Private reflections...

15 hours into the 17 hour flight from Christchurch to Dubai, and it's suddently hit home that this 'trip of a lifetime' which Duncan and I first started talking about in the summer of 2016, is actually done and dusted. I know that I have another 3 months off work and 6+ weeks in Peru and Ecuador after New Year, but Ginny & Duncan's Big Adventure has come to a close. Wow, that went fast. It's been amazing, difficult, stunning, loving, emotional, joyous, tense, spectacular, exciting, exhausting and pretty much everything inbetween. And while we have both learnt about each other and about ourselves, the most important lesson for me has been being reminded how lucky we are to live on such an incredibily beautiful planet, and that we have to do way better in how we share it with all the other amazing creatures that inhabit and enrich it. We have seen first hand, over and over, that there are plenty of people who are passionate about protecting them. On the flip side, we've seen how many aren't; collectively our species has, and still does, make their survival more and more difficult.  From cutting down rainforest for palm oil plantations in Borneo, to the importation of stoats and rats to New Zealand, or the vast quantities of plastic found in dead albatrosses stomachs, we all know about the problems.  And heaven knows if we can reverse what we've done.  I will do my bit, and continue to hope that we can and do reverse at least some of the damage.  And regardless of what eventually happens, the world will continue to turn, and life will go on. We are just blips. But really really lucky ones.

When we were staying at the last hut on the Kepler Track, the ranger there, Phil, quoted Chief Seattle to us as a reminder of how we must care for our planet.  I don't want to forget it, so here it is:

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.
How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and the man, all belong to the same family.
Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realise that we can not eat money.