The shot you came for is already framed before you land
You have seen New Zealand before you arrive. You saw it in 2000, when Shah Rukh Khan ran across those green Queenstown hills in Mohabbatein and your parents watched it twice in theatres. You saw it again in Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, in the waterfall sequences that made an entire generation of Indian travellers add "New Zealand" to a list they would spend the next decade trying to afford. By the time you book the flight, the country exists in your head as a sequence of frames, the gondola above Queenstown at sunset, the mirror lake at Milford Sound, the lupins along the Mackenzie Basin in November. You know what the photographs look like. You have already liked them on Instagram.
