I remember the cold most vividly — and that was before I had even made it to the deeper south.
I arrived in Christchurch in the middle of the night, the city glistening through recent rain. Johann and Kruger, both now playing their cricket in Ōtautahi, picked me up.
I didn’t have much time to reflect, just jumped through a shower and brushed my teeth and tried to fend off the cold by burrowing into the couch under a heap of blankets in the flat they shared.
The next morning, they dropped me back to the airport for the final leg of my journey.
My forehead remained glued to the window throughout the flight, as the plane followed the snow-white Southern Alps down the mainland. It was the closest I had ever been to snow.
I walked off the plane into Dunedin Airport. The sky was bright blue, the sun dazzling, but there was a wintry edge to the spring air.
I met Andy McLean, who I’d been liaising with over the previous months, and Mark Bracewell, then a selector for Otago. I loaded my luggage — my entire life crammed into a single suitcase — into Andy’s car and off we drove through the farmland.
First stop: University Oval, my new home ground, where I met Ross Dykes and the backroom staff. Then to the Edgar Centre, the indoor training facility where I would meet the majority of my new team-mates.
I was nervous — would these guys treat me as an outsider coming to take their pay cheques? — but I shouldn’t have worried.
Instead, I was overwhelmed by friendliness as players — I particularly remember Sam Wells and Matt Harvie — lined up to introduce themselves. I chatted with Aaron Redmond, who I had bowled to in England.
I met trainer Chris Donaldson, formerly a sprinter who had represented New Zealand at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, and a man who would become incredibly important as my career progressed.
I was surprised to find Mike Hesson shorter than me, which I hadn’t pictured while speaking with him over the phone.
Andy took me to the house — owned by Jared and Anna King, Andy’s good friends — where I rented a room for the first year of my life in Dunedin.
It was a Friday before a long weekend and they were away, so Andy showed me around, then left me to get some rest.
I felt very weird and alone in an unfamiliar house that was now my home, where I figured out how to blast the heat pump and eventually got the TV working.
Odd, I thought, that none of the doors or windows were latched, and I made sure everything was locked before I crashed out.
At the first ground, I noticed they were playing on an artificial wicket — something I hadn’t done since I was maybe 10 — and thought that was interesting. At the second, the same. At the third, artificial again — with the added peculiarity of overlapping cricket fields, where the player fielding at fine leg in one game would be standing at mid-on in the other.
This was one of the strangest things I had ever seen.
I met Neil Broom for the first time, the sarcasm of his Kiwi banter completely unintelligible to me. I just thought he was a bit cocky.
The next day dawned cold and gloomy, with threatening clouds hovering in the sky throughout the morning.
I had to get groceries, eking out the limited funds I had before my first Otago pay cheque arrived. I set out on foot, covering what felt like half the city before I arrived at a supermarket in the heart of South Dunedin. I got a few things — bread, some steak, a box of microwave risotto, a bottle of Coke and a bottle of mineral water because the Dunedin tap water at the time tasted undrinkably strange to me — and started back home with my supplies in a couple of plastic bags.
At the bottom of the hill, the sky broke open, freezing needles of rain coming almost horizontally at my face. I lifted my jacket to protect myself and continued, but halfway up one of the bags broke and the Coke bottle rolled, fizzing, down the hill.
I suddenly felt very far from home, and started to cry. What the hell am I doing here? It’s the middle of the night back home, with no doubt another beautiful hot day later to edge over the horizon. I am freezing cold, soaked through, on some street I don’t know the name of at the end of the bloody world.
I wanted to leave the Coke bottle to bleed out at the bottom of the hill, but in the end I trudged down to pick it up, making a basket out of my arms to carry my meagre supplies home, where only the longest shower I have ever had could warm my bones.
I jumped into bed and put on a movie, trying to clear my mind until South Africa woke up and I could talk to someone familiar.
Jared and Anna came back later, surprised by how secure I had made the house in their absence — they had to wait for me to unlock the front door — explaining that they never felt the need to lock even their car, that the back door to the house would always be open so don’t worry about having a key with you.
They were so open and welcoming — lovely, warming people who helped me quickly put my shopping excursion in the rear-view mirror.
Cricket training with Otago started as soon as the weekend was over.
— All Out, by Neil Wagner with James Borrowdale, is out now from Penguin.
