It wasn’t long after moving to the South Island in the 1980s that I realised what a difference a 4WD makes to exploring its vastness. A couple of trips and I had the bug, and the truck. I teamed up with Ken Sibly in the 1990s on the first of a series of off-road guidebooks that set the bar for on-the-ground research, detailing every gate, culvert and boggy patch on about 200 different routes from Collingwood to Oreti Beach.