Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

  At one point I unzipped my tent door an inch into the tumult of wind and, with rain drilling against my face, directed the beam of my headtorch outside for a quick monitoring of the situation, just time enough to glimpse the shredded remains of one dome tent flapping like a dervish attached to a couple of pegs. A second later I caught sight of the other dome tent sailing clean off into the night (I’m not sure whether it contained human form or not). That left only me and the Terra Nova man – if he was still in there. Maybe I was the sole survivor, standing my ground to go down with the ship.

  As water started to find its way into my tent the wind wound up the scale, intoning a terrifying whine, and I grew increasingly conscious that I was in a rising gale. I packed everything back into my panniers, including sleeping bag and diary and books, and then, still in my jacket and hat, climbed into my Gore-tex bivvy bag as the cold seeped into the tent, the dampness into my bones and spirits.

  The storm lasted about seven hours in all. Finally, cold and exhausted, I listened with relief as outside the rain gradually decreased in intensity. It dropped haphazardly upon my tent and the thunder moved away.

  This morning when I emerged tired and stiff from my sodden hovel it was only 10°C. There was no sign of Mr Terra Nova, but his tent was still there – just – hanging on by a thread of a guyline. The wind was still blowing a hooley, but slowly the sun started to appear and I spent the next few hours trying to dry everything out.

  The Dominion Post’s front page headline for today read: ‘STORM CHAOS – CAPITAL CUT OFF AS RAIN SHUTS ROADS’.

  It seems that several fronts swept across my tent last night, bringing 24 mm of rain, with 17 mm of it falling in the space of one hour. Lucky thing I camped on top of a hill, because Wellington has been hit by flash floods causing bridges to wash away and road closures all over, affecting water supplies and collapsing houses down mud-moving hillsides. Wind gusts in the city hit 120 km/h but the strongest gust recorded by the Met Service was 230 km/h at Angle Knob at the top of the Tararua Range – not that far away! The winds have lifted roofs, cut phones and brought down trees and power lines. Some are saying that this spate of ridiculous weather is the offshoot of the cyclone that is currently hitting Vanuatu. On the hostel TV I saw aerial views of the Wellington area – whole swathes of land resembling a vast watery landscape: a collection of lakes fuelled by raging torrents, swelling and bursting over fences, roads and hedges, surrounding hundreds of houses.

  Scientists are saying the weather system that caused all this mayhem is different to the one behind the ‘weather bomb’ that hit the Coromandel nearly two years ago. Mr Met Service ambassador man, Bob McDavitt, said of the present weather, ‘It is truly, truly abnormal.’ Well, that’s good to know. An editorial in the paper remarked that the Met Service was saying this event was ‘abnormal’ because it was ignorant of the cause. Scientist Dr Renwick warned against making a link with global warming. Instead New Zealand has apparently been hit by something called the Antarctic oscillation, a climate pattern that appears to be in reverse mode. I’ve no idea what this means. All I hope is that it oscillates away. Dr Renwick said he was ‘pinning his hopes on a dry and settled March’. So am I.

  Forecasters are admitting that ‘weather engineering’ (whatever that is – a team of cumulus and nimbostratus with spirit levels and socket-sets in hand perhaps?) is as much the cause of the disaster as climate change or Antarctic oscillation. So far the storms and flooding (which have been described as the worst natural disaster since the Napier earthquake) have caused around $100 million worth of damage in the lower North Island alone, and the Insurance Council says this cost is set to double. Uninsured losses are estimated to be three to six times the insured amount overall. Around half the total cost is expected to come from damage done in Wellington.

  Cycling to the Inter-island ferry terminal this afternoon, my bike computer plinked from 999 miles into the triple zero mark. The direct route from Auckland to Wellington on SH1 is 658 km (roughly 400 miles) and takes about 9 hours to drive. In contrast my route had taken me exactly 1,000 miles and 50 days. A much more satisfactory amount.

  As I waited for the 2 p.m. boat, the Aratere (‘Quick Path’), two other women on bikes turned up, though they weren’t travelling together. Laura Ottjes, a Dutch occupational therapist from Haalem, did a double take when she saw me before admitting she had read some of my wafflings. She seemed on good chatty terms with me, so I took that as a good sign. She had only arrived from Holland the day before yesterday in between two massive storms. Still, she hadn’t let the weather put her off and went out yesterday and bought a mountain bike for her planned two-month trip around the South Island. Trouble was, she’d arrived with her four Ortlieb panniers, but as her bike had front suspension there was no place to fix a front rack, which meant there was no place to attach her front panniers. So when I saw her, she had four panniers on the rear rack stacked up in a sort of interesting leaning-tower formation. She said she was going to devise a method for hanging one pannier off the handlebars.

  As for Achintya Paez, she was a Venezuelan living in Hawaii where she worked as a ‘Reiki Master’ with Oriental and holistic medicine. She had spent the first twenty years of her life in Venezuela going nowhere until she finally acquired a passport and then she spent the next fourteen years backpacking and working around the world. ‘I would do any job that came my way,’ Achintya told me. ‘I told people I would do anything for money – except sex!’ She admitted that, when desperate, she would even go up to people waiting in vehicles at traffic lights and tell them she was travelling alone around the world before asking whether they had any money they could give her. ‘No one ever refused me,’ said Achintya. ‘I think that’s the benefit of being a lone woman and asking nicely!’

  This was the first time Achintya had travelled by bike. ‘Usually I backpack or walk,’ she said. She was travelling extra light on a Specialized Stumpjumper with front suspension. ‘I started out with a load of camping equipment but then I sent it all home because it never stops raining!’ Before we rode on to the boat, I noticed that the quick-release lever on her front wheel was undone so I did it up for her. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how those things work.’

  Travelling from the North Island to the South Island by boat you’d think you would be sailing from north to south. But as Wellington sits slightly south of Picton you move ever so slightly north in an east to west fashion. All very confusing for the likes of my meridians, I can tell you.

  The Aratere ferry ride was completely fantastic across an angry sea swept into hissing and foaming windrows. Despite the sun shining bright all the way, most passengers chose to sit inside. This might have had something to do with the yowling wind that tore across the upper deck like a stampede of Kaiser Chiefs, blowing anyone without a firm handhold clean off their moorings. The highest recorded wind gust in the Cook Strait reached 267 km/h (166 mph) on 10 April 1968 during a shocking storm that sunk the Inter-island ferry Wahine (‘Woman’) after the gale-force winds drove it on to Barrett Reef at the entrance to Wellington Harbour.

  Two people testing the waters of the wind with me were a man and woman in the hinterland of their sixties who for one brief moment positioned themselves nearby, clinging on tight to the railings. The man had white hair and purple legs. She, on the other hand, was a dark bundle of a woman with hair crushed and subdued by the wind. Over her forearm she carried a Pekinese, neatly folded like a waiter’s napkin. I caught a snippet of their shouted conversation. She was saying something about how she would never be able to move house because her husband had over 3,000 books plus thousands of tapes and CDs and endless piles of papers. ‘Some people are hoarders,’ she said, ‘while others like to clear every surface in sight. My husband is a hoarder. I can only throw things out when his back is turned!’

  Once over the rough seas of the Cook Strait, the Aratere nosed its way into the narrow but calmer waters of the appropriately blue Tory Channel (site of early whaling sta
tion) and Queen Charlotte Sound. Rising abruptly on all sides of the ship stood the sharp escarpments of deep green mountainous hills, covered with a thick pelt of forest. The fjord-like indentations of the Marlborough Sounds are a labyrinthine fretwork of peninsulas, inlets, bays, islands and waterways that was formed when the rising sea invaded a series of river valleys at the northern tip of the South Island. While so much of New Zealand is still being lifted by tectonic forces, the Sounds revolve around a drowned landscape where the northern tip of the South Island is being tilted into the sea. The coastline of the Sounds has an intricacy unmatched elsewhere in the country – to the extent that this relatively small area contains 15 per cent of the national coastline.

  Sandwiched between the hills and the sea lies the former whaling station of Picton. Because of its position set in the upper reaches of Queen Charlotte Sound, this small town is the South Island terminus for both the Cook Strait ferries and the main trunk railway, and the start (or finish) of State Highway 1, which carves its way for nearly 1,000 km to Bluff. The seafaring Maori were the first settlers of the Marlborough Sounds and in their day they kept to the coastal areas, living off the abundant fruits of the sea. In fact, many Maori were so expert in the water that they didn’t even need a boat to cross the Cook Strait (its unpredictable weather conditions and powerful currents making it one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world), which at its narrowest point is 20 km wide: they simply swam instead. It wasn’t until 1962 that the first European, Barrie Davenport, achieved this swimming feat, taking just over eleven hours. I don’t know if it’s because of the number of people who may have drowned in this crossing, but the Maori name for the Cook Strait is Raukawa, ‘leaves of the kawakawa’ – a decoration worn by a chief in mourning. As for its English name, although the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to encounter this lively sea in 1642, Captain Cook felt he had earned the right to name the strait after himself because he was the first to chart it accurately.

  Te Rapa, Marlborough, 22 February

  As Picton (pop. 4,500) is a mere eleven hours’ swim away from Wellington, it was perhaps not surprising that it had not escaped the storms. A civil emergency was declared when up to a thousand residents had to be evacuated from their homes because of fears that the nearby Humphreys and Barnes dams would collapse after hours of torrential rain caused flash floods (40 mm of rain fell in forty minutes) that swept away campervans, flooded houses and caused mudslides and general mayhem and disruption.

  Cycling north out of town past the Toot ’n’ Whistle Inn and the Dog & Frog Cafe and Ye Olde English Barber Shoppe, I managed to find a slab of relatively drained land up at Waikawa Bay from where I could walk up to the end of a little peninsula, which in Maori is called Te Ihumoeone-ihu (‘the nose of the sandworm’), but in Pakeha patois is simply The Snout.

  Since my arrival in the north of the South, I’ve happened upon a local radio station on my mini radio called ‘Easy FM’. The music has its ups and downs and there are plenty of weather forecasts (rain, rain and more rain. And wind. And then more rain). Trouble is, there’s a woman presenter on it who tells me with every other word that I’m listening to Easy FM. ‘Hi there, you’re listening to Easy FM and this is Easy FM playing The Scissor Sisters. So here we go, from Easy FM, here’s “Take your Mama”.’ Added to this intensely aggravating and constantly repetitive reminder of what I’m listening to, when I know what I’m listening to, is the way she pronounces Easy FM as ‘Izzie If Imm’. I ask you!

  Lying in my tent near The Snout, I tuned into National Radio and heard the Met Service issue yet another weather warning as yet another low pressure system was expected to hurl itself at the lower North Island and the upper South Island, with wind gusts of 150 km/h predicted. There was also talk of a possible cyclone coming our way, though no one was quite sure quite when.

  The trouble with forecasts like this is that they initiate a dilemma in your head. You lie in your sleeping bag thinking: shall I go or should I stay? Shall I risk it or should I play safe? Though the wind was raging itself into a frothing great tizz, it wasn’t yet raining, so grabbing hold of a positive in the face of a negative I upped pegs and took off south on SH1 towards Blenheim.

  As tends to happen in this game, the minute you decide to do something and dismantle your home with all panniers open to the skies, the rain starts. Which it did. And it didn’t stop. Nor did I. Bracing myself for impact from the wind and the water, I rode a road that went up and then down, following a river valley through Koromiko (‘Japanese Womble’) and then a flatter expanse through Tuamarina (‘elaborate docking facility for yachting tuna’). In fact Tuamarina is near the site of the ‘Wairau Incident’ (formerly known as the ‘Wairau Massacre’) of 1843, when a disputed land purchase (some things never change) led to a bloody clash between settlers hoping to muscle in on Maori land. It seems the whaling captain, John Blenkinsopp, had tried to pull a fast one on local Maori. In the ensuing affray, twenty-two Pakeha and six Maori were killed. The terms of the ‘agreement’ were renegotiated in 1847 when the new European owners handed over all of £3000.

  Down the road lay Spring Creek (site of a backpackers called Swampy’s – ‘mind those underground tunnels and rattails around the Newbury Bypass!’) by which stage the wind was so strong that I could hardly stand up, let alone cycle. I narrowly missed being turned to pulp when a tree crashed down across the road in front of me. The remaining 5 km to Blenheim took over an hour – it was that stupidly windy.

  Blenheim was originally named Beavertown by a party of surveyors who apparently identified with the beaver when they became stranded in the area by floodwaters. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe they resorted to building a dam by cutting down some trees with their teeth. For some obscure reason the town was later renamed to commemorate the Bavarian battle won by the Duke of Marlborough when the English defeated the French and Bavarians. Quite what the connection is between this area and the Duke of Marlborough though is anybody’s guess. Maybe he once came for a little recreational cycle-touring holiday down in these wind-blown parts.

  Because the road south of Blenheim involved a couple of exposed passes, I decided I wouldn’t tempt fate and be blown clean off the planet never to be seen again. So in a rushing flap of wind and rain (Blenheim, by the way, calls itself the ‘Sunshine Capital of New Zealand’ – ha!) I threw my tent up in a corner of the run-down Duncannon Holiday Park. The owner, a hangdog man with a death-rattle cough, had told me in no uncertain terms to put my tent beneath a large cedar tree. But I didn’t fancy camping under a tree in this wind so I stuck to my guns and kept to the corner.

  And a good thing too. After a wild night of howling wind and gushing rain, I was awoken with a start this morning by a loud splintering sound followed by an almighty crack and thud. Taking a peek out of my tent door, I saw that a bough, the size of a large tree, had been torn from the cedar by the wind. I think it’s safe to say that if I had placed my tent where Mr Happy had wanted me to put it, there wouldn’t be too much left of me now.

  The news came on and I heard how Marlborough had been hit by wind gusts up to 200 km/h last night. How very silly. They were also saying that the cyclone was now set to miss New Zealand but that there was heavy rain still coming this way. Hadn’t we just had that? Or was that just medium-rare-to-heavy rain without the full-helmeted heavy?

  Contrary to what the weather forecasters said, the rain cleared this morning and a slightly sodden-looking sun plopped out. As I was shaking the rain from my tent, a couple in a Maui motorhome walked over to tell me how they had started out cycling around part of the South Island. ‘But we gave up on it because it never stopped raining,’ said the woman. ‘So now we’re treating ourselves to a van. I recommend it. It’s a lot easier this way!’

  For the first two miles after setting off I scarcely had to pedal. The raging tailwind blew so strong that it hurled me along the flat road at over 25 mph. It was like being attached to a rocket. But then I turned the cor
ner and the wind slammed into me from the side. Suddenly things had gone from fun and fast to slow and harrowingly hard.

  It was while I had been bowling along at top knots that I caught sight of the much-locally advertised tourist lure – Riverlands cob cottage. This cottage, made from cut tussock grass mashed with puddled clay, is classified in Kiwi terms as a site of ancient historical importance. It was built in 1860.

  As the road began its winding climb over Weld Pass, I suddenly entered a barren landscape of big and smooth and symmetrically rounded brassy-coloured hills. In the distance, towering high above the low-altitude hills, rose the harsh scree slopes of the Seaward Kaikoura Mountains still mantled with dog collars of snow. Sometimes I love cycling uphill and this pass was one of those moments. The gradient was good, the twists and turns were fun (apart from the moment when a double-trailer truck squinched me up tight against a cliffed wall of scree), the scenery almost startling. I then dived down and dashed up Dashwood Pass (hardly a pass, more a mere blip of a rise) before flopping into Seddon and filling up on liquid supplies at the Cosy Corner Cafe.

  After that it was up and down, up and down over the shorn flanks of hills passing over ribbons of water with names like Hog Swamp River, Blind River Loop and Puka Puka River (obviously a Jamie Oliver favourite). Just past Blind River and Tetley Brook Road came the weird sight of the purple-pink and white crystallising ponds of Lake Grassmere – New Zealand’s only evaporative solar salt works, formed by the almost constant winds and (supposedly) many sunny days that occur around here. Not far away lay Cape Campbell (South Island’s most easterly point) and Boo Boo Stream. Once past Atacama (not a desert but a farm dwelling) I was in and out of Taimate (‘tea-flavoured Coffee-mate’) and upon the tiny roadside settlement of Ward, where I paused for a breather outside the Flaxbourne Tearoom MOBIL petrol and diesel stop. A tourist bus pulled up and one of the occupants who spilt out of the doors was a short-haired girl from Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. ‘A dive of a place,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m here!’ She was now trying to get a job in New Zealand as a physio, but last year she had attempted cycling around some of the country. At one point she’d cycled over Lewis Pass (where I hope to find myself in a few days time) into a headwind. ‘It was so hard,’ she said, ‘I cried all the way!’