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Travel Literature
There's a noticeable dearth of dedicated travel literature on NZ, but the country's ability to inspire its explorers is obvious in most published accounts of local wanderings.
Greenstone Trails (1994) by Barry Brailsford retraces with descriptive zeal the arduous journeys undertaken by Maoris into the wild tangle of the Southern Alps in search of the highly prized pounamu (greenstone).
Though it recounts a fictitious journey to a nonsensical land in order to satirise Victorian-era hypocrisy, Samuel Butler's Erewhon (written in 1872 and an anagram of 'nowhere') nonetheless has some appropriately rough-cut descriptions of Canterbury's mountainous west, where Butler once ran a sheep farm.
Chris Duff's Southern Exposure (2003) details a 2700km sea-kayak circumnavigation of the South Island. It's written in a style reserved for self-obsessed sportspeople who regard their own exploits as spiritual revelations, but has some interesting descriptions of NZ's coastline.
If you like the way Paul Theroux cheers himself up by denigrating everything around him, leaf through the ultra-brief NZ entry in The Happy Isles of Oceania (1993), where Theroux flees to the Routeburn Track after Christchurch apparently makes him contemplate suicide.
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