From Cape Cod Shores to the Coromandel Sands Series – Part 1
I made the decision to move to New Zealand sometime in the late 80s, which would have put me in the 9 to 11-year-old range. I wasn’t looking to escape home because I was unhappy; I had a truly wonderful childhood growing up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was simply because I yearned for adventure, and despite having never even left America, I had fallen in love with New Zealand.
It was in the pages of some long since forgotten magazine that I first read about the alluring, far-away island country in the middle of nowhere with fantastical-looking birds, people with beautiful tattoos on their faces, and mountain ranges that seemed to go on forever. I was thoroughly enchanted. I decided that I didn’t just want to go there someday; I wanted to live there.
If the 9 to 11 year old range seems a bit young to want to move to another country, it might make sense when I explain that I was a child who was practically obsessed with travel and adventure. My favorite books were Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Julie of the Wolves, The Black Stallion, Hatchet, and Island of the Blue Dolphins. (In addition to desperately wanting to travel, I was absolutely convinced I could survive being stranded in the middle of nowhere with a wild animal companion).
I pored through my parents’ stacks of National Geographics, dreaming about visiting the faraway places I read about. I wanted to hear languages and accents different from my own, to meet people who looked different from me.
I thumbed through the New Yorker every week, clipping out advertisements for overseas adventures and sending away for brochures filled with pictures of beautiful places. (Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, my parents received a confusingly large number of brochures in the mail for things like guided hikes through the Costa Rican rainforests, or months-long excursions to Antarctica). I had an ever-expanding list of countries I wanted to visit: Peru, Costa Rica, France, Thailand, Tibet, Australia. But New Zealand was always at the top.
Four decades later, I’m at the tail end of fulfilling my childhood dream. I’ve now been living here for two years and was recently granted my Partner of a New Zealander Resident Visa. In 2027, I can apply for Permanent Residency and the bureaucratic portion of my immigration journey will finally, officially be done.
The immigration process is overwhelming, but I also found it interesting. Not wanting my endless hours of research to go to waste, I started a blog two years ago (www.newzealandchronicles.com) to document, for anyone who’s interested, what it’s really like to up and move to a foreign country. I knew when I embarked upon this journey that it would sometimes be difficult, but I could not have predicted how much determination it was going to take.
I had ample time to research and prepare for the move; I had no house, no children, no pets, no long-time career tying me down; I was able to save money by moving back in with my parents for a few years. And I’m highly organised. Yet even with all that in my favour, the immigration process has still been a formidable challenge, one which I’ve thoroughly documented along the way.
The subtitle of my blog is ‘The Adventures of a Washashore in Kiwiland’. A ‘washashore’ is anyone who’s moved to Cape Cod from somewhere else (as opposed to ‘Cape Codders’, those of us who were born and raised there).
Even after several years of living in NZ, I still feel like a washashore – and suspect I always will. But that’s not a bad thing. After all, most of my favourite childhood adventure stories started with someone alighting upon unknown shores.
In this six-part series, a distilled version of what I’ve shared on my blog, I’ll talk about how I went from a starry-eyed kid with a stack of National Geographics to a legal New Zealand resident. Come along with me for this wild ride of love, paperwork, money and determination.
Words by Hilary Emerson Lay
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