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
boots for bikes, arriving in Santiago de Compostela – where biblical apostle St James is said to be buried – after 16 days. Still having ‘‘ages’’ before they needed to be in East Africa, they decided to head back the way they had come on foot so they could run with the famous bulls.
By this stage, their backpacks weighed 7kg each (although Brent carried an extra 3kg on his front), and they were feeling lighter in more ways than one.
‘‘This became foundational to us embracing the minimalism culture, and led us to map out living in a tent on our eventual return home,’’ he says.
One day, they came across a young American woman who was dreading returning to her routine existence as a hairdresser. As they walked, Brent inspired and persuaded her to quit her job and start up her own business in Spain.
‘‘She went to the nearest town, purchased some scissors and for five months walked up and down the Camino trimming pilgrims’ hair. All because we had that one conversation... We just never know how [a conversation while travelling] might turn out.’’
It is conversations with strangers that give Brent the greatest pleasure while travelling.
Chatting to the porters – clad in jeans and business shoes – while climbing Kilimanjaro, the couple discovered they were fascinated by the All Blacks and held ex-player Jonah Lomu in particularly high regard.
‘‘When they found out I could do the haka, I was asked to perform it every day after dinner,’’ Brent says.
His final performance took place at the summit and, once they were back down, he says the porters – whom he’d been teaching the moves – ‘‘performed a native song and haka in response’’.
‘‘Those are the experiences that bring a tear to the eye when you reflect on them, long after the goodbyes are said.’’
Their eventual return to New Zealand brought mixed emotions, including renewed gratitude for their homeland.
‘‘We have a paradise in the left-hand corner of the Pacific’’, he says, which allows you to lose yourself in its ‘‘playground topography’’.
However, he says they experienced a kind of ‘‘reverse culture shock’’, feeling that they had changed fundamentally on their travels, whereas some they knew had simply aged. Things they had once deemed important, and others still did, no longer seemed to matter.
Determined to continue living more simply, they secured a permanent site at Christchurch’s Spencer Beach Holiday Park, pitched a familysized tent and furnished it with a leather couch and TV set. Worried the water that pooled inside the tent during heavy rain would wreak havoc with the electrics, they soon upgraded to a campervan, which became their home for the next four years.
‘‘Our backyard had a beach, our lawns got mown for us; it felt like we were on holiday and we made friends with other permanents and outsiders who camped at the park,’’ Brent says.
While some told them they were crazy for giving up their life in Dubai to live in a caravan, Brent says ‘‘the number of people who have communicated that we have got life sorted has grown markedly. Crazily in fact.’’
These days, the couple live in an 80-squaremetre ‘‘over-60s unit’’ that’s so cost-effective they’re able to travel overseas regularly. Brent has retrained as a celebrant and does freelance illustration work, while Claire has become a contract bookkeeper – their jobs enable them to pack up and leave whenever they like.
Since moving back to New Zealand in 2012, they have volunteered in an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo, trekked up to Mt Everest Base Camp, ridden cross Canada on a tandem bicycle, staged a mutiny on a Cambodian cycle tour when the organisers asked the ‘‘impossible’’, watched the sunset over the Temples of Bagan in Myanmar, released baby turtles into the surf in Sri Lanka, and followed the Te Araroa Trail around the North Island.
‘‘We are just a couple of baby boomers who have worked out what matters most and are chasing it,’’ Brent says. ‘‘While the bodies still can and we still have our marbles.’’
His advice to others considering a similar lifestyle: ‘‘Commit to going for it, cost it out travelling budget-style, save hard, go do it and repeat. The rest will fall into place.’’
That and ‘‘bugger the Joneses’’.