Sally Jackson

Each week Elisabeth Easther gets the story of people in the Kiwi tourism industry. This week, Napier City Council’s manager of visitor experiences

I’mfrom a little town called Llanycrwys in South West Wales where I grew up one of four siblings in a single-parent home. We didn’t have much money and we spent many of our holidays in charge of our own entertainment. During the day we could go off and explore various farmlands for hours without worrying about safety. It was fantastic, living rurally. When I was 10 we moved to a bigger town, and by the age of 16 I’d moved out of home, carrying on my education while working part-time jobs. Starting out in hospitality, I worked in a fantastic hotel called the Cawdor Arms Hotel in Llandeilo and then went off to university. However, after a year I decided I needed to travel so I took a work experience opportunity with P&O. I was on the ferry that went between England and France and, while it was meant to be just six weeks, I was there for six months and that’s how I started my travel fund. My first big trip was to Israel when I was 18, working on a kibbutz as a volunteer. To be fair, my mother was fairly freaked out when I announced I was off to a war-torn country, but she’d brought us up to be very independent children so she knew I would manage. The kibbutz was close to Haifa on the Mediterranean coastline and I fell in love with the people, history and culture. The landscape, the buildings, the ground, that harsh, red clay and blue sky, the contrast was so stark and very beautiful. Then there was the proximity to Egypt, Jordan and Cyprus. I hitch-hiked with a girlfriend from the kibbutz in Israel to Jordan and we went to the lost city of Petra. That was one of the most fantastic experiences I have ever had, walking through that corridor and it’s all dark and then the lost city appears in front of you. Going back to Wales to university I was working in an Irish bar in Cardiff where I started dating a New Zealander. When he returned home, he invited me to join him so I packed my bags, sold everything and got a oneyear visa, but things didn’t work out between us and we went our separate ways. Everyone back at home advised me to pack up and come back to Wales, but I was determined to make that one year work and pretty soon I fell in love with the country, got a job and started enjoying my new life. A little later, I met and fell in love with another Kiwi and we married in 2004 and now, with a couple of children, New Zealand is my home. Over the years I worked in various tourism roles before starting with the Art Deco Trust in 2010. For six and a half years I was their general manager, focused on the preservation and promotion of the Art Deco city of Napier. Tourism here thrives on the heritage story that started with New Zealand’s worse natural disaster — an earthquake and devastating fire in 1931. Napier completely rebuilt itself in just 22 months and today you have street after street of beautifully