Experiencing life on the road
Brent and Claire Ruru quit the corporate rat race to lead simpler lives, largely on the road, writes Lorna Thornber.
Cantabrian couple Brent and Claire Ruru had been living in Dubai for two years when they decided they had too little time left on the planet to waste it wearing themselves out in the corporate world.
They had moved to the United Arab Emirate after raising their children and building a successful childcare business in Christchurch, but their new lives amid the shiny skyscrapers of the desert city felt about as authentic as the snow on the ski slopes in Dubai Mall.
Brent, 52, says of his senior management role developing policies and procedures for a global logistics company: ‘‘I was driving to work in a square box, looking at a square box to generate square boxes for a bunch of squares.’’
A year in, Brent was sure this wasn’t the way he wanted the rest of his life to unfold.
Claire, 48, who had initially struggled to find work but had secured a role with the New Zealand Consulate, felt they should stick it out a bit longer.
A year later, in 2011, they’d sold the furniture in their apartment to their landlord, shipped their sentimental possessions back to New Zealand and left for Turkey with just a couple of backpacks.
The plan was to hike from Istanbul to Gallipoli (their travel style is probably best described as free-spirited, shoestring-budgeted, and slow-paced), walk the famous Spanish pilgrimage trail the Camino de Santiago, and trek to see critically endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda, before returning to New Zealand. When a friend joked that they may as well climb Mt Kilimanjaro as well, they decided to take him up on it.
‘‘It was very impromptu and before we had researched any facts about it being at altitude. All we could imagine was standing on the rooftop of Africa,’’ Brent says.
Friends told them they were mad for choosing to walk from Istanbul to Gallipoli – where Brent’s poua (grandfather) may have fought in 1915 – when it was just a five-hour bus ride. But the couple saw it as a good way to transition from life in the fast lane to a more comfortable, contemplative plod.
The intention was to walk up the motorway towards Gallipoli and hang a left when they could to follow the Marmara Sea coastline. They’d only taken about a dozen steps when Brent says they began cursing, asking each other who’s bleeping idea it was and saying ‘‘jeez our packs are heavy’’. I was carrying 19 kilograms on my back and six on the front; Claire had 17kg on her back’’.
Arriving in Silivri – a city on the Marmara just outside metropolitan Istanbul – three days later, the pain in their upper thighs was so acute they believed it was no longer purely muscular, but skeletal.
‘‘I couldn’t walk for the next two days and honestly believed our trip was over before we had barely started,’’ Brent says.
They laid out all their worldly possessions on the bed at the hotel that had found room for them, and threw out everything but the barest essentials. It was, Brent says, the beginning of an ongoing mission to live simpler, less materialistic lives.
They walked through raw countryside dotted with villages where men sat outside drinking coffee and smoking while women worked the fields, staying in cheap digs they found along the way.
‘‘Every now and then wild dogs would approach. The walking stick became our only defence, wobbling it around like a taiaha. And screaming loudly to scare them off. It did.’’
There were a couple of incidents that riled them (they discovered they were staying in a brothel one night, and Claire narrowly avoided a nasty snake bite after venturing into the bush to pee), but they arrived in Gallipoli certain they had made the right life choice.
They did as all Kiwis do in Gallipoli, sleeping at Anzac Cove and attending the dawn service.
Brent’s journal entry that day was a poetic tribute to his poua:
Although we never met, I know who you are, My grandfather who went to Gallipoli, a land of distance far.
We came to see for ourselves, where you spent some fighting time,
To expose ourselves to history, and imagined how you shined.
The walk was hard and challenging but we made it all the same,
It was the least one could do, to honour the family name.
Anzacs are spoke of highly, so we commemorate and remember you.
From all the Ruru wha¯nau, as they stand proud too.
They had expected the Camino to be more of a physical adventure than a sentimental or spiritual one, but Brent says the centuries-old trail seems to exude a ‘‘spiritual ambience’’.
Walking from the village of Roncesvalles to Pamplona, of the ‘‘running of the bulls’’ fame, they were surprised by how little their fellow ‘‘pilgrims’’ knew of New Zealand – and how quick they were to claim their countries did things better.
‘‘Territorial banter is quick to assert world dominance status,’’ Brent says. ‘‘People above the equator think we live upside down below and a number think we are a state of Australia and have no cars and ride horses. But it became more bull…. banter after a day or two, taking the p… out of each other with smiles and laughter..’’
In this way, he says, they became firm friends. In Pamplona, the couple switched their hiking