What gratitude! Here I am, trying to save this poor seal's life when suddenly a poop-eruption of Vesuvian proportions is being sprayed at me from its insides.

My shirt – full of seal poop. My shorts – full of seal poop. My legs – full of seal poop. Not even my feet were spared. I thought those smelled bad already! It was only the second day on my three-thousand-kilometre-long walk across New Zealand, yet I had already joined the exclusive club of people who had been spray painted brown by dying seals.

This is the tale of how one Swede ended up seventeen-thousand kilometres away from home with seal-shit all over him, and of the great journey across New Zealand that followed.

Other books in Across New Zealand:

• Part Two - Across Rainforests of Mud
• Part Three - Across a Green Country

Te Araroa stretches from north to south across the most spectacular country on earth. The New Zealand long distance tramping trail, which with its 3000 kilometres truly is a "bloody long way", runs along endless beaches, through ancient rainforests, up mighty mountains and along rapid rivers that many will only will ever see in Peter Jackson's the Lord of the Rings-trilogy.

Across New Zealand takes one young man from Sweden to the other side of the planet to traverse an entire country, unaware of how how it will change his life, how it will have him meet the God-father of his first-born child, and of how it will make him perhaps the first person in the world to be spray painted brown by a dying seal..