Kiwi brothers Oscar Steiner, 5, and Harry Steiner, 7, pictured running in the desert at Wadi Rum, Jordan. The Steiner family had to abandon their travels due to Covid-19. Photo / Sarah Steiner
We go places.
Those who came before did it, guided by the stars or the compass, and we do it too - albeit safer, and more comfortably.
But a deadly virus, which has left a trail of sadness and disruption around the world, has put an end to that. It's going to be a long time before we can roam the globe as freely as we, a nation of travellers, would like.
We're luckier than so many, but that doesn't mean our dreams of seeing people and places across oceans and continents don't count.
Cherie Howie speaks to Kiwis who are missing the world.
Getting out of India and home to New Zealand, with two little boys in tow and a border-closing pandemic at their heels, was a close thing for Sarah and Gavin Steiner.
The former Mangere Bridge couple and their sons, Harry, 7, and Oscar, 5, landed in Auckland from New Delhi, via Hong Kong, on March 20 - hours after our borders were closed to non-residents, and just three days before the level 4 lockdown was announced.
Safe in New Zealand through the lockdown, and the Covid-19 elimination which has followed, they heard one comment over and over.
"Everyone says 'you must be so pleased to be home'," Sarah Steiner says of their return to New Zealand.
Grateful, yes. Making the best of it, yes. Pleased? That's less straightforward.
"This was not the plan."
The family of four have, after selling their Māngere Bridge home and before Covid-19, travelled to 25 countries over 14 months.
They've slept under the stars in the desert, collected cow poo to fuel their yurt's (portable tent) fire in Kyrgyzstan, hurled coloured powder in the Hindu festival of Holi, seen the pyramids of Giza by camel and eaten and travelled as the locals do almost all the way.
This year they ticked off Fiji, Australia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and India - but onward flights to the Middle East and the United Kingdom were never taken after Covid-19 turned their plans - and those of the world - upside down.
But they've decided those plans are just on hold - the family's love of travel will see them back exploring the world again, Steiner says.
"We both love to travel," she says of her and her husband, who travelled together before becoming parents.
"And the kids, they love it."
They enjoy Immersing themselves in different cultures, and discovering each other's limits while facing the challenges of being countries so different to their own.
"Every day is pretty much an adventure. And 99.9 per cent of people we meet around the world are amazing."
After Kiwis were again allowed to travel around the country the family, now temporarily based in south Waikato, packed up a borrowed campervan and took their adventurous spirit on a month-long South Island road trip.
It wasn't the destination they'd planned in 2020, and it was amazing.
They saw Aoraki/Mt Cook and Milford Sound for the first time, and tackled a swag of stunning walks - including scaling 1300m high Roys Peak - which rewards hardy climbers with spectacular views over Lake Wānaka and Mt Aspiring.
It felt good to support domestic tourism, and she hopes some of their almost 2500 @awaywiththesteiners Instagram followers are inspired to choose New Zealand when international travel eventually returns, Steiner says.
As well as continuing the new experiences at home, the couple are also looking at using their time in New Zealand to do study and may also enrol their sons in school, a new experience for both.
They've found their silver lining to the dark clouds of Covid-19 - adventures at home, and preparing for when a safe world beckons.
"Adventure inspires adventure. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, you long for the learning and the challenges that come from it.
"Finding the silver lining, that's what it's all about. We're just making the best of it."
It's overseas, and it's an experience, but it's not the overseas experience Kiriana Welsh-Phillips had in mind when she swapped Upper Hutt for the United Kingdom 18 months ago.
Year one was for working, and year two for travelling, the 22-year-old says.
She just wasn't counting on a pandemic.
"I'm hoping the UK might give me three months of my [work] visa back. I've had to spend three months inside, it's not really what I planned for."
Welsh-Phillips, who is Ngāpuhi, lives in Darlington - 60 kilometres south of Newcastle - and is working as an office administrator.
She's grateful to not have been furloughed, as around one in four UK workers have been, because she earns just above the living wage and the furlough scheme covers only 80 per cent of wages.
But her plans to travel this year to Greece, Spain, France, Switzerland and Italy have been thwarted by the deadly virus, which has ravaged several countries in Europe - particularly the UK, Italy and Spain.
Even with borders tentatively re-opening, Welsh-Phillips is reluctant to cross them.
Her partner's parents both work for the National Health Service and have seen the worst Covid-19 can do - the virus has killed half a million worldwide, including almost 45,000 in the UK. Her partner's stepfather also caught the virus but has recovered.
"I just didn't feel comfortable travelling, even though some European countries are opening borders."
Instead, she's working from home and not going out much.
Life has become very small.
"I'm going just to the supermarket. And they're empty, people are not going unless they need to."
But her confidence is coming back - she wants to make the most of her remaining five months in the UK and is planning weekends away to neighbouring cities, and longer breaks further south.
"I'm just planning to see more of the UK, it's better than nothing at all."
In December she'll make the long journey home, where she previously lived with her grandparents, and make a new plan to one day return and see all the places she dreamed of visiting.
"Everyone's OE's are like, 'I went here and I went here', and I'm just going to be, 'I stayed in my house'."
It's a long journey from New Zealand to Europe. There's hours of airports, hours of flying and hours of time difference.
But it was all going to be worth it for recently-retired Christchurch couple John and Helena Duff.
This most gruelling of air journeys was going to take them away from a cold Kiwi winter and, most poignantly, culminate in the chance to hold their grandchild for the first time.
The first child of the couple's United Kingdom-based son Sebastian Duff, and his French wife Marion Autour-Duff, isn't here yet. The baby is expected in October.
But the baby's expectant grandparents know they're unlikely to be meeting their first grandchild as soon as they expected.
"Like a number of New Zealanders, we were planning to spend our winter months in Europe, with the added advantage to support and be with our son and daughter in-law, for the birth of our first grandchild," John Duff says of the couple's now Covid-19 cancelled plans.
"Helena's parents lived overseas when our children were born and growing up, so we know how important family and being together is."
But they also accept the situation, with the pandemic having "changed everything for everyone now", he says.
"And that's completely understandable. If it cannot happen this year, then at least we can look forward to it happening - hopefully - next year."
As well as his parents, his brother also planned to cross the globe to celebrate the baby's birth, Sebastian Duff says.
He and Autour-Duff are grateful they and their families are healthy and - by working from home - neither's jobs have been significantly impacted by the pandemic.
While they'd love to have family close to experience and help with such an important time in their lives, it's the unknowns that are toughest to take.
"One of the hardest parts is all the unknowns. We don't know when we will see our families again, especially my family, and when we will be able to safely go to New Zealand again."
The 30-year-old also lost his best friend since childhood suddenly, just as the spread of Covid-19 was starting to cause concern in New Zealand.
It was a hard choice, but he decided not to come home.
"As difficult as it was, it turned out to be the right choice as quarantine would have been introduced while I was en route.
"Staying here hasn't been the easy choice, but I'm convinced that, for me, it is still the right choice."
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Other challenges include pregnancy care during a pandemic - he stood on the street with other fathers and birth partners as his wife and other expectant mums went to hospital scans alone, and the couple also faced much shorter, and sometimes non-existent, appointments with their midwife.
But they also know there will be a happy end to their 2020 - new life and, he jokes, a very filling Christmas.
"We were really looking forward to having my parents around for the birth and early months of the baby's life, even sharing the first Christmas together, but it's looking like it'll be a Christmas over Skype instead.
"On the bright side, I guess that means we get to eat their portion of Christmas dinner."
Every morning and night, Niusulu Hellesoe talks to her elderly mum through the video chat app Facetime.
Her mum, Saleima Charlton, lives in Lelepa, a village on the Samoan island of Savai'i.
Hellesoe lives more than 2780 kilometres away, in the Auckland suburb of Hillsborough.
"She still remembers me," Hellesoe says of her 82-year-old mum, who has advanced dementia.
"She says, 'When are you coming to see me?'."
Hellesoe doesn't know. The world doesn't know.
Mother and daughter are among millions across the globe kept apart by Covid-19's devastating impact on international travel, as borders close and airlines cut flights to stop the spread of a deadly virus.
So, Hellesoe says the same thing over and over to her mother.
"I always say, 'Soon mum, I am coming very soon'."
It wasn't meant to be this way.
Hellesoe, a social worker, had booked three months off work to spend time with her mum, while also giving her own daughter - Charlton's main caregiver - a break.
She usually visits her mother twice a year, and was especially anxious to do so this year, because of her mother's health.
"It's become almost a desperate thing for me, for her not to forget me."
Hellesoe planned to fly to Samoa in the first week of April, even shipping a "big box" of belongings ahead.
But as the global Covid-19 pandemic worsened in March, with borders closing and lockdowns taking effect - including in both New Zealand and Samoa - she knew she wouldn't be going.
"My big box arrived without me."
She can laugh about that.
It's harder to laugh about the other stuff.
"[When I couldn't go], that's was devastating. And it's her birthday in September, and it will be the first time I can't go for her birthday.
"It's just part of the times. There's nothing we can do about it … we don't have control over it."
Many others are also doing it tough, including a colleague unable to travel to Samoa for a lagi, the gift-giving ceremony for the village after a death.
"It was devastating for them."
But Hellesoe, one of Charlton's six children, is also grateful the Samoan Government shut the country's borders.
The spread of Covid-19 in the country, which went through a deadly measles epidemic last year, would have been catastrophic, she says.
So while she can't, for now, see her mum, she's also focussing on the positive.
"I still worry every day about mum. But she's safe over there. That's the main thing."
You can't hug over Zoom.
Neither Skype.
Even WhatsApp, owned by the modern communications granddaddy of them all - Facebook - has its limits.
Paula Simpson knows, because she uses them all.
The ex-pat Kiwi and expectant mum lives in the southern Indian city of Bangalore and relies on video technology to run her content writing business.
Now, with India in the grip of Covid-19 spread - more than 740,000 have been infected and 20,000 have died - she's having to rely solely on video technology to bridge the gap with faraway Kiwi friends and family.
It's a poor substitute for her usual annual visits, Simpson, 38, says.
"I'm an extrovert, and I just miss everybody. I just need to hug them. It's just not the same, but at the same time it's better than nothing."
While Kiwis slogged through almost 50 days of level 3 and 4 lockdowns, she's been stuck at home - leaving only for groceries and medical appointments - for more than 120 days, Simpson says.
And life is likely to become even more restricted.
"My sister-in-law, there's been two cases in her apartment building, so they've got armed police at the door and can't leave. It's just a matter of time before it gets to my apartment building."
So she certainly won't be visiting New Zealand, as planned, before her baby arrives in late December.
Having made her home in India for the last four years she decided, as borders closed and flights were grounded around the world, to stay put. But that's not to say it's an easy choice.
An uncle's illness returned, and he died this week. And her sister had twins four months ago, but Simpson has no idea when she'll meet them.
There's also the unknown - the worry of something happening to another person she loves, and not being able to get home. She also lost a Kiwi friend to suicide during New Zealand's lockdown.
"In the back of my mind, with every conversation with my husband, is 'What if something happens'?"
It's the ex-pat's lot, having connections which ripple beyond borders.
"You have two homes, you have two places you need to be at the same time. And now you can't [easily travel] between them.
"Covid has taken that away."
Lucy Clarke should be in Europe now, working casual jobs, going on adventures and soaking up the warm summer days.
Instead, she's spending her days in an Auckland law office, and wrapping herself in layers of warm clothes as the country creeps through the wet and cold winter months.
"I was going to do two years overseas," Clarke, 23, says of her original plans after graduating from the University of Auckland with a double degree in law and arts.
Fortunately she hadn't yet booked her flights when borders began closing as Covid-19 spread out of control around the world.
There was disappointment, but also surprise - forced to stay in New Zealand, she got a job as a law clerk for Keegan Alexander Barristers and Solicitors.
And it has been great.
"It has been an interesting year. Everything's kind of changed. I got my job and I'm just loving working here.
"It's made me settle, and it's made me focus on what I can do … I'm trying to see the bright side."
For now she's working on her "profs", the mandatory professional legal studies training programme to develop the practical skills needed as a new lawyer, and expects to be admitted to the bar later this year.
The OE dream has gone on it's own holiday, and she'll join it in time.
The bright side she's focusing on will become even more apparent in the years to come.
Instead of relying on low-paying backpacker jobs to fund her travels, Clarke will be able to work overseas in her profession, giving her more options to see all the places she most wants to explore.
"I'll probably do three years here and get as much experience as I can. [And when I do go] I'll have so much more experience as a lawyer."
The events of earlier this year - their pace and the seriousness - still leaves the Aucklander a little stunned at times.
"It's just so weird how it all happened. Obviously it was serious, but we didn't realise how serious it was initially."
She's grateful to be in the relative safety of New Zealand, where Covid-19 has been eliminated bar new cases caught - and quarantined - at the border.
But that doesn't mean the young woman who planned to enjoy a Northern Hemisphere summer, rather than a Southern Hemisphere winter, doesn't still feel the same wanderlust shared by so many Kiwis, and the realisation that roaming the globe freely is - for now - no longer possible.
She'd always used previous travels, to Australia or the United States, as something to look forward to around her studies and work.
Not being able to leave New Zealand feels a bit "claustrophobic" and "kind of sad", Clarke says.
"There's so many places I haven't seen, and when you can't, you almost want to do it more."
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