New Zealand topped the Telegraph Travel awards as one of the best places to go, but one of their journalists was not so enamoured.

British writer Peter Foster, who moved to the rural South Island town of Takaka with his family, would not recommend living there.

The allure of Golden Bay could only be enjoyed for a limited period, Foster wrote in 2009.



Bike rides, buttercups and vanilla fudge cows were part of the eerie paradise that was beginning to drive Foster up the wall.



That, and lack of traffic jams.

READ MORE: New Zealand wins world's best country

A section of the Takaka Hill road. Photo: ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ

Here is an excerpt, where Foster describes the moment he realised the country wasn't for him. He was dropping his three-year-old to kindergarten:



"On the back of the bike the first-born yabbers away as only a soon-to-be-four-year-old can; bleating at the newborn lambs and pointing upwards into a firmament as blue as the gaze of the late Paul Newman.



"'Look Daddy,' he says, brimming with the joys of a New Zealand spring. 'It's a skylark? Can you hear him?' I could, and yet much as I wished to share in the boy's innocent enthusiasm for the birdlife, my own mood was decidedly unlarklike. In fact, if I'd had a gun, I'd have taken pleasure in blasting it from the sky.



"It so wasn't meant to be like this. After a decade scrumming it in big cities – six years in London, four in New Delhi – moving to Golden Bay in the garden of New Zealand was supposed to be a dream existence. The idea was to take our young family from a sooty suburb in New Delhi (population 20 million) to the tiny rural town of Takaka (population 1182) on the South Island and prove there really was more to life than career ladders, commuting and dropping the kids at daycare. (I'm still haunted by the London friend who said he didn't know what his son liked to eat because he 'usually ate at nursery'.)"

However, the small town was too different to what Foster was used to. He wrote:

Wharariki Beach in Golden Bay.

"It is, quite literally, the end of the earth (which was the point) but at times during the past year, standing on the beautiful beach at the bottom of our garden, I did start to wonder if I might topple off without anybody actually noticing. Being awake while the rest of the world is asleep is not healthy for lifelong news junkies.

"It's deeply annoying to admit it, but the metro-mate naysayers (smug themselves, we thought) have been proved correct. "You'll go bonkers in a week," they said. They were only half-right. It took me at least two. Growing the perfect runner bean and baking dates scones have their undeniable satisfactions, as does catching your red snapper at sunset and pounding the deserted windswept beaches. But there is a limit. And now, I'm faintly ashamed to say, I have discovered it. So while it's wonderful for young children to have their father around

all day, a father's not much use if he's become a lunatic lark-slayer.

He hoped his family would forgive him to taking them back to the high-rise city.

While the year-long stay was exactly as he had imagined, daily walks on the beach, fishing off the rocks...it was boring.

"Bliss is, well – I'll say it straight out – boring as hell. Or should that be boring as heaven?

"After a year in the pristine seclusion of Golden Bay tending the veg plot, I crave the infernal stink of the big city and the juice-inducing competition of the rat race. If that's a measure of my own shortcomings as a human being, then so be it, but I'm afraid Julian Barnes had heaven bang on in the sublime climax of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters when his narrator wakes from a dream to find himself "on the other side".