FROM THE EDITOR

Don’t you hate it when all the days roll into one...Monday, Wednesday, Friday – when they’re all the same. It’s mundane. It’s monotonous. It’s Groundhog Day without the laughs – without Bill Murray! Or a bad pop song that plays over and over and over in your head, its humdrum jingle taunting you. Goading you. This is why we need holidays – to get off the treadmill. It’s why we’re told to take a walk at lunchtime, to get some fresh air and revive our tired minds. Why we need to switch off our devices and clear our minds of incessant noise.

That said, it takes courage and a considerable dose of steely determination to step away from that noise for an extended time – to exist without electricity, without easy comforts, without social media, without dessert, without TV. It’s a romantic ideal in modern times, to escape these echo chambers that we bounce around in every day, and go back in time to a rural space where there is... silence.

It’s almost a scary concept, isn’t it?

Which is why it took the couple featured on our cover a few years to finally pull the plug, to leave their jobs and their routine and their home and their regular income behind for days that were simpler and closer to nature. They did it for 15 months, packing up their entire lives, only taking the bare essentials, and their dog, to the remote peninsula of Te Maika. They wanted a return to silence and they got it, but they got much more than that. It was off the grid, it was therapeutic, it was beautiful, it was ugly, it was confronting. It was cold. Read more on page 6.