Lifestyle and Leisure
A teenager's view
Being a teenager is hard enough without your parents deciding to drag you all the way across the world to a tiny town situated underneath an active volcano
Seventeen-year-old Kirsty Needham shares her experiences of moving to Turangi with Maike van der Heide.
Hiding around the corner from their new school, Kirsty Needham and her little brother Josh watched as a large group of teenagers wearing what appeared to be grass skirts danced, stomped their feet and sang. The boys slapped their chests, poked out their tongues and yelled while the girls swayed in the background, swinging white balls on the end of a string in time with the music. Watching the spectacle, Kirsty and Josh were at once hysterically amused and completely terrified. In just a few days they would be walking among these teenagers at Tongariro School.
Kirsty and Josh, aged 15 and eight at the time, had just arrived from the UK with their parents. Touching down at Auckland International Airport, they had immediately been whisked away by taxi to the tiny township of Turangi, located at the southern end of Lake Taupo. Not traditionally a popular destination for newly arrived Brits, Turangi is home to roughly 3,500 people, of who more than half are Maori. It's a scenic but isolated part of the world which is slowly becoming more and more popular with city dwellers due to its serene environment and, more importantly, great trout fishing. For Kirsty, moving to this small town as a teenager, where the overriding Maori culture is so different from her own, was like being plunged "into a different world."
When Kirsty first heard that her family were planning to move to the other side of the world, she was not impressed. "I wasn't up for it at all," she states. "I was very against it, in fact, because I had all my mates and my family sorted. But at my age you know what you want to do, but you can't decide for yourself what you actually do," she says. "I just had to go along with it." Kirsty admittedly didn't help things by not keeping up to date with details of the impending move. "I was always out with my mates so I didn't really get told anything. Then, the month before we moved, it was like, we're really going?" Kirsty says.
Before she knew it, Kirsty found herself at a lodge in Turangi with just her little brother for company. Her older sister Jackie, 20, joined the family with her boyfriend several months later, but her oldest sister Gemma, 21, remains in the UK with her partner and their child. Three days after they arrived in NZ the family bought a car, and four days later they moved into their Turangi home, located a short distance from Tongariro School. Soon after, Kirsty and Josh witnessed the Maori performers, or kapa haka group, outside the school. Although Kirsty has seen similar performances countless times since then, she is still amused by the strange new culture that surrounds her. "Everyone wanted to sit next to me at school assembly because I always laughed," she says. At Tongariro School, Kirsty found lessons a lot more laid back, and uniform rules to be very relaxed. "It doesn't matter where you are in the world, you still get people who mess about, but the teachers were not very strict. The uniforms were shocking because people were walking around with slippers and no shoes. In the UK we weren't even allowed to take our jumpers off without asking."
Kirsty's first, and only, school year in New Zealand was daunting to begin with. "I'd never moved schools before, only to high school and that was with all my friends from primary school, so not only was I at a new school, I was on the other side of the world." On her first day of school Kirsty says plenty of fellow students were keen to meet her thanks to her status as 'The English Girl'. "The first ones were nice because I was new but they actually turned quite nasty when I started hanging out with other people," she recalls. After finishing Year 12, Kirsty left school to find work, something she says she would have done in the UK as well. She worked full-time as a waitress and kitchen hand at Turangi's Four Fish café before switching to a job at the local Shell petrol station. Besides work, there's not much else for a teenager to do in Turangi.
In the UK Kirsty spent her spare time hanging out with mates in town, visiting McDonalds and window shopping. Turangi has a Burger King at the Shell station, a supermarket, a cluster of small stores selling tools, food, stationary and fishing gear, and a mini golf course, an indoor climbing wall and not much else. Having scaled the wall and visited the golf course many times, Kirsty now fills her days off with a casual babysitting job and spends time with her boyfriend, who she met at Tongariro School.
Although Kirsty has made new friends since arriving in NZ, she still looks on with some regret (via Internet sites such as Bebo) as her friends in the UK reach milestones that Kirsty had been looking forward to sharing with them. Such milestones include the last day of school, pictures of which had been posted on Bebo for Kirsty to see. "I thought, I should have been there. Even if I went back now, it wouldn't be the same. Everyone has gone and got jobs now and moved away." But Kirsty could do something her mates couldn't – get her drivers licence at 15. Within three months of arriving in New Zealand Kirsty had her learners licence and she recently achieved her restricted licence. All she needs now is a car, which she is now saving for instead of gathering funds for a visit to the UK.
Because her parents started work almost immediately after arriving in NZ, Kirsty hasn't had a chance to see much of her new country yet. She has been to Rotorua, Taupo and recently went on a weekend trip to Wellington where, to her great joy, she found a British food shop. Almost NZ$50 later she was munching on numerous bags of Walkers Crisps and had packed away gravy granules for her mum. So far, New Zealand's natural beauty has not made too much of an impact on Kirsty, though. In fact, she points out that Turangi's natural beauty has some major downsides. "Of all the places in New Zealand, we had to move in right next to an active volcano!" Mount Ruapehu did, in fact, erupt last year, though the blast only lasted one evening and left the surrounding area largely unscathed. Kirsty didn't hear the eruption but she did feel one of the many earthquakes that went with it. "We kind of heard it coming. We'd never felt anything like it before. It sounded like a stampede of rugby players coming past. We screamed and went under the door frame. It was like a wave."
In all, though, while she misses friends and family, Kirsty says she has no desire to move back to the UK at the moment. "I think I'm probably just going to visit the UK for now. It's just getting worse and worse over there. Crime and stuff is just getting really bad. "I like New Zealand and I suppose I'll probably move somewhere else here eventually – my sister says Tauranga is really nice..."
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