You have to find adventure wherever you can get it. Sometimes that means going to far-flung destinations, but other times it can mean a homecoming. In the new film from Need Essentials, Space In Between, Johanna Brebner did the latter.
“My friends are settling down, buying houses, starting families, and here I am living in a tent. How on earth did I end up here?” explains Brebner at the top of the film. “Somehow, I’ve decided to weave my love of surfing together with cycling. Never in a million years could I have seen this coming.”
Brebner hails from a small coastal town of the north island of New Zealand, but she’s been living in Australia for the past ten years. However, she decided to return to her mother country after being inspired by Robyn Davidson’s 1980 book Tracks, in which she recounted her 1,700-mile-long journey across the deserts of Western Australia. Brebner’s version of the trek would trade camels for a bicycle, and take her from the South Island town of Bluff, all the way up the east coast, across a ferry to Wellington, and then finally up to the top of the North Island — a journey of over 1200 miles.
The endeavor was ambitious enough on its own, but the effort is all the more impressive for the fact that Brebner came into it with essentially no cycling experience. “My cycling career peaked when I was probably 7 years old, cycling to primary school, and I haven’t actually been on a bike consistently since then,” she explains. “So, going in completely blind. Sometimes you’ve just got to show up and do it if you’re ready or not.”
And show up she did. After nearly three months, Brebner not only accomplished the Herculean task she set for herself, but learned more about surfing, her homeland, and herself along the way. “It’s no longer about hyperfixating on waves,” she observes at the end of the journey. “It becomes about the spaces in between, the people, the weather, the next meal. And in that slowness, you begin to truly know a place and yourself a little deeper.”
