Now, I thought, now it will get interesting. He doesn't manage to settle on the Gorge River until almost halfway through the book. Seems like that would be an interesting thing to expound on.) Every once in a while he would start on an anti-materialistic rant that at least sounded somewhat entertaining, but he would choke it off before it really started going. 'First I went to Perth and then I walked to Katherine and then a truck driver picked me up and we went to Darwin.' (And why was he barefoot? I have no idea. He hitchhikes barefoot across Australia, but all he can come up with to say about the trip is a list of towns. But he's not too good at stringing words together. The author is one of those chest-beating men who claims to have excelled at everything he has ever tried: school, carpentry, outdoor living, etc. Unfortunately, it was far from interesting. A couple raising their kids in remote New Zealand? It sounds like Swiss Family Robinson. In places it is a bit long winded and a better map would have been useful, but still worth a read.

As long as one enjoys all the stuff he has to do for himself (and he seems to) then its fine.īut the rest of us know why we don't live the same way. Well, maybe he does, there is a lot of overhead living there. He keeps his needs very simple so he has more time than the rest of us. That part of the world is beautiful, if challenging (I've hiked near there, but not right there, and I wore boots). The lifestyle seems to have become less rugged when the wife and, especially, the kids arrived, but it is still very spartan. He's a bit New Age but, if that helps him keep going it doesn't bother me. And somehow, after living like this for 10 years, he convinced a woman to come and raise a family with him. He's also smart, he dropped out of med school to do this.

When he does this he doesn't bother with a tent, just a sleeping bag cover. The climate is very, very wet (rainfall is measured in meters down there rather than cm or inches the rest of us use). Fishing boats pass by but getting out to them means braving the serious surf in a small dinghy or just swimming. To get there you mostly have to walk at least 20km, though there are small planes and helicopters from time to time. It is the true (ie autobiography) account of a man who kind of dropped out of society and went to live on the lower west coast of NZ.

A life on Gorge River by Robert Long