NEW Zealand is a long-haul destination and its tourism board executives said that it is only fair for them to push for quality experience to their visitors.
And how to have this? By having a qualified agent to advise you and you doing a bit of homework yourself on the main offerings of the land.
But for the harried traveller like me, who was moving from one coverage to the other with only enough time to pack bags in between, my wish list for New Zealand was stripped to the barest two – be on the airport on time to catch my flight and see the (in)famous sheep in its natural habitat.
I think this fixation with icons has something to do with first-time visits. Call it Touring 101. See the icon and you get your initial proof of visit. Once the brush with it has been done, you may now proceed to experiencing the host country on a higher level.
Kiwi would have been a more fitting icon but then one thing that I have always heard about New Zealand is that there are more sheep than people. And when they talk about the flightless bird, it always sounds like just an afterthought.
So show me my sheep.
Meanwhile, there was the duty of official business to do. From time to time, I would hear snippets about the animal life like there are less sheep these days while the number of cows is increasing. The government removed its farm subsidies some years ago and it was just a matter of time before farmers realised there is much more money to be made on cattle. But sheep still outnumber people.
One editor from Thailand said she joined the pre-conference tour which brought them to Stewart Island, famed for the national park that is home to the kiwi and an assortment of wildlife.
She said the kiwi was such a shy creature that the nearest they got to encountering it was seeing its fresh tracks. At the opposite end of the personality spectrum was another bird, which was sociable, nosey and noisy. It checked them out and followed them everywhere. Smack in the midsection of the temperament of these two creatures was a humongous seal, which was basking in the open, yawning loudly and totally unmindful of the intruders.
Would these animals be representative of the personalities of New Zealanders, I asked a destination expert. They could be representative of people of any countries, she said.
But of course.
Then the time for the post-conference tour dawned. We rode the TranzAlpine train, which has been described to run through one of the most scenic trails in the world. From the station, the suburban landscape soon gave way to the endless sprawl of farms bordered in the horizon by towering mountain ranges, holding promises of views from the Lord of the Rings.
I saw what appeared like fat, white fleas studding the greens. They turned out to be my sheep.
Following sightings would have them in almost life-size scales, looking very content as they grazed, frolicked and socialised among themselves. Out there in those fields of the big sky country, they looked like the happiest pre-schoolers enjoying officially sanctioned extended minutes in the playground.
Pretty soon, I saw so much sheep that I started feeling my eyelids getting heavier by the second.
There’s a moral lesson somewhere: Wishes could come true and the results, sometimes, should not come as a surprise.
