There are two yous: Pre-Wanderlust You likes yoga, wants to get into meditating more and reads a bit about mindfulness. Post-Wanderlust You has cried openly in front of strangers, forgotten what it feels like to wear normal clothes and hugged 10 people in the last 24 hours.
That’s right, somewhere around your ninth hour of yoga, not only are your hips more flexible, but so is your mindset.
This is Wanderlust, and it’s the closest most of us adults get to running away to join the circus.
There’s a little bit of irony to that statement: usually I drive a very small blue car that my friends have nicknamed ‘the clown car’, because it’s comical seeing me try to fold my almost 6-foot frame into it. So I’ve borrowed a very fancy car for the road trip down to Taupo.
Happiness is a loan car.
If you’re a car person, you may like to know that it’s a Mitsubishi Outlander 4WD and it seats seven people. If you’re not a car person, like myself, the key points are that it has a sunroof, you don’t need a button to turn it on (witchcraft!) and the speaker is so good you can blast Celine Dion (classic road trip playlist) and feel like you’re at a concert. So by the time my yoga buddy Lucy and I rock up to Wairakei, we’ve sung ourselves hoarse and are in need of some silent meditation, stat.
I spent time at Wairakei when I was a kid, but the resort has been completely transformed for the festival.
The rolling lawns out the back of the vast property, which usually lie empty – save for a wild rabbit or two – have been transformed into a colourful tent city, adding to the carnival feeling. There are food trucks, earthy-looking marquees with cafés tucked under them, huge temporary yoga studios, small shops all set up, and hundreds of sprawled yoginis in brightly coloured pants milling around. It’s kind of like school camp, if it was run by 21st-century hippies.
Two years ago I attended my first ever Wanderlust – I laughed! I cried! – on the Sunshine Coast, but this is my first look at how it works in New Zealand and I’m a little sceptical. Australians are generally a bit more showy than New Zealanders and as one of the big requirements of the festival is Extreme Public Emotion, I’m interested to see how well a Kiwi audience takes to this.
Welcome to Wanderlust
The touchy-feely stuff begins almost immediately. Lucy and I are off to our first class, with the wonderful and fully hippy-dippy teacher Eoin (pronounced “Ian”) Finn. Eoin looks like a surfer version of Robin Williams and is basically sunshine rendered in human form.
His reputation has preceded him: the class Melt My Shoulders, Bliss My Hips is so packed that we have to lay our mats so they touch in order to get everyone packed into The Greatest Space yoga tent (the concept of personal space has no meaning at Wanderlust).
But Eoin is so good-natured it’s impossible not to keep a smile on your face for the whole class, particularly when he throws out sentences like “every exhale belongs to the ocean”,
or when we’re instructed to get into a squat and “release what you need to get rid of: fear, anger, Trump”.
We’re encouraged to give low fives, high fives, and tiger impersonations to the yogis around us, and if we can’t do some of the more complicated poses, we have to cheer on the people who are doing them. My good vibes meter is turned right up to full after 90 minutes of this, even if I know I’m going to be very sore the next day.
Over the next three days, Lucy and I take in another two of Eoin’s classes: one an afternoon meditation in which I fall so deeply under his spell I fail to notice a fat beetle crawling up my neck – I just assume it’s happy tingles; and the second a class called Rockstar Vinyasa, where the usual yoga music is exchanged for rock songs like House of the Rising Sun and Stairway to Heaven.
We finish with our arms around each other, listening to a singer belt out Let It Be and yes, I’ll admit, there is the faint prickling of tears in my eyes. Turns out I’m not the only one – over the course of the weekend we get used to the sight of people openly crying, both in class and out. It seems even staunch Kiwis aren’t immune to the emotionally charged atmosphere of Wanderlust.
One of the absolute highlights of Wanderlust is how well it incorporates a distinctly New Zealand vibe into the whole experience. A powhiri opens the festival and the schedule has a lot of Maori inspiration packed into it.
In the class Haka, The Force Awakened, local experts Tiare Tito and Kemara Kennedy teach us the history of the haka and why the pre-rugby-game routine is just a drop in the bucket of what this tradition means. Fascinatingly, the group who’ve picked this class are mostly tourists; out of about 35 of us, only five were born in New Zealand.
There’s a huge overseas contingent who have made the trip down under for Wanderlust and it’s a fairly wonderful experience as people from Greece, Bulgaria, Scotland, Chile and more open up about where they first learned about the haka. As someone who, like so many of us, learned it in primary school but hasn’t tried it since, the class is a real reminder that I need to take a more active role in learning about New Zealand’s culture, as it’s a privilege the rest of the world is envious of.
My favourite class of the entire weekend is another only-in-NZ experience. Led by hugely experienced dancer and yoga teacher Taane Mete, it’s a class that combines haka movements with modern dance. You may not think that ancient Maori wisdom and traditional yoga teachings would be natural bedfellows, but Taane links them together in a way that shows how complementary the values are.
Over 90 minutes, we learn a dance that helps us “find our inner Warrior spirit” and it’s cool as hell to perform. The beauty of Wanderlust and its ability to stretch the boundaries of what yoga is, and what makes a yogini, is completely present here. I’ve practised yoga for seven years and feel like I’m learning new aspects of it in every single class.
Wanderlust creates a kind of bubble and while you do have to have some tolerance for hippy-dippy woo-woo, the core of the weekend is all about human connection. Yoga is one of the few physical activities you can’t really get competitive in, and in which there’s no age limit to what the human body can achieve – something I see first-hand when three women in their 60s drop into the splits next to me.
There’s a strong community spirit to the festival right away. Never is that more clear when two of our fellow yoginis and their children get stranded when their car breaks down and we’re able to take them home in our giant on-loan car. Leave no yogini behind – that’s the Wanderlust spirit.
Wanderlust 101
First started back in 2009, Wanderlust came down under in 2013 and now hosts two festivals a year: Great Lake Taupo in February and Sunshine Coast in October. The Taupo event is held at Wairakei Resort and the price starts at $125 for a one-day pass and goes up to $490 for a four-day pass.
You can also get a taste of the Wanderlust experience at a one-day event, the Wanderlust 108. Dubbed ‘The world’s most mindful triathlon’, you do three activities: a 5km run, yoga and meditation. Visit wanderlust.com/108-events/auckland to register for the next event, which is to be held on Saturday, April 29.
For more, see the March issue of New Zealand Good Health Choices. And don’t forget to visit our Facebook, and follow us on Instagram.
