Bonnie suddenly felt as if a fist had closed around her throat. Picking up her phone, she opened the internet search function and typed in a few key words. The stories and photos that came up made her cry out in such horror that Tracey dropped the mug of tea she was holding so it smashed into pieces all over the tiles.

‘What the hell is going on?’ she cried, but Bonnie was already running from the room.

35

Despite enduring a two-day whisky hangover that would have measured a strong ten on anyone’s ‘what the hell were you thinking’-o-meter, I have felt pretty good since my trip out to Oamaru. Queenstown is even busier now than it was in the run-up to Christmas, as backpackers and holidaying New Zealanders alike converge on the South Island’s party capital, ready to see in the New Year.

I haven’t seen Kit or Tui since they dropped me off back at my apartment, but I have been thinking about them – mostly about how much I will miss them when I eventually go home. It has been eighteen days now since I landed here, but I feel as if I have been here for so much longer, and with no return flight yet booked, I feel pleasantly untethered. And it’s not just the winter sunshine warming me up, it is the people that I have met, and the person that I have started to become once again – someone less brittle and more at ease, someone who is able to find the funny in every situation. I didn’t realise how much I had missed myself, how much I needed to feel something other than sad and hopeless. My main concern now is what will happen when I go back to England.

To give myself a task for the day that will hopefully go some way towards distracting my freewheeling mind, I set my alarm early and leave the apartment before the sun is fully up, going directly to the bus station and buying a ticket out to Wanaka – a picturesque area about two hours north of Queenstown.

Like many of the towns in Otago, Wanaka boasts a quaint sprawl of houses, shops and businesses, but its defining feature is the lake. As the bus pulls in, I spy the Southern Alps in the distance, glaring down like proud parents at the landscape below, and admire the tribes of colourful flowers bursting out from window boxes and pots. There are a handful of cafés on the opposite side of the road to the water, but instead of eating in as I usually would, I order a flat white and a muffin to go, keen to keep moving after the long drive.