A Kiwi couple who have lived an outdoor, nomadic lifestyle and walked thousands of kilometres together say they were almost torn apart when it took a toll on their health.
Miriam and Peter Lancewood have had no fixed abode for the past 10 years, living off the grid both in New Zealand and in Europe.
While it’s been an adventure for the pair, who have a 30-year age difference between them, Peter says the journey became “lethal”.
After walking 5000km across Europe in three years, Peter, in his mid-60s, began to experience kidney failure while travelling across the Australian desert by car.
“I was staring death in the face,” he told TVNZ1's Sunday.
The couple returned to New Zealand and for the first time in nine years, had to live in a house.
“That was a very difficult time for both of us. Because in the house, you're in a building, you're cut off from the forest," says Miriam, 37.
"You don't hear the creek. You don't hear the birds. You don't feel the wind."
As Peter's condition worsened, he was given a three per cent chance of survival. Dialysis and joining the waiting list for a new kidney was his best advice.
“I offered him my kidney. That was the least I could do. I got two good kidneys, and people can live with one. So I thought I'd give him one,” Miriam says.
But Peter rejected those options and instead opted to hunker down in the house they were living in.
He was so sick that he wanted to end it all, contemplating euthanasia.
“I did, because I thought being that ill, I mean nauseous 24 hours a day, absolutely zero energy, 20 hours a day in bed, four hours up, which even that was exhausting. Couldn't walk 100 metres and you really think for a person like me, lived the life I had, that's about as bad as it can get," Peter says.
“I was more worried about how she'd live with me if I couldn't recover. What a life she would have if I was stuck having to go to a hospital or being dependent on medical services to the point where I couldn't live a nomadic life anymore.”
But he says he looked around him and decided he would keep on going until he couldn’t.
“The nature of life is healing. It's always trying to do it. You look around here. And everywhere you look, you see things falling over and trying to grow back up again," he says.
"And life doesn't want to die. And I felt that we give up too easily a lot of us humans. We think, 'Oh no, this is it.' But the natural world doesn't do that. It keeps on going until it can’t.”
Now, two years on, Peter is practically thriving - making plans to spend the summer in the mountains, but this time taking a few more precautions.
Watch the video for the full Sunday story.
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