach House, Warpaint and Deerhunter–all good. And while I thought I would like Yeasayer (I’d seen them at Lollapalooza a few years ago), they’re a bit too poppy and campy for me. All in all, it was a great day of music and grub in Auckland before heading to Melbourne.

The full lineup:

Foals
Yeasayer
Ladyhawke
Beach House
Deerhunter
Blonde Redhead
Warpaint
Holy Fuck
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
Children’s Hour
Lawrence Arabia
An Emerald City

And all for about $75 USD. Cheers Auckland.

“In a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!” –Merry Christmas 2010

Paul — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:31:17 +0000

Ah the days of the stellar SNL cast, with Chris Farley as the motivational speaker, Matt Foley. The phrase echoed through the classroom and my circle of friends, “I live in a van…DOWN BY THE RIVER!” The ultimate phrase of failure.

Well, it’s a car not a van, and it isn’t always the river we live by. It could be the wild west coast, a calm sandfly free haven on the southern shore, the magical valleys of Fjiorland or it could be a small brown patch of land just outside town with some permanent caravan inhabitants. Living out of a car isn’t always glamorous, but it’s definitely not the failure of this classic SNL skit. It can be tiring being on the move, packing and unpacking every day or so– setting up camp, trying to find where you packed the bread last night. But the freedom that mobility brings is a wonderful reward. With no confines of a 2 week vacation schedule you can follow the weather or your whims to your next destination. You can take every interesting side trip, turn down that gravel road or seek refuge in the local backpackers while you wait for the clouds to clear before climbing that summit. We aren’t climbing the corporate ladder, and our real estate has 4 wheels and a shattered window. But we are adding important experiences to the résumé of life, and our possessions are rich with friends and memories.

We consider ourselves very fortunate this holiday season, and are lucky to have met a generous local on the West Coast who has given us her home to use for a month. It will be nice to not live out of our bags for a while. It will be nice to cook up some good meals without having to stress about whether the next hosteler is waiting for the pan. And it will be great to spend Christmas with our new friends, our surrogate family, as we are thinking of our families and friends back home.

Merry Christmas to all of our new friends, our families and friends back home. We miss you and will be thinking of you this season.

Alpine Vistas to Mythical Mysts

Paul — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:57:38 +0000

We continue to be blown away by the beauty and wonder of the South Island of New Zealand. Traveling by car definitely has it’s advantages here. It allows you the freedom to take as much time as you like exploring anything that catches your fancy along the way, and truly soak up the beauty around you. We revisited Franz Josef for a short respite and some tracks we hadn’t done yet. Making our way further south, we spent several days in magical Fjiordland camping along the Milford Road, cruising Milford Sound, hiking the Kepler Track and relaxing with a rewarding cold beer afterward. Next, we followed the Southern Scenic Route through the Caitlins on the southern coast. We discovered some beautiful and remote campsites, and observed wonderful wildlife along the way. Browse the gallery of images below and transport yourself to this magical land.

From Coasts to Caves

Paul — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:27:14 +0000

New Zealand continues to offer up amazing sites from the obvious to the simplest of details. We had some great weather while we kayaked through Abel Tasman National Park, and some not so great weather around Nelson lakes, which made it prime time for sandfly feeding frenzies. From the mystical coast, bush and caves of Karamea to the wild West Coast and Golden Bay, here are some highlights…

[[Show as slideshow]]

Aquiring Your Immigrant Family On The Road

cee — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:24:28 +0000

On the road, I expected to meet lots of people and share stories. What I didn’t expect was to aquire my own little family of nomadic gypsies. New Zealand is a small enough place that you’re likely to run into the same people many times along your journey. And working in a place for a few weeks or months, you build even stronger bonds with the people you meet.

Working in Napier, for instance, we became close with our fellow grape harvesting backpackers. We all shared leads on contractors looking for a crew and carpooled early in the morning to work a long day in the sun together. After our day finished, we’d relax and bond making pot-luck style meals together and sitting on the beach beside a bonfire listening to our friends play guitar. We bonded so closely with them in fact, that we met up with them many times along the way after we parted from Napier… both on purpose and by chance. We’d either realize we were headed to the same place and meet up and travel together for a bit, or find each other on the road. One of our travel mates found the other hitchiking… and we met the same friend in front of our flat totally by chance whilst living in Tekapo during a visit from our other Napier friends! Our fellow WWOOFers from Franz Josef offered us a place to stay in Wanaka, and in return, we offered our flat to them in Tekapo.

You’ll learn lots from the friends you meet on the road:

Like how to roll your own smokes…

Or how to swear and offend people in French, Japanese & German…

And you’ll share things about each others cultures and learn that we’re really not all that different…

So though I missed my lifelong friends from home dearly, it helped to have a little family to travel around with on the road. People who share the same itch to travel and experience new things. People who understand what it is that brought you so far away from home. And now we have a network of people to visit across this big, beautiful world. People to open your home to when you settle down again, and whom will offer you the same welcome in their homeland.

The world is no longer such a big and daunting place… It’s a small world full of welcoming smiles and open arms. All our differences fade away and there’s a sense of peace and understanding. You no longer feel like a stranger in a strange place, but rather a part of something bigger and more meaningful.

- Christina

The Working Abroad Experience in New Zealand

cee — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:23:00 +0000

At the age of 29, after much self evaluation and dissatisfaction as to what I’d done with my life thus far, I decided to take a risk. That risk was to quit my job during struggling economic times and leave everything behind to go traveling. As long as I could remember, I’d always wanted to travel to the farther reaches of the globe, yet I’d only really seen my own country and just a few of other places. I’d never traveled anywhere for longer than the standard 2 week holiday time alloted to us unfortunate Americans.

So, facing a new decade in my life and in desperate need for a change and some inspiration, I signed up for a year long working holiday abroad in New Zealand.

… And it’s been an amazing experience.

Yes, many of my fellow travelers are younger than I, but there’s no age limit on living your life to the fullest. So if, like me, you’re no longer a young college student, don’t fret. There’s room out there in this big beautiful world for all of us. Take the risk… it’s never too late!

If you’re still not convinced, let me sum up a few inspiring realizations as to what this experience has been all about for me:

Working abroad on a working holiday visa gives us the freedom to move jobs and experience different things we might not have the chance to try working just one job at home.
Imagine an evening beside a bonfire w/ a box of goon & some guitars on a Napier beach w/ your pals after a long, hot day harvesting grapes in some of the region’s top vineyards.
It’s about being offered a home-cooked meal from your foreign co-workers during “smoko”, when all you brought was a measly sandwich.
It’s about taking time out to follow Frodo’s footsteps, climbing volcanoes that are very much alive, in an other-worldly landscape.
It’s about sitting on an abandoned West Coast beach, completely mesmerized by the swirling surf that hisses right beside you as you take in the view of magnificent sunlit, snow-capped mountains in the background.
It’s about being invited as part of the family and fed with the fruits of their labour and their land.
It’s about the silence & the space to clear your mind and let it wander w/out all the chatter of the world at home.
It’s about the challenge of nature, as you tread new paths.
It’s about the comeraderie of your fellow travelers. For they understand what it is that drives you.
It’s about changing your perspective and seeing things in a whole new light.

There are so many reasons to just go ahead and do it. The world as you know it will be right there waiting for you when you get back… IF you go back

-Christina