by Josie Dew
In fact there was scarcely any traffic of any kind, so maybe everyone knew something that I didn’t. But I carried on anyway, inching my way steadily up the gradual gradient alongside the great Waiau River that rushed downwards in the opposite direction. The scenery proved dramatic and rugged, riding as I was between the Hanmer Mountains dominating the views on my right and the Organ Range and Doubtful Range on my left. I passed over Cow Stream, Calf Stream and Wee Stream and then the swirling River Waiau transmuted into the Boyle. The higher I rode, the more the wind felt like cycling into a jet-engine testing tunnel. Churning cloud swirled all around. Occasionally the cloud emptied its contents heavily on top of me. Towards early afternoon a storm that must have been lying in wait behind the Spencer Mountains, or possibly even the Victoria Range, launched its attack when I was at my most vulnerable – out in the open with not a hint of shelter. As the sky detonated with a thunderous roar and jagged cracks of lightning flashed all around, I raced onwards through a blinding deluge of horizontal rain. With senses heightened and skin tingling from the electrical ions charging the atmosphere, I felt slightly concerned that I might be incinerated at any moment by a direct bolt of fire.
Several miles up the road I spotted the remnants of a shanty shed, which looked just the job for diving into for a bit of halfhearted sheltering from the storm. So in I lunged out of the rain only to discover rain coming through the roof, pouring down in a black funnel. But by standing up tight against one of the dank corrugated corners I could keep my head out of the flow, only my body getting wet by the ricocheting splash-back off the sodden ground. Then suddenly the downpour stopped and the roof dripped and the rain moved on, with the lightning quivering on its flanks like a protective barrage.
More rivers came and went, displaying conflicting ideas of optimism such as Hope River and Doubtful River. Then came the rivers of Nina and Lewis. I also passed a mountain called Mons Sex Millia, which rather begs the question of just exactly what it was that Nina and Lewis got up to when they came this way.
The scenery continued wild and remote, the road continued free of traffic and the wind continued to be no help whatsoever. Then somewhere around Windy Point, a flattish stretch of open wind-battered road, I came across a car that had slewed across the road, slammed into some small rocks and was now in a sorry state at rest in a ditch. The car was a hired car, appropriately a Rent-a-Dent (though I don’t think it was part of the contract to rent it to dent it), driven by an American couple. They had both clambered out of the dented door and were now standing in various tragic attitudes about the car. I asked them if they were all right. Yes, no injuries, but owing to them having whacked the undercarriage of the vehicle against a football-sized boulder and dislodging the oil department, which was now leaching oil into the ground, the car understandably did not want to start. The woman, a long ratty-haired, pale dishcloth of a person with a splintery voice, had been at the wheel at the time of the incident. She had been driving along, travelling in the opposite direction to me, and then for no apparent reason lost control, skidded and flew off across the other lane and into a ditch. I find it rather worrying how someone can be driving along a wide, flat straight road in good visibility with no other vehicles around and no animals running out under the wheels, and then suddenly just go ploughing off the road. If I had been a minute or two earlier, she could quite easily have crashed into me and sent me for a sorry Burton.
The man, who clearly didn’t know his arse from his elbow, stood looking at the car with dazed befuddlement. Had Gary been here, I bet he would have rolled up his sleeves and been under the car like a shot, knife clamped between teeth and various assortments of spanners and strips of wire and zip-ties clasped in hand. A few minutes of whistling later, he would emerge with black hands and a splattering of oil streaks on his face, then throw up the bonnet and fiddle with something in the murky inner depths of the engine before declaring the job done and the car ready to go. Gary loves engines, anything from car engines to steam engines (both external and internal) to traction engines to early plane engines (like the Tiger Moth’s radial engines). I’ve learnt a lot more about engines from Gary than I ever really wanted to know (or deem necessary), from flame-ignition Crossley’s (gas engines) to 8-stroke aeromotors (once used for driving water pumps on remote farms in America) to sleeve-valve engines (as found on old Buicks where instead of overhead poppit valves the actual cyclinder liner shifts and rotates) to Wankel rotary engines (a dubious-sounding but apparently wild device conceptually evolved from an internal combustion engine usually found lurking beneath the bonnet of a Mazda). And for some reason he knows how they all work. The other day when I gave him his bi-weekly phone call from a phone box, you’d think we might talk about something vaguely romantic or even topically interesting, but instead I heard myself having a conversation about Stephenson’s Links and fly ball governors. To the uninitiated this may sound like an euphemism for a spot of below-the-belt talk, but rest assured, a fly ball governor is nothing more dodgy than a device that regulates engine speed in a revolution-per-minute type of way.
Anyway, all the Rent-a-Dent man had to say was, ‘You gotta cell phone?’ Indeed I did (I use it to text Gary about four times daily to talk about the delights of the lifecycle of a fly ball governor). The man wanted to ring for help but could get no signal on his cell phone, so why he thought my phone would have a signal was a little mystifying. The reason he could get no signal on his phone was simple: we were in the middle of the empty mountains about fifty miles from any signs of habitation. If you’re a telecom company, you don’t just stick up a telecommunications mast willy-nilly in the middle of nowhere for the fun of it. But the man insisted I turn my mobile on and then expressed surprise, followed by despair, at how I too failed to receive a signal.
I asked the Rent-a-Dent couple if they were in need of any sustenance (I am after all a travelling larder on wheels) but no, they were quite happy in their unhappy way with their bottle of Coke, so, assuring them that some form of vehicle would be along before too long, I took off into the wind.
A long time later I entered a thicket of forest of green dripping beech trees and the road got steeper and steeper as it climbed upwards in a stepped sort of way. The rain returned and it poured and poured. Everything was looking very subalpine. Mini waterfalls tumbled down the hillsides and the light was washed from the sky as a thick mist descended. Despite being wet, it was all rather lovely. On one corner I passed a white cross upon which were scribed the simple letters: DAD R.I.P. Then out of nowhere a motorbike came hurtling down the hill, braked hard when it shouldn’t have braked hard and flew into a big fish-tailing skid heading directly for me, which gave my heart an invigorating moment. The rider managed to gain control just before slamming into my side and carried on his way. I wish people wouldn’t do things like that. It’s not good for my welfare.
The mist grew thicker and the gradient steeper and the slower I cycled the denser the clouds of sandflies became. Unlike Australia, where most of the country’s wildlife tries its darnedest to sting you, eat you, poison you or burrow into your flesh and start raising a family, the only predators on human life in New Zealand are a timid spider with a puny bite (non-fatal) and the sandfly. Sandflies are as extremely irritating as Scottish midges, only they are bigger and more ferocious in their bites, drawing blood and welts that can make a victim look as if they’ve come down with some horrible pock-marked disease. And unlike their name suggests, they don’t just dwell in sandy regions. As was evident from the number that were crawling up the sleeves of my jacket and down my neck and under my shirt, they particularly like sweaty cyclists struggling up thickly forested mountains in the rain.
As it was growing dark and as I didn’t know exactly how far away the top of the pass would be (though I sensed not far), I made the most of a little camp spot down beside a gushing stream called Deer River. This was a Department of Conservation site. The DoC operates over 120 camping grounds around the country in national parks and
reserves, and in maritime, forest and farm parks. More often than not these tend to be set deep in the bush, on distant sweeping beaches or beside isolated lakes. Most are just an expanse of stony ground reached by a track. Some provide water, some don’t. Ditto toilets. Deer River was not much more than a lay-by, set away from the road down a dip. The choice of ground on which to pitch a tent was either hard and rocky or wet and mossy. There was a pit toilet set in a whiffy hut. The only water supply was the river. There is something very enjoyably back to nature about washing your hands and face in a cold mountain river in the rain and then scooping up the cold clear water and slurping it down your throat.
Deer River was deserted so I flung my tent up on one of the mossy wet patches as fast as possible before a cloud of sandflies could make themselves at home on my skin. But I wasn’t fast enough. When I threw myself inside I found the inner walls of my tent wallpapered with the bastards. The next half an hour was spent on a murderous mission taking great pleasure in slaughtering every sandfly I could either see or find with the beam of my headtorch. Some fell into the hotpot I was making in my pan, but I didn’t bother hoicking them out. I was too tired and hungry for that. And anyway I considered their presence as an extra protein count.
As night fell an odd stillness dropped over the forest and welled up in the mist from the ground. There are people who live in cities who couldn’t sleep in a place like this because of the silence: silence can be like noise, dinning against the eardrums. But I love the lonely remoteness of it all – just so long as an axe murderer doesn’t decide to turn up on the scene.
9
Moana, Lake Brunner, West Coast, 3 March
Late during the night two headlights appeared out of the mist, boring a tunnel of light into my tent. I lay as still as a corpse hoping it wasn’t an axe murderer on the loose. This morning I discovered it was an innocent motorhome belonging to a retired couple of Kiwis travelling about the country. The husband, a bearded whippet, said to me as I was packing up my tent, ‘Have you found the natives friendly?’ Which made it sound as if the country was running amok with naked forms in loincloths wielding blunt instruments.
It was still raining when I set off into the cold foggy mist. The top of the pass came sooner than I expected – about 5 km from Deer River – but with the heavy mist making it impossible to see a thing I only knew I had reached the top when the road suddenly started falling away. The trees were still thick and green and dripping and I could hear the roar of the Maruia River crashing downwards through the forests of red and silver beech.
The last three days have been wet and hilly, but because I felt bursting with energy I went veering off course and have got nearly two hundred unplanned kilometres under my belt. From the Lewis Pass I rolled west, then north, then east, then south and then west again. In other words I’d gone round in one big hilly circle. All in the name of fun, you understand. I sprang through Springs Junction, rose up over Rahu Saddle (much puffing), skirted Mount Haast and glided down through dense bushy woods set among steep hillsides laced with fetching babbling brooks and small waterfalls. Then came Inangahua Gorge and the old gold-mining cowboy town of Reefton. An information board in the town told me that Reefton is famous for having been the first place in the southern hemisphere to generate and reticulate its own electricity for public use, back in 1888. Well, I never.
The other thing I learnt about Reefton (apart from the fact that it had a shop called Rags to Retro and that the town is named after the gold-bearing quartz reefs and was once nicknamed Quartzopolis) is that the summers in Reefton are hot and dry (funny, it’s still summer now and I’ve never seen so much rain) and that when it does rain, the locals don’t consider it rain, but champagne for the rainforest.
From Reefton I soared north alongside the Inangahua River through Waitahu (‘I’m waiting here, thanks’) and Inangahua Landing and Inangahua Junction to Inangahua (‘questionably cross person’) passing en route Larry’s Creek and Mount Copernicus (‘horse-riding policeman who arrested us’). Next it was east along the broad Buller River, which carves the deep Buller Gorge from the jagged mountain peaks and which once carried a phenomenal amount of gold, turning places like Lyell into bustling mining towns. I rode over the Alpine Fault Line that shook the area to extreme in the 1929 Murchison and 1968 Inangahua earthquakes. At O’Sullivan Bridge it was south to follow an undulating road (though it proved a lot more dulating than un) through the coniferous podocarp (‘fishy feet?’) forests as I climbed upwards following a downward-flowing Maruia River over Shenandoah Saddle. Next came Frog Flat with views of Rappahannock Saddle (‘hammocky-style wrapping of bicycle seat’). Before I knew it I was back in Springs Junction and Reefton and then I was cycling south down the road that I had meant to cycle south down before I had turned north then east then south then west.
A sweeping road bordered by fields of cows and sheep saw me shooting along beside the railway and the Grey River through Ikamatua and Ahaura, where the New Zealand Truth headline sandwich board informed me that there was a ‘DRUG HELL IN GANG BROTHEL’. At Stillwater I looked around the graveyard where thirty-three men and boys killed in 1896 in the country’s worst mining disaster are buried in a mass grave. Sixty-five men and boys were killed in total (which was virtually everybody underground at the time) by a methane explosion when they were working down the nearby Brunner Mine.
I’m now camping at Moana, overlooking Lake Brunner and surrounded by magnificent hills and mountains. I had hoped to cycle further inland towards the Alps and Arthur’s Pass, but my ankle (Achilles tendon department) has suddenly wonked on me and doesn’t want to push me any further. So there I was calling it a day, with tent just put up, when who should arrive on the scene but the travelling threesome – Bridget, Anne-Marie and Pete. Back on the Kaikoura coast, Pete had told me in his northern way that what would make him ‘rhaat happy’ about being in New Zealand would be seeing an Austin A35 with sticking-out indicators. (Until quite recently, before most New Zealand cars were imported cheaply second-hand from Japan, the country’s roads were full of Ford Anglias, Triumph Heralds, Morris Oxfords, Austin Cambridges. There are still quite a lot around, but they mostly now sit in quiet retirement in fields and backyards.) And somewhere between Kaikoura and Moana he spotted one so was well pleased. Anne-Marie, in that strong Glaswegian accent, told me that making herself understood in New Zealand was not easy. Last night she was in the pub and asked the barman for two packets of crisps. He just stared at her with a look of complete incomprehension. So she repeated her request and got two pints of lager.
Bridget, being heavily into Reiki and crystals and meditation and dousing, took it upon herself to heal my ankle. Under her instruction, I crawled into her tent and lay flat on my back on her Therm-a-Rest sleeping mat. She crawled alongside and started hovering her hands above my clapped-out ankle. After a while she asked whether I could feel a healing heat pass into my body. Err, no, Bridge. Can’t say I can. In fact, never mind heat, I’m feeling a little chilly.
Bridget, undaunted by my unreceptive body, continued to float her hands above it in a floaty manner. Things then turned so floaty that I fell asleep. When I woke up, Bridget was still there trying to do things with my meridians and inner energy canals and narrow-boat passages. She then told me to smile at my ankle. Bridge, you loopy nutter. It’s an ankle – not a person! I can’t smile at my ankle. Especially when it’s stopping me from cycling!
Undeterred by my non-believer’s outburst, Bridget continued with her hovering-handed pursuit. I had to admire her staying power. Anyone else would have given up on me long ago. Finally I managed to get her to give herself a break and acknowledge that my unresponsive body must simply be dead to the world in certain areas. So, after rummaging around for a while in the depths of her substantial homeopathic medical kit and feeding me with a mixture of ruta and rhus tox, she flopped down beside me and for the next couple of hours we lay in the tent talking. Or maybe I should rephrase that – we both lay, but she talked. B
ridget was a great talker and in between dozing off several times (well, it was getting on for midnight and I’d had a busy day getting nowhere fast) I heard quite a bit about her life, like how in 1998 the pains in her joints got so bad that she could scarcely walk. Sometimes her whole body would go into intense spasms and seizures. The doctor was no help whatsoever so that was when she turned heavily alternative. One day she was doing Reiki on herself and she suddenly felt all the pain wash out of her through her feet. Later the pain returned, though I’m not sure if it entered through her feet or via other means. Because of all the pain, Bridget had to give up her work as an eco-architect. But last year she had started working again whereby she became involved in an eco-project, which (if I’ve got this right) concerned her designing some sort of means to generate power for Scotland using nothing more than icicles and frozen water. Seems she won all sorts of awards for it. But then she’s pretty bright, is Bridget.
Next, she told me about her family (a complicated saga) before progressing to how she had met Anne-Marie in a walking-cum-climbing club and then they went cycling together. When Bridget got the idea to cycle in New Zealand and asked Anne-Marie to come with her, Anne-Marie said she couldn’t afford it, so for Anne-Marie’s fiftieth birthday party they had a ceilidh for 150 people and Bridget told everyone to give Anne-Marie money instead of a present and about £800 in total was given, which meant Anne-Marie could afford the flight to New Zealand after all. Phew! Bridget said she was very competitive by nature, but it was good for her having Anne-Marie here as it prevented her from racing ahead at top speed. Though I’m not sure Anne-Marie would agree with that.
Moana, Lake Breuner, West Coast, 4 March