Explorer

I’ve always wanted to travel. As a kid, I loved maps, and I used to imagine the lives people were living in places that felt worlds away from mine. I went on to study geography, and the idea of the world, all its land, cultures and stories, has fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

My first real trip came in 2019, when I travelled solo to New Orleans on a leadership scholarship. Since then, I’ve travelled to compete in strongwoman, and to the land of my tūpuna in the Cook Islands. Then, in 2023, I packed up my life and moved to the UK. By the time I came home in March 2026, I had been to 20+ countries, and explored much of Europe on my own.

People often asked what I was looking for. The honest answer is: me.

I wanted to know what I actually desired, not what I thought I should want. I wanted to know what fun looked like for me. I wanted to know whether I could be alone, truly alone, and be okay. I wanted to see if I could set down my logical brain and my always-doing mindset, and learn to flow and follow my intuition instead. And I wanted to step off the corporate ladder I’d been climbing for years, and find out who I was without it.

So I learned. I learned how to travel, how to find my way somewhere new, and how to make decisions with no one else to lean on. Slowly, I learned to trust my intuition. When you’re on your own in a foreign place, that quiet inner voice is often the only guide you have, and the more I listened to it, the clearer it became.

And I had fun. Real fun, the kind I had almost forgotten I was allowed to have.

But being far from home taught me something I didn’t expect. The whenua I come from has a pull that distance can’t break. And here is where I feel safest.

I went searching across the world for myself, and part of what I found was the way home.