I got used to being alone really quickly, though. It was easy once I started actually seeing the country. The loneliness never completely went away, but it was manageable for the most part. I was having way too much fun to let it get in the way. And I made transitory bonds with the people I stayed in hostels with. The beauty of hostels are the people you meet, travelers who have been abroad for months on end, who’ve seen the world five times over and are at it again. The best part is meeting someone in one New Zealand city and then running into them a couple days later in another, finding out that you rode the same bus and ate at the same places. New Zealand’s small, so it’s easy for that to happen, but when it does, you get the feeling that the world is perfectly aligned and that this was somehow meant to happen.

I’m definitely beginning to warm up to this traveling alone thing. Last night I stayed up a bit talking and laughing with my roommates, one of whom an American who had lived in India for a number of years, and another from London. My other roommate was Polish but also living in London. This is surreal — meeting so many people from all over the world. I really envy the ones who have been traveling for months on end.

I met one guy outside my hostel in Mt. Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand. We went for a two-hour hike to a frozen lake, talking the whole way. Dressed in a baseball cap, a hoodie and shoes not fit for hiking, he was English and twenty years old. We talked mostly about politics and travel and discovered we shared a mutual liking for Banff, Canada. After the hike he drove me back to the hostel and we ate a quick lunch together before going our separate ways. I never got his contact information, and it was only in the last few minutes that I finally asked his name, though now I wish I hadn’t. I didn’t need to know his name — what mattered was that we both made each other’s journeys a little more complete by sharing some of ourselves and by being perfectly honest with each other.

It’s so easy to talk to someone when you know you’ll never see them again. You’re free to be completely open and divulge anything because fear of judgment vanishes when you know there’s a finality to the meeting. And yet, I still feel a bond with everyone I’ve met. I don’t think I would be able to recognize them on the street, and I barely remember any names, but I don’t hesitate to call them my friends.

It’s so easy to talk to someone when you know you’ll never see them again. You’re free to be completely open and divulge anything because fear of judgment vanishes. And yet, I still feel a bond with everyone I’ve met.

We all seemed to share a lack of desire to impress. The beauty about traveling alone is that it becomes OK to wear the same pants five days in a row. Even clean underwear is an option. Sleeping in your street clothes becomes the norm when it’s freezing in hostel rooms. I even stopped wearing many of the clothes that I brought over with me — I became stuck in a cycle of a few shirts and my three pairs of pants, and stopped even trying to give myself a little variety. When you see different people everyday, no one’s going to know you’re wearing the same clothes from the day before. There’s nobody to even care if you smell a little dingy because, let’s face it, everybody else smells a little off, too.

When I travel, I travel to go places, to see new things. Not to worry about what I’m going to wear the next day or how long I have to take with my hair. I don’t bring a blow dryer. I didn’t even bring any sort of hairspray to New Zealand. Gone is all the phoniness, all superfluous accessories, all jewelry. I don’t bring my best clothes while traveling — I know they would end up getting ruined. I even threw away a jacket and a pair of jeans in Christchurch, my last major stop in New Zealand, because there was no hope of them ever recovering, and I needed more space in my backpack.

Now when I come across my travel clothes hanging in my closet, I’ll find myself standing in front of a mirror for longer than is necessary — my eyes not gazing at my reflection, but at the memories pressed into the shirts and pants. If I think for a while, I can still remember exactly what I was wearing on each day of my trip. I put on my brown, baggy pants — the ones with all the pockets — and I can feel my camera in its place at my right hip and my folded map on my left.

I sometimes tell people I’m in a “missing New Zealand mood,” but I don’t think they understand the extent of my yearning to be there again. When I say I miss the place, I don’t just mean that I miss it as a distant memory of a good time — I miss it as if I were there yesterday, as if I didn’t know what living was until I stepped off the plane and found myself completely alone, out of my normal element and free to do whatever I wanted. I made some stupid decisions, one of which was potentially life-threatening (out in the middle of nowhere I decided I wanted to go on a hike by myself in avalanche territory — a hike that took me up steep, icy and snowy steps that required me to hold on for dear life to the branches overhanging the trail as I went back down), but the freedom was something I’d never experienced before. Sure, I can go off to college and be away from my hometown restrictions, but I still have to go to class and work and conform to the many schedules of the surrounding people. In New Zealand, I had no obligations to anyone but myself.