by Josie Dew
This morning I was up early. So was Anne-Marie. In fact, she had eaten breakfast and was all packed up and ready to go, unlike Bridget and Pete who were still fast asleep in their respective tents. In the campsite kitchen Anne-Marie vented her frustration about Bridget with me, explaining she was just too intense and that she had decided she was going to go her own way. Not wanting to get too involved in the domestics of a threesome, I kept a neutral position. But I could see what Anne-Marie meant. Bridget could do your head in – in the nicest possible way.
When Bridget and Pete woke up and discovered Anne-Marie’s plans to go it alone, Pete was his usual laid-back self. As for Bridget, she joked to me on the quiet that Anne-Marie’s huffiness was all my fault. ‘The first time we met you,’ said Bridget, ‘was just after Anne-Marie had blown her top at me for the first time when we’d got to the top of that hill outside Blenheim and she said to me, “It’s not a fucking competition you know!” And now we see you here and she’s gone off her rocker again. You must be a bad influence!’
The owners of the campground are Jackie and Graham. Jackie, a short-haired no-messing woman, was a senior nurse in her time. She told me in no uncertain terms that I was not to cycle for at least three days on account of my malfunctioning ankle. As the nearest store around here is a good 40 km away in Greymouth, she offered to give me a lift into town so I could experience the joys of shopping at the Supervalue supermarket. So I left the travelling threesome to work out whether they were going to stick together or not and climbed into Jackie’s car. This was the first car I had been in for months and I can’t say it was a particularly pleasant experience. She drove like the devil incarnate.
‘Jackie, what is it about Kiwis that make them drive like lunatics?’ I asked.
‘There are only four million of us in this country – three million in the North Island, one million here in the South – and we’re used to our space,’ she explained. ‘We hate someone in front of us. Makes us go bananas. When I see someone up ahead of me I think: WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY WAY!’
Crikey. How very het-uppishly dramatic.
We then got caught behind a bus, which Jackie tailgated in an agitated fashion. She kept trying to squirt past and when the bus suddenly braked we nearly rammed it up its rear. This made Jackie even more irked and she pulled out and performed a supremely dangerous overtaking manoeuvre into the path of an oncoming vehicle. With an open view of the road we could see why the bus driver had suddenly braked: an Australian harrier was slowly flapping away from tugging at a lump of carrion in the middle of the road. Jackie yelled at the bus driver, ‘What did you brake for a bloody bird for? Jesus!’
As if you should just mow down a big and beautiful bird that was in your way.
Maybe it was just Jackie. She seemed to be a particularly impatient person. She told me she had spent two winters working as a nurse in a hospital in Bath. ‘Your National Health Service drove me nuts!’ she said. ‘It’s so antiquated! So badly managed! Us Kiwis and Aussies who go over there to work soon discover what a backward system it is. We say to you lot, “There are better ways to do this and we’re prepared to show you,” but you Brits just don’t want to know and say, “But we’ve always done it this way and won’t change now.” I mean, how frustrating is that?’
Jackie also said that the first time she went to work in the hospital in Bath a woman told her to make tea. ‘It was like an order!’ said Jackie. ‘So I told the woman I was a senior nurse and that in New Zealand senior nurses do not make tea. That they have hospital helpers to do that sort of thing!’
It wasn’t just the NHS that got Jackie’s goat. She said, ‘Unlike us Kiwis, who are by nature really quite aggressive, you Brits are so passive it drove me insane!’ She went on to tell me how when she first went to work in England she went to the bank to open an account. ‘In New Zealand we can walk into a bank and open an account on the same day and get all the necessary bank cards etc. But in the UK it took forever. Weeks! And you Brits put up with that sort of service!’
On another occasion Jackie went to the Post Office to buy some stamps and the woman behind the counter said very sternly to her, ‘Did you wait for my bell to ring?’ It was only then that Jackie noticed a long queue of people waiting in a special corralled area behind her. ‘They were all silently glaring at me for queue barging,’ she laughed. ‘My mum and dad say: we don’t do queues! If there’s a queue anywhere they want to go, they won’t wait.’
Later Jackie said, ‘Another thing that drives me nuts is Helen Clark and her bright brainwave to close down scores of rural schools. Brash says keep them open, but Helen Clark is hell-bent on closing as many down as possible. Up at Arthur’s Pass there used to be a school with eight children but it has been closed, which means the children now have to travel seventy kilometres each way to the nearest school – sometimes along icy and dangerous mountain roads. It’s completely insane!’
Jackie had a son who was working in England and a daughter who was training to be a nurse over here. This got Jackie on to Maori and Pakeha – another subject that got her hot under the collar. ‘When Labour got in with Helen Clark as prime minister, suddenly Maoris were given lots of advantages over Pakeha,’ said Jackie. ‘For instance, my daughter has had to pay to take herself through nursing college and is now in debt, while a friend of hers at college who is one-eighth Maori has had it all paid for her. That Helen Clark really drives me mad. I can’t stand the woman! She can’t seem to understand that we’re all New Zealanders now. There aren’t any pure-blood Maori left as they are all so interbred. That’s why Brash is suddenly so popular because he recognises we are all New Zealanders and should all be treated the same.’
This ‘One people, one law’ thing was something that a lot of die-hard Maori were quite wary about. They said it disguised the reality that Pakeha would, because of their greater numbers, define what that would mean by reinforcing ‘white privilege’. They said that ever since their first contact, Pakeha feared that Maori would dominate and frustrate their plans to colonise Aotearoa. Every day I heard on the radio or read something in the papers about the Land Wars or the 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the accord between the British Crown and the Maori that is the official founding document of New Zealand. Just the other night I heard on the radio a Maori man talking about the ‘era of colonisation, assimilation, deception, lies and rampant expropriation of indigenous resources, which has been corrupt, corrosive and must not continue.’
Moana, Lake Brunner, West Coast, 5 March
I’ve just found a four-day-old New Zealand Herald in the kitchen. The headline says: ‘AND THAT, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, WAS SUMMER’. Although I’ve been pelted by heavy rain in South Island over the last few days, it apparently hasn’t been half as bad as the rain in North Island. The Herald described how ‘summer ended in dramatic fashion’ when more heavy rain in the North Island yet again forced people from their homes and closed main highways. The army was on standby as rivers came close to bursting their banks, threatening areas already devastated by flooding. The highest recorded rainfall was at Mount Taranaki, which received more than 400 mm in twenty-four hours. Nearly one-and-a-half feet! As if that isn’t quite enough to take on board for one summer, New Zealand, which is renowned for being a windy place at the best of times, has just had its windiest February ever recorded.
When I came back from my Supervalue near-death drive yesterday with Jackie, I found no signs of the travelling threesome so I didn’t know whether they had patched up their differences and left en masse, or went their separate ways.
Today a rare thing happened: the sun shone. The lake shimmered and the mountains beckoned in the bright, clarified light. The air here was cool and had the same scrubbed clarity as that of Iceland. There was no way I could lounge around wasting a day like this so I decided to test my ankle by cycling 100 km (there and back) up the 3,032-foot Arthur’s Pass – which if you cycle from west to east is the hardest, steepest pass in the country. Jackie said t
he last five kilometres were virtually vertical and suggested I take the train. Taking the train may be a sensible move for preserving twanged ankles, but it’s not the same as cycling. But to appease the wrath of Jackie I compromised by cycling up the pass pannier-free. Well, pannier-free apart from my two front panniers. You can’t leave home without emergency rations of bananas and unnecessary clothing, you know.
All started off fairly fast and easy as I rode past Kangaroo Lake and Crooked River and Inchbonnie and the old tavern at Jacksons, which had once provided accommodation and fresh horses for the horse-drawn Cobb and Co. coach parties who made the arduous 270 km trip from Christchurch to the West Coast over the alps in the days of the Westland gold rush. As I joined the Otira River things started going upwards through the nigh-on deserted and ramshackle settlement of Otira with its derelict playground. By the time I hit the Otira Gorge and the newly built Otira Viaduct that traverses the alpine faultline and treacherous rock falls and shingle slides which stretch hundreds of metres from mountain top to the river at the foot of the gorge, I had reached the part on my map that says ‘Not suitable for caravans’. This was where things turned a bit stupidly steep, albeit in a spectacularly sort of stupidly steep way.
I struggled and I lopsidedly cycled but I made it to the top (with lungs and ankles still intact), where there stands a monument to Arthur Dudley Dobson. He is the Arthur of Arthur’s Pass and in 1864 he rediscovered the former Maori Route (the Maori crossed to the West Coast in search of greenstone – a form of jade which they made into tools and weapons and jewellery) while seeking a way to supply West Coast gold-diggers from Christchurch. The names on the road leading up here recall the calamities and torment that those gold-miners and road-builders suffered before the road was built: Starvation Point, Lake Misery, Death Corner. Arthur’s Pass marks the boundary between Canterbury and Westland, a boundary often reinforced by distinctive weather patterns. During an infamous nor’wester, you can leave on a hot and dry day on the Canterbury side of the pass only to descend into heavy rain in the West Coast’s Otira Gorge. But during a southerly or easterly, you can be West Coast-bound and leave the rain and the cold behind in Canterbury for a dramatic landscape of mountains and sea bathed in dazzling sun. Getting the winds right round here means a lot. Especially to cyclists.
Cycling up Arthur’s Pass is one thing. But cycling down it is quite another. It was the most ridiculous fast fun I’d had in a long time. The road immediately after the pass was so steep that I felt like my back wheel was going to flip up over my head. Everything apart from the road in front of me turned into a blur. At one point I caught up with a car with a bumper sticker that read: ‘I’M DRIVING THIS WAY TO PISS YOU OFF’. But I didn’t let it piss me off for long because I undertook a spectacular overtaking manoeuvre that sent my adrenalin levels almost into overdrive. By the time I arrived back at my Lake Brunner basecamp I was on a happy endorphin-bursting high. What a day!
10
Lake Pearson, Selwyn, Canterbury, 6 March
There were two cyclists in the campsite last night. Young Aussie lads called Robbie and Cameron. Robbie was on a mountain bike pulling a Bob Yak trailer so he only had a handlebar bag on his bike. Cameron had a road bike with two rear panniers and a top rack bag. They made it look as if I was carting around a couple of cows in my panniers.
This morning was well and truly murky with a thick rainy mist. When I walked up to the toilets in the night, the mist was so thick it felt like walking through water. Sitting in my tent having breakfast, I overheard Robbie tell Cameron how he had heard Cameron swearing at him in his sleep during the night. Cameron denied the accusations.
Robbie said, ‘You were, mate. You were saying, “You fucking bastard!”’
Cameron said, ‘Did I wake you up?’
Robbie laughed. ‘Of course you did, you bastard, coz I heard you, didn’t I?’
I went up and over Arthur’s Pass again today, but this time by train. My ankle felt fine(-ish) but I was not so sure it could take the strain with fifty kilos of kit on board. And anyway, I was a bit scared of Nurse Jackie’s reaction if she knew I was going to tackle cycling over this pass two days in a row. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Jackie – otherwise it could hurt.
There was only one train a day that passed through Moana from Greymouth. The trouble was that it didn’t stop unless you rang ahead and told the driver that you wanted to be picked up. It seemed that not many people did.
As the touristy TransAlpine Express (as it was known, though I don’t think it went much faster than running speed) didn’t leave Moana until 14.42, I spent the morning admiring the particularly ugly houses that were springing up on the lakeside – big and modernly boxy million-dollar monstrosities of corrugated iron and concrete. It’s amazing planning permission was ever granted to build such diabolical eyesores in such a scenic area. A nice bit of wood would have gone down a lot better.
After sauntering across a wobbly suspension bridge and going for a long walk in the jungle-woods, where I was attacked by clouds of flying ants, I wandered back to my bike along the lakefront. Here the Lake Brunner Yacht Club was based, containing boats with names like Barnacle, Nirvana, Ratbags and Glydeawave. As I was walking along, an upmarket boy-racer revved up unnecessarily fast in a souped-up car with go-fast stripes. The car’s licence plate was VENOM 8 and it pulled a trailer with an expensively sleek speedboat on the back called Extreme. Funny the lengths some people go to in order to try and toughen their image. The driver who got out was a puny mite with I suspect not a lot down his trousers. Thus the need to make up for what he lacked in size by the attachment of a couple of throaty engine roars.
The 14.42 arrived at 14.55. Only trouble was the guard’s van overshot the short platform because, the guard said, the driver nearly forgot to stop. The height of the floor of the guard’s van stood at least five feet above the track, so trying to lift an unwieldy overloaded bike above my head felt like trying to lift an elephant. Fortunately the guard gave me a hand, but even he struggled. ‘Jesus, mate,’ he said, ‘you got a couple of Maori in here, or what?’
The guard, a stout fella in his fifties with a large nose, round and pitted like a golf ball, was a friendly and jocular chap. Together with a stewardess called Vanessa, he made all the announcements on the train. But his announcements were quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard emanating from the tannoys of GNER or Southwest Trains back home. Here’s the nub of his first announcement: ‘Now it’s of some concern to me that many of you have been taken in by the seductive tones of Vanessa, but I’m happy to announce that she still has copious supplies of fruit cakes and cup cakes at her disposal.’ Then the next thing you heard him say was a sort of cry for help in strangled tones. ‘Help me, Sparky! Help me!’
It’s always good to know you’ve got a nutter on board.
As the train approached Otira and the mountains closed in, I caught snatched views of the road on which my legs had emitted a cry for help yesterday afternoon. Otira was where the disembodied voice of our guard reappeared, informing us that in its heyday Otira was a busy railway town with a population of 600. ‘Now it’s nothing more than a ghost town with a population of forty-five with a lot of vacant sections,’ he said. ‘This is the place to live if you like rain. It gets six metres a year compared to half a metre in Canterbury. Storms here are as intense as they are sudden, dropping as much as 250 mm of rain in twenty-four hours. Back in the seventies when I was a young man, I was overcome by the foolish notion that I wanted to be a stationmaster in Otira. So I brought my wife up here to show her where we might live. She looked at me real stern and she said, “You listen here, boy. You want to be a stationmaster in Otira, and you’ll be a single boy!”’
It was the coal and timber trade that first demanded a railway over the Alps and work began on the rail crossing soon after the road across Arthur’s Pass was completed. The major obstacle was the completion of the 8.5 km long Otira Tunnel, which, by the time it was finished in 19
23, was the longest in the southern hemisphere and the seventh longest in the world. The narrow-gauge single-track line drops from 620 metres above sea level on the Canterbury side to 483 metres on the Westland side of the tunnel, a gradient of 1:33.
When the TransAlpine Express entered the tunnel from Otira we left behind an anguished sky of broiling storm clouds. But by the time the train had emerged from the tunnel eighteen minutes later we were in bright crisp sunshine.
As I knew I would be arriving in Arthur’s Pass Village late afternoon, I thought I would probably camp the night there – hopefully not getting pecked to pieces by the inquisitively mischievous keas (large native mountain parrot – the only alpine parrot in the world), which, along with their traditional diet of leaves, fruit, buds, insects and carrion, have a fetish for rubber, particularly windscreen rubber and bicycle seats, which they tear apart with gusto with their big hooked bills. (Farmers aren’t so much concerned about rubber as they are their sheep, which they claim are killed by kea who grip the sheep’s backs and peck them to death.) But as sun seemed to be at a premium in this fair, storm-ravaged land, I thought it best not to waste the opportunity of cycling down the mountain in good weather, because tomorrow could well be a day of rain and gale-force winds. Before I cycled down, though, I cycled up – just the four or so kilometres to the top of the pass. Then I cycled back down, filling up on some over-priced supplies at the Arthur’s Pass store.
When you cycle down a mountain pass you imagine you’re going to go down, so it comes as a bit of a shock to find yourself going up. Well, this is not entirely true: I did go down but not as much as I’d been expecting and not half as much as the falling sensation I got when I plummeted off Arthur’s Pass in the opposite direction. And it always seems very inconsiderate of a mountain to put in a few little ups when you’re expecting a big down. The wind wasn’t helping either, blowing such a humdinging gale that even when I was cycling downwards it felt like I was going uphill. And when a down bit did come, it was accompanied with a sign that warned TEMPORARY ROAD SURFACE and plunged me into skiddy deep loose gravel – not a pleasant surface to be taken at speed, as it feels akin to ice.