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Welcome back home to your warm and familiar grindstone, which probably looks a lot like ours. There are many good reasons for not going on holiday, including the fact that you may offer your employer a relaxing period during which to find some reason to sack you, and the simple act of going away from familiar territory is inherently risky. It’s bad enough putting up with those relatives you loathe and having them camp on your lawn over Christmas and criticise the state of your bathroom while consuming the contents of your fridge and wine cellar. It can get worse, if you foolishly venture forth to strange places such as Indonesia or Hokitika.

St Arnaud, at the height of the summer. Up the road, Nelsonian eco-twits are waging a war to banish plastic shopping bags. In Haiti, they'd prefer less crap about global warming, and would like a plastic bag containing some food and water.

We have endured a dismal two weeks in the South Island, where the weather was terrible, the fishing was fruitless and the retail rip-offs in isolated places were eye-watering. My malodorous companions – all seasoned trampers – rejoiced at having “knocked another bugger off”. This was their triumphant justification for enduring 14 days of almost continuous tumults and torrents, as they forged across enormous tracts of the wilderness, looking at their feet all the day long, surviving on freeze-dried, flavour-rich polystyrene, and making themselves acceptable only to opportunist point-to-point drivers who can feign the loss of their sense of smell as they transport stinking trampers from one end point to another start point.

Rather than a rewarding visit to stunning Sir Peter Jackson scenery (most of which was hidden in cloud and deluge), it appeared to the casual observer more like Mao’s Long March. For the non-tramper, it was a case of turning up the heater full-blast in a remote remotel room and occasionally venturing to the village store, where a fishing lure cost three times the normal price and a warming bottle of spirits cost a staggering $38 for 375 ml and – adding insult to misery – the skinny DominionPost cost more than its usual gross waste of money.

In Golden Bay and Nelson, strange and wizened people who echo from the late 60s and early 70s occasionally peered out from unlikely bushes in the middle of nowhere, and yours truly received a stern rebuke for accidentally wearing his slip-on shoes in an environmentally sustainable back-packers’ hostel. I could not help wondering why one of the owners spent so much time sitting and smoking something or other, in an unlit paddock with quietly spoken people who were also not smoking tobacco, and why their cost-effective hostelry seemed to be so hostile to overweight non-trampers who own expensive cars. It was deeply unnerving for an unfit, semi-naked 4WD owner to stumble upon a half-starved, candle-lit yogi from Nepal in the lounge, curled up in a tight meditative knot, at 3am, while feeling the way to the communal toilets.

On one of Takaka Hill’s 365 corners, a sign beckoned: Need a Miracle? Just around the corner, there lurked someone promising miracles. I made an excuse to myself, and sped on. After all, you’d need a miracle to improve the climate on Takaka Hill, without my feeble intervention. The God-forsaken place is made of marble, and shows no evidence of marvels.

View from the motel, a brand new development where the roof failed

At Lake Rotoiti, I was told off by the motel owners for innocently asking to buy a $1 pottle of washing powder during their “feed”. Never mind the $900 pre-paid accommodation bill; even long-term guests must know their Ps and Qs when it’s feeding time for the hosts… Some clients travel 12,000 miles all the way here to be abused, and pay for bad and overpriced food. (With the notable exceptions of St Arnaud’s Alpine Lodge and its eclectic brand of excellent fare and endlessly entertaining staff, and Golden Bay’s Mussel Inn, which maintains its tradition of providing what people want, at a decent price.)

But generally it was expensive and cold comfort, and even an unhealthily large shot of gin could not relieve the pain of a newly cracked tooth and the boredom of a motel telly that only provided half a dozen “free” channels, in a place that had no radio reception – not even Radio New Zealand National and its exhausted Matinee Idle afternoon holiday show.

And there was slim chance of sending a small fortune in fishing tackle to the bottom of the Buller or Wairau rivers. The Buller is fearsome at the best of times (and is now full of disgusting didymo). The swollen Wairau was eager to pluck the angler and even his vehicle into its raging maw. Bugger.

The mood was sombre as our group of holidaymakers cut short the agony and headed home through the gloom, as quickly as their ancient and rusting ferry could take them.

So much for NIWA’s forecast of “average” weather during the break, and so much for global warming. The entire world (apart from Australia) is freezing and, in parts of the South Island, the tourist’s welcome is sometimes unusually frosty. Hopefully, we’ll enjoy the better half of NIWA’s average weather in February…

Ah, but here we are back at Home Sweet Home, and what do we find?

A rotting rat in the attic, a goldfish trapped, half-dead, in the pond’s protective netting, most of the orchard’s bounty plundered by marauding birds, and a burst water pipe. The minute after smug pal Russell (who couldn’t – and wisely wouldn’t – come on holiday) reports that “it’s been sweltering up here”, our following rains arrive; and they stay for three more days.

Mac the Dog is back from the kennels, along with his usual infestation of cattle ticks that will cost another $67.70 (inc GST) to eradicate. He is itchy, tetchy and edgy, and rightly so. Dog-owners simply cannot be trusted these days, but the kennel proprietors assure us that Mac is a brilliant chap and he had a really great time, gaining new friends and pests.

Pete the Plumber is summoned, but it’s the holidays and he announces that plumbing is not really his thing any more, because he’s going into citrus fruit production. After 24 hours of no water in the house, and the enduring stench of what remains of a dead rodent in the attic, Pete arrives in a van that should have UN painted on its sides and roof. We excavate the driveway and, thanks to Pete’s water-divining skills, trace the leak and fix it. But we’re sodden, again. Sod it.

The laundry reeks of a fortnight’s worth of trampers’ rancid clothing. The fitted carpet is stained with the blood of flicked-off cattle ticks. The plastic Christmas tree needs to be dismantled toot sweet, or bad luck will ensue. The computer doesn’t work properly, thanks to Bill Gates’s automatic updates. Light bulbs have popped. The couch grass has gone troppo and spread the lawn with unwanted seeds that will ruin it. Blackbirds have stripped the strawberry patch, and local tribespeople have mounted an abortive rustling raid on our pet sheep. A machete goes on the shopping list; otherwise, we’ll never again reach the end of the garden or ward off the rustlers.

Halleluya! There is Christmas left-over beer in the fridge along with toxic yoghurt and thousand-year-old eggs, and we break one open just in time for the 6 o’clock news. We’ve suffered a dead rat and a water shortage and flat batteries and heaven knows what else, and the next-door neighbour almost cut his arm off in a chainsaw accident while we were away; we’ve driven 2500 km to rediscover places we never want to see again.

But Hello-you-yah… in Haiti, there’s a God-forsaken quake scene featuring tens of thousands of rotting human beings and an impossibly biblical food and water shortage.

Back to reality.

Back to work.

Thank God that didn’t happen to us.

Happy New Year.