by Josie Dew
I’ve spent every night camping in the small fenced-off tents-only area of the Poplar Heights section of the sprawling Lakeview Holiday Park and watched backpackers (mostly carpackers) and cyclists come and go. Someone outstaying even my stay was Andrew Pye from Australia. He was travelling around on a yellow mountain bike attached to a trailer. Before I arrived here, he had already been in Wanaka two weeks waiting for the Warbirds over Wanaka – the largest international airshow ever held in the southern hemisphere, featuring planes like de Havilland Vampires, Harvards, Hercules, Mustangs, Spitfires, water-landing Catalinas, Sopwith Camels and Fokker Dr1 triplanes. For years Andrew had had his own radio communications business, which he’d now sold along with his house and most of his possessions to move to New Zealand. He’d always been keen on planes, he had his pilot’s licence and in his spare time he built a plane back home in Perth and flew it three times across Australia. He now wanted to get a job flying tourist planes over Mount Cook.
One afternoon I was walking from the campground into town when I saw an Atomic Shuttle bus go past with a bike attached to the rack on the rear. I thought: I’ve seen that bike before. A minute later the bus stopped and I saw ex-threesome travelling Bridget staggering down the steps. After Pete had flown home she continued cycling south alone, but then decided to pack it in due to all the cold and the wet. For a few days Bridget was another addition to the Poplar Heights camp and she was surprised to find me still injured. I think Bridget felt I was in need of a little spiritual enlightenment: she gave me one of her books to read called Body Electrics – Life’s Turn On, plus a magazine she bought from the crystal shop in town. The magazine, Rainbow News – ‘Feed Your Soul’, had some unusual articles on offer like: ‘Taoist Abdominal Massage’; ‘Beyond Feng Shui’; ‘Soul Psychology’; ‘After Death Communication’; ‘Whispers from your Angels’; ‘Crystal Healing’; ‘The Chakras – A Practical Guide’; ‘Discover your Blocks with a Pendulum’. And I don’t think they’re talking about brake blocks you’ve lost down the back of the sofa. The magazine was also liberally furnished with adverts for things like ‘Soul Psychology Workshops’ and ‘Aurora – Colour Magnetic Crystal Sound Healing’. There was even a ‘DO-IT-YOURSELF SPACE CLEARING KIT – Picks up where Feng Shui leaves off! Learn to clear the energies of your space like a pro.’
Another passing inhabitant of the Poplar Heights camp spot was an Irishman with entangled hair – a ravelment of dreadlocks topped in a rainbow Rastafarian hat. He was trying to find work WOOFing (Working On an Organic Farm) and was travelling about South Island with a guitar and a backpack and a South Korean girlfriend. He told me how the West Coast was ‘feckin’ awful, man, for hitching’. One afternoon, up at Fox Glacier, they had packed up their tent and stood outside the campground at the side of the road for five hours. Not one person stopped to offer them a lift. Then it got dark, so they walked back into the campground and put up their tent again.
Katharine has been busy pummelling my ankle on a fairly regular basis. Lots of smoking needles have been stuck into it too. Seems to be working, though, as I’ve been swimming and walking and cycling every day – I even made it up the road to Mount Aspiring as well as the Treble Cone Ski Field without giving the twanged bits a set back.
Bridget became very friendly with Jenny, the owner of the crystal shop in town. In fact she became so friendly with her that she packed up her tent and was going to live with her for a while. One afternoon I was wandering past Jenny’s shop and stopped to read the small hand-decorated messages attached to the noticeboard outside. Messages like: ‘Inner peace creates world peace’; ‘I meditate everyday to nurture my soul’; ‘Once you have learned how to enter your Inner Kingdom, you have a special retreat within that is always available to you’; ‘You create your thoughts, your thoughts create your intentions, and your intentions create your reality.’
I was just pondering whereabouts within my anatomy I might find my Inner Kingdom (just south of my superior vena cava and north of my duodenum, perhaps?) when Jenny stepped out of the shop and invited me over for dinner that evening. Jenny lived in Albert Town on the other side of Mount Iron. It was about a five-minute drive or a two-hour walk. I decided to walk along the banks of the Clutha River, the largest river (by volume) in New Zealand, following a narrow path flanked with poplars and willows bathed in a halo of autumnal gold. There were maples too, looking on fire. They glowed red at the tips, then faded into orange and yellow.
By the time I arrived in Albert Town it was dark and I was navigating my route by headtorch. Jenny’s house was like a cosy cabin veiled with strings of prayer flags and painted in big bold colours. There was a big tent in the garden filled with a double bed. There was also a caravan, which was where Bridget was currently sleeping. I found Bridget inside the house, looking very at home with the dog and cats in front of a magnificent blazing log fire. When I asked Bridget how she was, she responded, ‘Physically or mentally?’
‘Just a general all-over synopsis would do,’ I said, while thinking how you often got more than you bargained for with Bridget.
Jenny offered me free rein to have a bath (my first in six months), but in the event I only had half a bath because I didn’t want to use up too much hot water. On my way out of the bathroom, and feeling hot for the first time in weeks (this was the longest I had been inside for three-and-a-half months), I noticed a shelf of books. One was called Succulent Wild Women – Dancing with your wonder-full self. Another was entitled Mapping Your Birthchart, which made me wonder whether such a process might involve contour lines and a scale of 1:350 000 along with a key indicating historic buildings and scenic reserves.
Jenny hailed from Dunedin and had spent quite a bit of time in both Canada and America. She had lived in Wanaka for twenty years and took over the shop last year. She now wanted to build a meditation centre. Since she’d been in Wanaka she’d seen big changes. ‘It was a small, quiet place when I first arrived,’ she said. ‘Now it seems as if all Wanaka is a vast building site.’
She was right. Wandering and cycling around Wanaka you couldn’t go anywhere within a short distance of the town without coming across an army of bulldozers carving out the hillside, marker tape delineating new building sites and subdivisions consisting of 300 or more ‘sections’, as they call plots over here. Some prices for houses had doubled or even trebled in just three years. Buyers were throwing money at the chance to buy a section for $500,000 to $1 million; a house with a lakeside view for $2 million to $3 million. Fancy gated communities were mushrooming out of the land with names like Sunrise Bay and Edgewater Resort. On the western side of the lake, Far Horizon Park was described as being ‘themed on an English village’ (what, with gangs of hoodies setting fire to the local bus shelter?). Most of the houses cost around $1 million and residents got a heated swimming pool, spa, gym, tennis courts, putting green, volleyball, petanque, and avenues of perfect trees and what was described as ‘schist landscaping’.
Before I left Jenny’s at midnight, she had invited me to stay the night. Although I could have fallen asleep quite easily in front of the fire, I didn’t want to break the chain of sleeping in my tent so I went back to the campground.
The night was crystal clear and hard-edged – the temperature in my tent an exhilarating minus 6°C complete with layer of ice on the inside of the fly. I wriggled down into my sleeping bag dressed in as many clothes as I possessed, including hat and gloves. To combat the cold nights I’d bought a hot-water bottle (essential survival polar-exploring equipment, I believe) and utilised vast wodges of old newspapers I found about the campsite, stuffing my whole tent full of the crumpled-up pages to act as insulation. My tent was now so full of balls of newspaper that when I unzipped the door in the morning all a passer-by could see when they looked in was a mountain of newspaper. The other morning I crawled out of my tent to see an elderly man leaning on the fence looking at me a little concerned as balls of newspaper avalanched out of the opening. When I had straightened myself uprigh
t and casually kicked a few balls back through the goal mouth of my door, he asked warily, ‘Do you have such a thing as a sleeping bag?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I just wrap myself in newspaper.’
And I think the man believed me.
Kurow, North Otago, 18 April
After the better part of a month getting nowhere, I’m suddenly steamrolling ahead at great guns, albeit in a backwards sort of direction. From Wanaka I was planning on heading north back to Twizel before heading south to the south of South Island, before heading north to the north of South Island and then north to the north of North Island, before heading south again. I’m still hoping to do all this cycling north and south of both North and South Islands, but not quite in the sequence that I had originally planned. This is because Gary has gone and put a spanner in my works, though a welcome spanner at that. When I last phoned Gary from Wanaka I discovered that all my trans-global naggings must have paid off, because he has suddenly decided to take the plunge and fly out with his steed to meet me. For Gary, this is quite a leap into the unknown as he is not the type to stray far from the familiarities of the highly tooled workshop of his comfort zone. Not that I think he hasn’t ever wanted to stray far. It’s just that working as a carpenter since the age of fifteen (he is now thirty-three) he has never had the opportunity or the money.
So from the end of May he is putting the building of buildings on hold and fleeing to what he’s been looking forward to all winter, which is summer, by flying to the opposite side of the world to have winter all over again. Not that I’m making too much of this point. Don’t want to put him off before he’s even begun. Anyway, I hear winter here can be really quite nice – as long as you like lots of rain, wind and cold. Sounds like summer all over again to me. What fun.
As I’ve only got a month to cycle back up to Auckland, I’ve been hurtling along at a lickety spit. Fortunately my conked-out ankle is now only semi-conked (just minor prickly twinges) so in the past week I’ve been making up for lost ground.
From Wanaka, Katharine gave me a lift in her clunking jeep-truck back over the Lindis Pass to Twizel. I’m surprised we made it that far as the heater wasn’t working, nor the temperature gauge, speedometer or rear door. The engine produced several last-leg splutters too. The Lindis Pass links northern Central Otago with Mount Cook and the Waitaki Basin of Mackenzie Country. As I had been trucked up and over it twice feeling highly fidgety I wasn’t out there cycling among the stark beauty of this remote hill country, I was determined I wasn’t going to pass by this pass except on my bike. So late one afternoon, as the sun burnished the golden hills, over I went, skirting Ewe Range, Wether Range and Snowy Top while dipping down over Dip Creek, Breast Creek, Camp Creek, Long Spur Creek, Short Spur Creek and Coal Creek. At Crippletown I joined up with the Clutha River again and over the next few days I forged my way through the desolate, treeless tussock country of Central Otago, which tends to be desert-like in summer and shrouded in snow in winter. I had a bit of both: desert sun during the day and a dusting of hill snow at night. The towns of Clyde, Alexandra and St Bathans once attracted thousands of gold-diggers, who rushed to uncover the treasure hidden beneath the bleak landscape. The towns are now at the hub of New Zealand’s stone-fruit and Merino wool industries.
Merino sheep were the first sheep in New Zealand and are the most amusing sheep I’ve ever seen. With rippling folds of wool hanging from their necks like dewlaps, they look as if they have climbed into a coat ten sizes too big. All rams and some ewes sport horns that protrude like handlebars from halfway down their heads, giving the appearance that their faces are suffering from subsidence.
There’s been much made in the news of late of nine-year-old Shrek, a Merino ram who had evaded the musterers for six years on Central Otago’s Bendigo Station. While living 1500 metres above sea level, Shrek’s fleece grew to 38 cm long. Then he was spotted hiding in a cave. He was relieved of his 20.5 kilo fleece in a televised twenty-five-minute shearing operation that took place just down the road in Cromwell and was broadcast around the world. Shrek has been in all the papers too – the headline in The Press reading: ‘WOOLY YARNS SPUN AS HEFTY SHREK LOSES LOCKS’. But Shrek faces competition from North Island pretenders for the handle of world’s woolliest sheep. The greater Waikato is laying claim to having three Shreks – dubbed the Taharoa Trio. One of the trio, caught in March, had wool 43 cm long, smashing claims that Shrek, at 38 cm, was the world’s woolliest sheep. Billy Black, one of the sheep farmers who tracked down the trio, said he was dubious as to the authenticity of Shrek. ‘I think it’s a pet one,’ he said. ‘The South Island one was just a tourist sheep. This is real North Island King Country sheep.’
Still roaming in Shrek land, I spent a couple of days cycling along the vehicle-free gravel track of the Central Otago Rail Trail that sidled alongside the Raggedy Range and through places like Chatto Creek, Omakau (‘Oh motherly cow’), Ranfurly, Daisybank, Rock and Pillar and Middlemarch. In summer this 150 km track, crossing nearly seventy bridges (including a couple of wooden trestle bridges), would be busy with bikers and hikers. But the whole route was now deserted – hardly surprising as the wind hurtling through the ravines careered into me from almost every direction, wrapping itself in a rage around my body and forcing me to push my bike to avoid being blown clean down the gullies.
Sometimes being alone and banged about by wind for so many hours can wreak havoc with your mind. For some reason, as I fought to control my bike in the maniacal gales, the only words I had going round and round my head were the stock phrases of Kiwis that have ingrained themselves into my brain: good as gold; sweet as; awesome. At one point along the Rail Trail, I stopped at the Omakau Four Square and heard all three much bandied-about phrases within the space of two minutes. A man with hair sitting close on top of his head like a small, tight-fitting stocking-stitch beanie walked past me in the store and said, ‘Hi! How’s it going?’
I was about to say, ‘Not very easily. It’s flippin’ windy! I’ve nearly been blown for a Burton once too often!’ But then I thought that was probably not what he wanted to hear, so I just said, ‘Fine thanks!’
When I paid for my food, the woman at the till said, ‘Good as gold.’
Then she handed the beanie-haired man a pack of cigarettes and he said, ‘Sweet as.’
Outside the store, the beanie-haired man asked me where I was cycling and when I told him he said, ‘Awesome!’ He walked back to his pick-up, in which he had left the engine running. Lots of people do that round here. It makes me want to lean through the window and switch the ignition off. But I haven’t been that brazen yet.
Another thing I’ve noticed about Kiwis is that, like the British, they tend to talk about the weather a lot. But unlike the British, who tend just to pass comment on the current conditions (‘Chilly today!’ ‘Bit wet!’ ‘Could do with some sun!’), Kiwis appear to be amateur meteorologists – much more involved with their isobars and approaching highs and lows. They all seem to know when a cold southerly is approaching and what’s going to happen when it slams into a more tropical front racing down from the north. Countless times I’ve been warned, ‘Ya bitter watch out, mate – ya don’t want to be stuck out there when a nor’wester is blowing!’
And whereas, say, The Times at home simply lists on its weather page the hours of sun, millimetres of rain and maximum temperature of various locations around the UK over the last twenty-four hours, New Zealand newspapers go to quite the other extreme. The New Zealand Herald, for example, lists the maximum temperature, the minimum temperature, the grass minimum, the 24-hour rainfall, the rainfall to date for the current month, the mean month rainfall, the rainfall to date this year, the mean annual rainfall, the humidity (%), the pressure (hPa), the maximum wind gust, the sunshine on the day before yesterday, the month’s sun until the day before yesterday, the average sun for the month, the sun for the year to date, the sun average for the year, the evapotranspiration (mm) and the soil temperature at 10 cm. All of whic
h, I’m sorry to say, I find quite riveting reading.
Then there’s our friendly National Radio. Every evening they broadcast a farming programme containing lots of weather talk interspersed among all the crop talk. Back home, the BBC tucks its Farming Today programme well out of the way at half past five in the morning. And only once a week on Monday mornings does it give a quick précis of what the weather has up its sleeve for the forthcoming week. National Radio’s farming programme, on the other hand, is broadcast at prime time listening. And it doesn’t just discuss the weather in intricate detail during every programme; it describes certain effects of the weather with an intricacy that almost borders on the fanatical. Take the hailstorm, for instance, that struck Hawke’s Bay yesterday afternoon. Instead of just saying a hailstorm hit the apple crop in Hawke’s Bay, the two presenters deliberated on the size and shape of the hailstones. ‘Fortunately the hailstones were small and round as opposed to large and jagged,’ remarked one of the men. ‘So the apples only suffered minimal damage.’ There then followed much discussion concerning the various shapes and sizes of hailstone that have wreaked havoc on crops in the past. I’d never heard a simple hailstone being given such extended airplay before. It was quite heartening.
Another thing about New Zealand weather: it doesn’t half produce some very uncloud-like clouds. Some are shaped like mushrooms or cones or rolls and rounded clumps, or are lens-shaped, looking as if aliens are coming in to land their spaceship. I’ve discovered these alien clouds go by the rather wonderful name of altocumulus lenticularis and are something which not that many people are lucky enough to see. I think New Zealand produces such chaotic weather and uncanny clouds due to its position in the world – out on a limb sandwiched between the volatile Tasman and the whimsical Pacific. Added to this mixture, cold air rushes up from Antarctica to collide with warm tropical air spilling in from the north. Thus meteorological anarchy ensues.