Naresh Kumar got his first glimpse of New Zealand in 2001, when he watched a Lord of the Rings movie. He fell in love, almost immediately, he says. “I didn’t even know the name of that country and where it was. But I knew I wanted to live in Middle-Earth,” smiles the 33-year-old. New Zealand must have seemed very far away for a young boy growing up in a slum in North Chennai, eating only one meal a day. But Kumar had big dreams and this was one of them, to call Kiwi Country home.
It didn’t happen immediately, of course. “Life as a child was all about survival. I needed to first take care of my family,” he says. So he studied very hard, landed an engineering scholarship, and went on to secure a job in a software company. He spent the next decade or so doing the conventional thing: a regular day job, plenty of money, linear growth. In 2010, he moved to the United States, for work. It was there that he discovered trail running. “I wanted to push limits, see how far I could go. A passion was born really,” he says.
By 2014, he says he had all that a man could want. A well-paying job, a base in Silicon Valley, a beautiful partner. But he wasn’t happy any more, he admits. “I was just another guy working long hours in Silicon Valley. I wanted to see what is out there, have a real life,” he says.
He quit his job, applied for a resident visa in New Zealand, and moved there, celebrating his new life by running the Te Araroa trail that traverses the entire 3,054-kilometre-long stretch of the country. But the mission of the run, which took around 87 days, wasn’t just about experiencing Tolkien’s Middle-Earth differently. It was also about raising funds to support victims of human trafficking. “Just before I moved to New Zealand, I was in Nepal trekking the Annapurna Circuit, when I encountered a man trafficking two little girls,” says Kumar. This shook him considerably, he says, so he decided to do something about it. Partnering with a local organisation that does a lot of work in Nepal, Cambodia and Thailand for victims of sex trafficking, he used his running to raise awareness and money for them. The novelty of being a new guy in town, running in sandals during winter, worked for him, he grins. “People see you and ask you why you are doing this. It gives you a perfect forum to explain the why, tell your story,” says Kumar, who managed to raise around 8000 NZD for the cause.
Stories and more
Since New Zealand, he has travelled to over 11 countries in the world, sharing stories everywhere he went. His approach to travel is remarkably minimalistic, “They are mostly human-powered. Everything goes in slow motion when you travel this way,” says Kumar, who runs, bikes and treks across countries, armed with nothing more than a backpack and his trusty pair of Bedrock Sandals (he is incidentally Bedrock’s Chief Experience Officer). A flip through his Instagram account reveals long runs into forever, sunsets on various mountain peaks, coffee brewed and drunk in the wilderness. “It took me 10 years to get this freedom. Now I live one day at a time,” he says. Sometimes he works along the way, in exchange for food and shelter, but what really powers him through most countries is human kindness. “When you are vulnerable, people don’t see you as a threat,” says Kumar, admitting that the joy of entering someone’s life as a stranger and leaving as family is transformative. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, of course. He has encountered multiple injuries, flash floods, bear attacks, extreme weather and more, says Kumar. “Of course, things happen beyond your control, life is constantly throwing punches at you. You do whatever it takes to survive and come back with a story.”
A climb to remember
He has many stories to share, but what is his favourite? “We didn’t really have a lot of food at home while growing up, and dessert was out of the question,” he says. Then one Christmas, a missionary family invited him home and served him Black Forest cake.“I was 11 years old. It was so delicious that I had tears in my eyes,” he smiles. Discovering that the layered cake bursting with chocolate, whipped cream, maraschino cherries and liquor was of German origin, allegedly named after the Black Forest Mountain Range in the country, he made up his mind to, “go to Germany, sit on the highest peak of that densely forested mountain range and eat a piece of black forest cake”.
And though it took 20 years, he finally managed to achieve this at 31. It was a freezing October evening, he remembers. But nothing mattered as he sat there with his legs dangling off that cliff, watching the sunset as he ate that massive slice of Black Forest Gateau, “I had struggled so much to get there. Never had a meal tasted so good,” he says.
