by Josie Dew
This road took me into bigger, wilder country, similar to parts of the west side, but now in Imax – sparky snow-peaked mountains, dense all-enveloping forests of mountain beech, gaunt eroded hills, high open country of golden tussock and swaying toetoe grass and plentiful rivers all set in a dramatic, desolate landscape. I passed Klondyke Corner and Bealey Spur and Mingha River, which joined forces with the Bealey River, which itself joined forces with the broad Waimakariri River. It was these rivers that once posed such a challenge for the Cobb and Co. coach parties; they would frequently flood, causing either days of delay or a raft of drowned passengers when some drivers dared to force a way through. All over Canterbury the wide rivers proved major obstacles to nineteenth-century travel and settlement, as they did to much of New Zealand. Between 1840 and 1870 so many people drowned in rivers that Parliament went so far as to suggest that drowning be classified a natural death.
As I climbed Goldney Saddle the sun sank and the light flattened, the shadows stretching across the open land as the mountains receded. Soon I was upon Lake Pearson, set against erosion-torn hillsides, where I put up my tent in the basic DoC site beside the perfect mountain-reflecting water. The dark came quite suddenly with a sky of low and brilliant stars.
Springfield, Selwyn, Canterbury, 8 March
You might have thought that I’d have learnt my lesson yesterday – that I shouldn’t expect any downhill until a downhill came my way and then be very grateful that it came at all – but all morning I was cycling a mostly uphill battle when I imagined I would be having a downhill bonanza. I knew Porter’s Pass lay ahead, but I also knew I was already high in the mountains so I didn’t think passing by this Porter would be too much of an ordeal, even though at 944 metres it is a smidgen higher than Arthur’s Pass. After all, I was at an altitude of about 2,500 feet and I was heading for Christchurch at sea level. Again, the socking great headwind didn’t help. And again, the scenery made up for any strugglesome misgivings. I inched onwards past Flock Hill and the Craigieburn Ski Field and Broken River Ski Field and Mount Olympus Ski Field and Mount Cheeseman Ski Field (see, I must be high), all up in the Craigieburn mountains. Then on past the Torlesse mountains and Staircase on my left, with the fortress-like limestone outcrop of Castle Hill on my right.
Somewhere around here a man driving towards me stuck his head out of the window and shouted, ‘You got one fat hill ahead!’ This was of no help whatsoever because he didn’t say whether it went up or down. But when I finally reached the top of Porter’s Pass, I realised he meant down. I stood on the brink of the pass surveying the fun that lay ahead: one steep descent of multiple switchbacks dropping 400 metres in 4 kilometres.
Two girls turned up in a hired car, one with cropped bright red hair, the other in floaty clothing. They spent the first five minutes standing near me in a state of (how shall I put this?) wandering hand-and-tongue interlockment, before expressing amazement that I was travelling alone on a bike! As I mounted my steed in preparation for an eye-streaming downhill, the red-haired girl said, ‘Have a real cool time, man!’
And a cool time I had – it wasn’t exactly hot up here in these mountains – leaning into the switchbacks and overtaking a beached whale of a motorhome that braked on every corner. I shot past Kowhai (‘Hawaiian cow’) River and through the Waimakariri Valley, where the land went backwards at a low even roll to Springfield, once a staging-post for the Cobb and Co. coach parties. In the early 1900s more than 5,000 people used to live here, due to the railway and tunnel construction. Today there are but a mere measly 400. Short in number Springfieldites may have been, but big on friendliness they seem. Especially the owner of the small store here who threw in a few extra bananas for nothing.
I’m camping tonight on a nice little mown patch of grass down at Springfield’s domain campground. In New Zealand the ‘domain’ is an open grassed areas of public land in towns or cities. Usually you can put a tent up on it for free. There’s generally a public toilet somewhere around. Where the local council operates a more organised domain camping with basic facilities, you sometimes have to pay a bob or two.
Templeton, just outside Christchurch, Canterbury, 9 March
Good thing I stick to my tent for accommodation purposes. News this morning is of a man who was staying last night at a youth hostel in Punakaiki (just north of Greymouth) being rushed to Grey hospital with a knife embedded in his head. Seems the man, who’s about my age, was stabbed in the chest as well as the head. The paper says his injuries have been described as ‘moderate’. If having a knife embedded in your head is a moderate injury, what would, say, having your head cut right off be classified as? A fair to middling injury, perhaps?
When I arrived at the Springfield domain last night, I only had a deluge of magpies for company – the Australasian variety, that is, which are a far cry from European ones. Magpies in New Zealand look about twice the size with a plethora of pied plumage. At nesting time they can get very aggressive and go on dive-bombing missions – smacking into people’s heads. But by far the most distinctive thing about these birds is the rippling flute noise they make, a sort of gurgling burble of babbles as if someone is holding their heads under water.
Just before dark an elderly couple from Nelson turned up in a campervan, shortly followed by two cyclists. This morning I had a little chat outside the toilets with the cyclists. They were John and Pip from Nottingham and they knew I was Josie from a similar neck of the woods. Pip did something in computers, whereas John used to be a professional mechanic for a bike team though said he now did anything to get work. ‘Everyone comes to me with bikes to fix and wheels to make, but I don’t make any money that way. If I charged £500 for a set of wheels, then maybe I would.’
Both John and Pip had been to New Zealand before. In fact, they had spent so much time down here that they must surely have cycled almost every road in South Island. They were last here about three years ago and told me that, even in that time, the amount of traffic on the roads had increased hugely. Last September, when back in Nottingham, Pip had a head-on collision with a car and broke her wrist as well as acquiring lots of other pains and her new Mercian was completely smashed. So she was now on her mountain bike. They had both toured in other countries, but strangely, they didn’t enjoy cycling in Italy at all. ‘The Italians are just nasty people,’ said John. ‘We’d have been better off being German!’
Later this morning I bowled along the flat roads of Canterbury, through Sheffield and Darfield and Kirwee and Sandy Knolls. Darfield was notable for its surplus of farm supply merchants, specialising in a very high-quality line of stock boots. Darfield was also notable for a small happening that occurred outside the small Four Square supermarket. A big stocky farmer, built like a bulldozer in a china shop, walked towards the Four Square, but before entering he removed his great clod-hopping boots – stock boots, just like the ones in all the stores, and almost as clean – and left them beside the door outside. He then walked around the supermarket in his socks as if he had entered some Holy Shrine.
To give the busy main road a miss, I veered off along a rumpled road of potholes and gravel to Rolleston. This was when my ankle suddenly twanged again. Only worse than last time. It felt as if my Achilles tendon was being spiked with barbed wire and bee stings. I pressed on in a mostly one-legged fashion passing farms that finally gave way to patches of commercial land – a mountain of bald tyres, a stepped angular cliff of scrap-metal car wrecks, several aircraft hangar-sized warehouses – and into an area of car dealerships, fast-food outlets and shopping plazas. Here I rang the number that Nurse Jackie had given me for the sports injury clinic in Christchurch and I booked an appointment for tomorrow with a man called Dr Tony Page.
Tonight I’m camping in a shabby suburb of Christchurch alongside a travelling circus that includes a woman in orange braided bunches walking about in a top hat and dangly clothing. I’m sandwiched between a burger van man and a lot of Maori. Strutting among this melee is a big vain rooster admiri
ng its reflection in various vehicles’ hubcaps. At least it was until I heard a large squawking commotion and saw a brute of a dog tearing the rooster apart. An old Maori woman came flying out of a caravan and launched into an enraged attack on the dog’s owner, who was hurriedly trying to scoop the remnants of the rooster into a plastic carrier bag. When the dog and owner had disappeared she came over to me and said, ‘That bastard dog should have a bloody muzzle, it should. I fed that rooster, I did. And I fed its wife – or whatever they have. Bastard dog. I’m going to report that bastard owner, eh?’
Akaroa, Banks Peninsula, Canterbury, 12 March
A few days ago I limped into Christchurch – second largest city in New Zealand, founded as a well-to-do Anglican enterprise, intended to recreate a little slice of England in the South Pacific. People call Christchurch the most English city outside of England. There may be punting on the River Avon and a hundred-year-old cathedral, but the whole place still looks and smells very Kiwi to me. Christchurch is also known as ‘the world’s aerial gateway to Antarctica’ – which is not a boast that the likes of Manchester or Margate can make.
Dr Tony Page was a very fast-talking Kiwi who had me flat on his couch as he poked and prodded while bending this and tweaking that. He didn’t think I’d done anything too serious to my Achilles. He seemed pleased that the tendons were thin ones and knobbly-free as opposed to fat ones with lumps. He said the ankle was more irritated than anything else and gave me some dropping-heel-off-step exercises to do and advised me to give cycling a rest for a few days.
So that’s what I’m doing now, camped high on a hill overlooking the volcanic crater-cupped harbour and French-flavoured town of Akaroa. Akaroa sits out on a limb on the Banks Peninsula, which itself stands out like a giant clenched fist just south of Christchurch. When Captain Cook sailed this way in 1770, he initially mistook the peninsula for an island, which it had been several millennia ago, so he wasn’t too far out.
To abide by Dr Tony’s advice, I reached Akaroa by bus – a memorable experience of air-conditioned awfulness. Claustrophobically sealed in, I became progressively more crotchety that I wasn’t out in all that wind, cycling up the large number of incredibly strenuous-looking hills which seemed to cover the Banks Peninsula from top to toe. There were about fourteen passengers on the bus. The man in the seat in front of me had a plastic-wrapped straw tucked behind his ear like a smoker might have a cigarette or a carpenter a pencil. He was from Virginia and was over here to visit his daughter, who lived just outside Christchurch in Lyttelton. ‘I’ve booked myself on to one of these organised hiking treks,’ he told me. ‘Only a two-day one, starting in Akaroa. Any more than that and I’m not sure my old body could take it.’
A blonde girl sitting across the aisle with a Windtunnel rucksack, and sunglasses pushed back on her head keeping her hair out of her eyes like an Alice band, overheard our conversation and said to the ear-straw man, ‘I’m going on that same trip. I’m now wishing I’d chosen the four-day trek.’
‘Same scenery,’ said the straw man.
‘I know,’ said the Windtunnel girl, a city worker from London, ‘but four days would give you more time to appreciate the views without rushing through it.’
‘By the look of the size of these hills,’ said the man, ‘I’m not so sure I’ll be in any state to appreciate anything, let alone the scenery.’
Our bus driver was a bearded man called Bob. He was attached to a microphone over which he insisted on giving us a lighthearted commentary whether we wanted it or not. He also gave us a bit of flora and fauna talk. Driving past Lake Ellesmere, he told us that the area around here is akin to a desert and that if we looked carefully, the scrub of bushes we were passing sprouted leaves on the inside while being prickly on the outside in order to conserve water. Careful examination of roadside bushes is not possible when travelling past them at 100 km/h, so as they were but a mere blur we had to take Bob’s word for it.
Lake Ellesmere is a large but shallow expanse of water – more a lagoon than a lake – covered with more than 70,000 black swans (these are Australian black swans, introduced in the 1860s to control the watercress – itself introduced – that was choking Christchurch’s Avon River). Bob told us how the lake was full of floundering fish (or should that be flounder fish?) and that the area was used for parachute practise during the Second World War. ‘Some of the men landed in the lake and one of them couldn’t swim and started thrashing around in a panic. Then he noticed some of the others standing up in the water and realised he was only in waist-deep water. So he just walked out and was fine.’
My neighbour on the campsite here in Akaroa was Greg from Thatcham, Berkshire. He was cycling in New Zealand for about six months (with two months left), only he was travelling by bus at the moment because he’d left his bike and Bob Yak trailer back at a bike shop in Christchurch to get some new bearings put in. This was his first ever cycle tour. He had backpacked around New Zealand in 2001 and kept seeing people on bikes so thought he’d give it a go. ‘In only three years there’s been big changes,’ he said. ‘More traffic and I don’t remember campsites like these resembling car parks.’
Greg was right. At most of the main campsites here hardly anyone turned up under their own steam. Those in tents mostly arrived in a hire car or a 4WD. But mostly it was retired couples travelling around the country in caravans, campervans, motorhomes or big buses, like America’s recreational vehicles.
Greg was a bit of a deep person, and always looked slightly troubled. When I asked him what he did at home, he said, ‘Be unhappy mostly.’
I got him to elaborate. ‘I’m not happy in Britain at all,’ said Greg. ‘The TV’s crap. So’s the radio. And I see people around me and all they want is a little house with a little car with little children and a little two-week holiday. Is that all there is to life in Britain? I’ve owned my house for twenty years and I thought: I’m going to move. Get away from the area. Start afresh. But then I thought that after a few weeks’ frenetic activity you are back in another little house and it starts all over again. You go to work, you go to the supermarket, you go on your two-week holiday. I hate the things in the UK that people there consider important. It makes basic human existence so meaningless.’
Not so long ago Greg had gone on a trip to Alaska. ‘It had been a childhood dream,’ he said. ‘A wild animal thing. I had to pinch myself when I saw my first moose.’
Then he came home and got involved in a long-term relationship with Sally, a divorcee with two small children. ‘It was all going well, I was happy and thinking this is everything I ever wanted. I thought I’d get the house together – maybe even get married. We used to have this big ritual where after breakfast we would all go upstairs to the bathroom to clean our teeth. Sally would sit on the edge of the bath and her little boy would stand beside the basin while her daughter stood up on a box to reach and I would brush my teeth making silly faces at them to make them laugh. One time we were doing this and it was summer. The window in the bathroom had frosted glass, but the top window was open and I looked out and I saw this incredibly vivid image of the Alaskan mountains. I didn’t say anything at the time, but afterwards I would see the mountains quite often from this window so I took that as a sign that I wasn’t supposed to get involved in this relationship and ended it. It was a messy ending. Sally didn’t deserve that.’
Greg was now happy he had made the move to come away. ‘I love the simple lifestyle of travelling by bike,’ he said. ‘It puts everything in perspective.’
Although Greg had put money aside for his trip to New Zealand, the rent from his house in Thatcham would see him though Australia – his next port of call. ‘When I last came to New Zealand I did the same thing – got an agent to rent out my house. When I got home the tenants had left without cleaning the toilet. Which was no big deal so I just got on and cleaned it. But the agent said he had asked the tenants to clean the toilet before they left and didn’t think it was good enough that they had left with
out cleaning it. So he asked me how long I had spent cleaning it, and I said about two minutes. “Let’s make that half an hour,” said the agent. Then he asked me how much I had spent on cleaning products so I said, “I don’t know – a couple of quid.” So the agent said, “Let’s make that £5.” In the end I made £25 for cleaning my own toilet. It was the easiest money I’ve ever made!’
Greg said he wanted to get qualified in something when he got home. When he was younger he had always thought he wanted to be a farmer. ‘But then I decided farmers were boring people because all they ever do is talk about farming.’ Instead he got a job working for Panasonic – putting together the electronics of mobile phones, working in a shift of four days on, four days off. He now had other ideas for making money. ‘I fancy being a masseuse,’ he said. ‘It’s something I could do anywhere. And I’m told I’m good with my hands.’
Akaroa, Banks Peninsula, Canterbury, 17 March
The news today in Christchurch’s The Press was of the Queen swearing at a police constable patrolling the gardens of Buckingham Palace armed with a machine pistol of the kind used by diplomatic protection officers. The Queen had just returned to London after a break on her Sandringham estate and was unimpressed to find the new beefed-up security at the palace. When she set eyes on the officer and his MP5 Heckler and Koch she turned on him saying, ‘You can take that bloody thing away!’