musingsonwomenshealth.com

I don’t know why I come to Taupo. The lake is beautiful, I guess -it’s the largest freshwater lake in New Zealand, for those who measure these things- but I feel uneasy here. Lake Taupo is a caldera: a volcanic crater, in other words. It was apparently first formed from a massive eruption from the Taupo Volcano around 300,000 years ago, but the caldera we see today was from the Oruanui eruption, apparently the world’s most recent super-eruption – it happened only 27,000 years ago.

I mean I’m not afraid of sleeping volcanoes or anything, although I’ve learned to be wary of waking them (like the one on New Zealand’s White Island -Whakaari- in 2019 after water apparently came into contact with hot magma in the volcano’s core; several people were badly burned and 18 people were killed). I would not knowingly travel to a grumbling volcano.

No, the real reason I feel uneasy here is, that despite its stunning beauty -or perhaps because of it -Taupo is so crowded, so touristy. Nothing seems real here -including me. It’s sort of a good-time-town with businesses that pretend they’re like business elsewhere, only aren’t: they are simulacra. Of course, I suppose most of us who visit here are also variations of what we were before we arrived but less inhibited, perhaps; we carry copies of who we were in our pockets along with our phones -just in case we need to prove what we escaped from…

In Taupo, as in most other tourist attractions, we are granted licence to deviate; it’s part of the prevailing Zeitgeist that here we are not simply where we come from; we are not simply replicas of who we once were. We’re not bad or reckless here, by and large, but you can feel mischief in the air: clouds of it drift with the often raucous laughter through the many opened doors of bars and restaurants advertising good times and great music. Nothing wrong with that, I guess… except that it isn’t really you in there; it’s just the mask, the costume, you brought along with you in the car: the one you hesitate to wear at home…

But lest ageism rears up against my Jeremiad, I’d like to be clear: I’m not against escaping from the mundane. After all I, too, am escaping; I’m a tourist from away; I also have a need to straddle worlds, albethey worlds only foreign to me -and those only briefly. I’m not sure why, but so be it. Indeed, I suppose I am also bestriding antipodal versions of the same things -and, I imagine, for much the same reasons: escape from the doldrums of predictability; escape from the known; escape, even, from the knowers.

But I do not seek to escape in crowds where I am just another face, nor to places where, if only briefly, I can forget who I am and make merry with those who are similarly afflicted. To gently paraphrase Oscar Wilde: ‘I do not live in terror of not being misunderstood’.

Perhaps I should, though. To quote Sartre, another thinker, ‘Existence precedes essence’; my agency depends on that. And so does the me who, once again, mistakenly booked a repeat visit for the scenery, and forgot about the crowds…