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Travel has always had an unusual place in my life. Being brought up in Queenstown, New Zealand has left me well versed in the many facets of a journeying that others may well have needed to cover thousands of miles for. Yet here I was with it all set before me from day one. My home was a whirlwind of passing travellers. I was given introductions to cultures, language, food and the people of almost every conceivable destination around the world for a few weeks at a time. One of my earliest memories consists of offering a ball to an exchange student and repeating the word in a naive yet hopeful exchange of language. It was, by all means, a blessing but also a catalyst for questioning my own heritage. Right there in an epicentre of tourism where were the impressions of history? Geographical history we have in spades. Imbued within the glacier-carved valleys that framed my home town. So too in the gold and greenstone laden rocks and rivers. Lake Wakatipu itself has an iconic lightning bolt shape and unique twenty-seven minute tide known as seiche periods. Attributes which Maori legend has placed upon the defeated form of a slumbering giant or Taniwha. But what of the kind of history left not by nature, or legends, but by mankind itself. Of lives lived, decisions made and blood spilt. With New Zealand being a bit of an infant in terms of social world history, we tend to feel like meer visitors in our own right. Our ancestry spans a few short generations before branching off into multitudes of locale and cultures very few of us ever get to see or experience for ourselves. In my young life, any queries into my ancestors' origins were met by my mother’s staple answer of, “We were gypsies. You're the best bits of everything.” and with it came a sense of comfort but also no real sense of self. People had proudly shared their culture and traditions with me, my whole life, but what did I have to offer beyond the word for ball? It was some time before I found that mine was not all together lonely quest as some extended family had found the need to delve into some of the more finer details of family origins. Following the discovery that I have the blood of Scottish, English, German, Italian and indeed Romani flowing through my veins, I was surprised to find that they had not satiated but rather emboldened my thirst for history. I found that the names and dates were not quite tangible enough. I wanted to see these places where thousands of feet left warn edges on stone stairs. The places where social-political changes were made. The places where the people before me made the life-altering decisions to leave there home and try their chances in the young country that could have provided only the vaguest promise for change and opportunity. I came to believe that perhaps it too was my time to make my own proverbial leap into the unknown.