New Zealand
The Place
In Return to Paradise, James A. Michener wrote "New Zealand is probably the most beautiful place on earth" with "natural beauty difficult to believe". Thirty years later, in a magazine article entitled The Memoirs of a Pacific Traveller, he listed Milford Sound as "The Most Stirring Sight" in the world.
Native Maori emotional attachment to the "Land of the Long White Cloud" is profound. The Maori story of the creation explains that land and human beings are all one, flesh and clay from the same source material. The first Europeans, however, tried at first to remake the face of the countryside into a Britain look-alike. Some 20,000 km (12,500 miles) from the tailored communities of Europe they still called home, they cut and burned the forest and sowed grass. But when they had the leisure to look around, they realised that packed into their small new country was a whole world of diverse and dramatic scenery.
New Zealand has majestic snow-capped peaks and unexplored rainforests, pristine lakes swarming with trout and turquoise ocean bays speckled with wooded isles, glaciers and fiords, geysers and volcanoes. It has modern cosmopolitan cities and backcountry sheep stations, kauri forests and kiwi fruit plantations. New Zealand is a combination of a land that time forgot, and a land that is difficult to forget.
