Ozma is a traveller, not a tourist. Kristine Joan Taylor, known to her loyal subjects as Ozma, the Queen of the Realm, or Phenom Femme, inhabits a place when she travels to it. She travels with passion.

“A traveller is somebody who wants to absorb the country as it is and participate in the living in the country,” she told me after ensuring that I knew that traveller has a special meaning and is spelled in the British manner with two l’s.

“A tourist wants to stand on the side and observe. A tourist is somebody who books a vacation in Mexico and stays at an American resort with tall fences all around it. A traveller would take an old retired school bus with the chickens and the locals into a town.”

After participating in the life in New Zealand for a few weeks, she pronounces it worthy of inclusion in her Realm:

“New Zealand is really fulfilling my anticipation-that it is the country I would design if I could design a country.”

She considered this a moment. We sat together in a cafe in the sunny, Art Deco downtown of Napier. She sipped her latte and scowled.

“Except I wouldn’t have the forests in rows,” she added, referring to the planted pine plantations we’d seen on the east side of the South Island. “The forests along the west coast run amok. The ones on the east coast are orderly. That’s a pine orchard, raised as a crop. My forests would all be wild.”

We sat just over midway through the month of March, midway through our trip. The first half of the month had been dedicated to the South Island and re-acquainting ourselves after my time in Antarctica. We’d crossed the Cook Straight a few days before on a ferry, and we now were exploring the North Island, where we hoped to follow the trail of her grandfather, a Mormon missionary to New Zealand a century ago.

As we sat astride this natural break in our month-long sojourn, I asked her to list the notable moments of her time here so far.

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