Peter Janssen has criss-crossed New Zealand, travelling tens of thousands of kilometres for more than 15 years. Photo / supplied
Travel writer Peter Janssen is renowned for his ability to find and highlight the best of small-town New Zealand.
He’s recently released his revised and updated versions of his two popular Worth a Detour books – one each about the offbeat attractions of the South and North Islands.
“They’re a real potpourri of places that I think people tend to overlook,” he told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
“You won’t get the Sky Tower in here, you won’t get Queenstown – you’ll get everything else but those. It doesn’t take too much to just stick your nose down a road, check out something, don’t rush quite so much and just take your time to stop at a few places.
“Sometimes you go to places that are deadly dull, but then you find incredible gems.”
The revised versions of Worth A Detour add to his collection of 20+ books, which combined have sold more than 100,000 copies. That’s not a bad record for a guy who himself grew up in the tiny mining township of Pukemiro, west of Huntly, and was raised by two working-class immigrants.
Janssen told Cowan his own humble background has given him an appreciation for the less flashy parts of Aotearoa.
“I have to say, when I go to places like the Kaitangata coal mining town or Wairoa, which has had a bit of rough time, I have a soft spot for those places, I really do,” he said.
“My parents were Dutch and my mother and three brothers came, and it was a really big thing for them. They came from poor families, basically, and New Zealand was very good to them.
“In a place like Pukemiro, my mum was always incredibly loyal to certain people. They said they were really good to us when we came here, and that Huntly was good to my parents and they were very loyal to it. They loved it. They built their own house and that’s where they stayed.
“So I think you learn to make the best of things and you learn to enjoy things that don’t necessarily need to be big and flash – because if you haven’t got a lot of money, big and flash is not going to cut it.”
Janssen told Real Life that despite his parents’ lack of wealth, they made the best of what they had – and managed to sow the seeds of his eventual career in travel writing by regularly going on aimless drives on a weekend.
“My father and mum were big fans of the Sunday afternoon drive. I think it’s a real Kiwi institution that everyone should do,” he said.
“Whoever was free just got in the car and off we went. There was a destination, sort of, but it didn’t matter if you got sidetracked and you went somewhere else.”
“You might say, ‘oh, someone’s building a new house out there’ or ‘we haven’t been down there’ – and off you go. You get sidetracked and you chat about the people who live in a particular house along the way – ‘there’s that old building over there, and it used to be a school and now it’s this.’
“You just take an interest in everything around you without necessarily having to be fixed on getting somewhere. And there was always an ice cream!”
Now well into his 70s, Janssen reckons he’s seen most of the country. He still loves getting on the road, but is more selective about his travels nowadays.
“I think you just get tired of it,” Janssen told Cowan.
“When I’m doing the book stuff, I travel on my own because if I take someone with me, they think it’s a holiday, whereas I have to be a little focused, I have to cover a reasonable amount of ground – there are a lot of roads in New Zealand!”
Janssen has a few favourite weird and wonderful spots from his book – the absurd toy wall in Eltham and the ‘fence of death’ made of pig skins and skulls in the Macraes – but says some of the best discoveries have come through chatting to strangers on his travels.
“I think we just need to just slow down a little bit and make a little time to have a conversation with people, without overdoing it, of course,” he reflects.
“Just engaging with people, it’s amazing what enhances your life through conversations with people on a random basis.”
Worth A Detour is on sale now.
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