New Zealander Dietmar Hornig inspires audiences at Nötel House

Scheeßel – By Hannes Eugen. Discover New Zealand for yourself. This has always been the wish of Dietmar Horning. “After my retirement in 2005, it was finally time for me to fulfill my dream of a longer trip to the country,” the former president of the Beekeschule told his guests at the fully occupied Kis Café. They all came to see his New Zealand film, which he produced entirely on his own from over ten hours of material – he edited and set to music himself.

“Flieger” started on schedule in the afternoon from Nötel’s home, and after a short pause, the spectators were already in New Zealand, 20,000 kilometers away. “A Long Journey to an Old Dream” was the title Scheeßeler gave his cinematic impressions from the other side of the world. After several days of staged flights over Perth and Sydney, he reached his destination Auckland in the geographically isolated island nation in the South Pacific. “I took a rental car and spent seven weeks exploring ‘Aotearoa’ – the land of the long white cloud, as the Māori, the original New Zealand immigrants, call them,” says Hornig.

Left to himself, he embarked on adventurous rides that often took him off the beaten path to beautiful coastlines, lakes, fjords, glaciers, volcanoes, and hot springs. “The scattered markings in the high mountains were very inaccurate—the medium-difficult runs were actually very difficult. I was never physically exhausted.” Even a twenty-year-old girl had reached her limit, another climber had to be rescued by helicopter after a fracture in her leg.

Adventurous solo tours through the rainforest

Dietmar Hornig also describes his solo tours through the rainforest as adventurous and not without risk – without a cell phone reception. Even driving left-hand traffic on narrow lanes without guardrails directly on the cliff will be difficult.

To the astonishment of the audience, he succeeded excellently in documenting the unusual flora and fauna of New Zealand in all its diversity with his film and shots. A particularly highlight was the reunion with two Maori women Kai and Pete, whom he had hosted months earlier at the traditional costume festival in Chesel: “They gave me a lot of valuable advice and I was honored to attend the Maori course on the preservation of culture and language at Wahrenui, the home of your encounters. To be able to be there.”

He himself, he says, is no longer as cheerful as tourists who only look at natural beauty, “because I also lived daily life there in a country full of contradictions,” says Hornig. On the one hand, the country invests a lot in the preservation of plants and animals, and on the other hand, pesticides are excessively sprayed on kiwi plantations. “They don’t go together. But what would appeal to me again to travel there is to delve into the Maori culture.”