Prepare to be overwhelmed.
On second thought, don’t prepare. Preparation is pointless.

Is there anything, really, that you can do to ready yourself for the sight of an iceberg, large as all the houses on your street, drifting past you in complete silence? Is there a warm-up you can do to prepare you for the sight of a 36-tonne humpback lifting itself entirely out of the water? Or, for that matter, the sight of a sheer, towering cliff that is quite literally alive with millions of seabirds?

There isn’t.

But then, how could you be prepared? Here, nature trumps all else. All of us, citizens and visitors alike, live in its glorious shadow – just footnotes in a much grander story that spools itself out along some 29,000 kilometres of our coastline. The natural beauty of this place surrounds you at every turn, largely untouched and unspoiled. Now, it’s easy to bandy about words like ‘stunning’. But what you will experience here will indeed leave you stunned, jaw agape, gasping for air, and wishing for more.

Don’t expect to see those kinds of sights anywhere else. This is a special place, after all, like nowhere on Earth. Is it because of the ancient geological events that gave this land its unique shape and form? Or because our particular geography makes us a busy crossroads for all those whales, and icebergs, and seabirds? Doesn’t matter, really. All we do know is that people who visit here often leave saying that this place has somehow, in some way, changed them. Altered the way they look at the world. Altered themselves. They can’t always explain it, but we know what they mean; what this land does to you can’t really be described. It can only be felt.