The northern part of the Scandinavian peninsula has some similarities to northern Canada, if you're looking for that but with an EU passport. Not as gigantic as the continent-sized Canadian north (only Russian Siberia competes there), but still pretty large and mostly empty. The "everyman's right" also makes it legal to travel/camp/forage essentially anywhere in the countryside, including on private land [1], as long as you avoid active farms and the immediate vicinity of people's houses.
I'm Australian, and have gone through ~7 years of paperwork to become an Canadian Permanent Resident. I have another ~5 years for citizenship, which I'm working towards because Canada really is that awesome :)
I'm sure there are places equally as stunning in the Northern European countries.
Arg. I knew the rules were changing, and I thought they were changing on the 1st of July, so I got my application in a week before that... it turns out they changed the day before my application was "accepted", so it was denied, and I must live in Canada for another 2 full years before I even qualify to apply.
Normally that wouldn't be so bad, but I've just set off on two years around Africa, which means it's going to be a long, long time before I have 5 continuous years in Canada. Oh well, at least I can remain a permanent resident essentially forever.
Uggh I know exactly what you mean - I happened to see folks mentioning the rule change on the Canada visa forum and scrambled my application together just in time, and it was AoR the day before the change.
Based on my (limited) experience in hot parts of the world people manage this by breaking their day up into two and take a long nap in the middle of the day.
The harder something is, the more rewarding it is.
It would definitely be harder to tour Africa in an old, beat-up Honda Civic than in a jeep, and it would be even harder to tour all of Africa without a vehicle, or without supplies entirely, blindfolded, and with your hands tied behind your back.
Absolutely. So what I'm doing in my life is walking the line between easy and hard, in such a way as to keep it challenging and interesting, while not making it downright painful and so difficult that I won't enjoy it. Everyone has their own personal line to walk.
I'm driving a nice Jeep, which for me, is as challenging as I personally can handle, without it being painful and not enjoyable. At the end of the day I'm doing this for enjoyment, not for punishment.
People tougher than me ride motorbikes.
People tougher than that ride bicycles.
People tougher than that walk (yes, it's been done).
etc. etc.
There will always be someone doing something more daring than me, but I'm not interested in what other people are doing, I'm finding my own personal balance / limit of difficult yet enjoyable.
I think instead of framing it as a continuum between easy and tough with a strict correlating reward factor, it makes more sense to frame it in terms of the types of challenges you enjoy versus the types you simply don't.
The rewards that come from challenges and difficulty are not often correlated with the amount or intensity of the difficulty, and even when they are, they are often inversely correlated. You need to take into account the type of difficulty (e.g. mastering a musical instrument vs enduring an abusive parent) and the predilections of the person trying to overcome the difficulty (e.g. many people who enjoy difficult challenges may not enjoy the challenge of living in a freezing climate). The challenges that you enjoy are what make you an interesting person, and so the simple statement that “the harder something is, the more rewarding it is” is not only completely false on its face, but it tells us nothing about you other than the possibility that you might be a masochist.
So one might say that they think that New Zealand provides the benefits with less of the challenges, but you could say back to them that the types of challenges that New Zealand lessens are for the most part the exact kind of challenges that you enjoy. An answer like that would better help people understand where you're coming from, which is good because you seem like a genuinely interesting person.
It seems out of the question for me on a EU passport to live long term in Canada. You're lucky!