“Pastoral Eden”

Writer Luba Vangelova takes a road trip up the “stunningly beautiful” east coast of the North Island – a journey described as “temporal as well as geographical.” Vangelova muses over the locals who “[lament] the lost days of untamed wilderness, blessed isolation and clean living”: “As I sat in perfect stillness, gazing out at the pounding surf in the distance, in a village of about 15 permanent residents, I thought of how everything is relative, how one person’s paradise lost is another’s paradise found.”