Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

  Last night I camped on a small patch of sodden grass at Hu-Ha Bikepackers, a fine bunkhouse overlooking the Lookout Range and the Hope Range. In the visitor’s book, I saw that Karin and Marten Yurman, the Dutch cyclists I met at The Pedallers Rest with the travelling threesome, had passed this way not so long ago. ‘What a view!’ they wrote. ‘Good records, nice paintings, loved the hot tub. Thanks.’ The owners, Sam (who had a box load of his old LPs for hostellers to listen to – Bob Dylan, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, Talking Heads, the Police, the Rolling Stones) and Jo (a chef and artist), lived upstairs. No one else was staying, but Sam lit the woodburner for me. When he’d gone back upstairs, I turned off the light and watched the fire flaring and crackling, all the shadows in the room retreating to the corners.

  Two scenic saddles lay in my way this morning. The first was Hope Saddle that, once I was over top, plunged me down a steep, twisty gradient alongside the Pinchback Range through forestland and then farmland. Spooners Saddle gave me a good vantage point for distant views over Nelson and for acting as temporary weathervane: a menacing curtain of black cloud was rolling in off the Tasman. With no time to dally, I sped off the saddle, hurtling downwards along with the logging trucks. After a fast spin I was back in what could be called civilisation – though it didn’t appear very civilised, with cars and jams and traffic lights and road rage among the busy bottlenecks of the Nelson suburbs.

  Cycling through Hope as the first fat raindrops began to explode on the tarmac in front of my wheels, I spotted a bunch of keys in the gutter. A photofit driving licence attached to the keys told me they belonged to Catherine Anne Newport. Her Video Ezy membership card was also attached. When I handed the keys in at Richmond police station, the officer on duty took one look at the photo on the licence and said of the woman who peered out at him with long straight hair, a double chin and glasses the size of television screens, ‘Well, she’s a bit gawky-looking! She could do with losing weight and getting some new specs!’ This from an officer who was nothing if not ovoid himself.

  Pelorus Bridge, Marlborough, 13 May

  More rain. More floods. Tent, clothes, body resembled large sponge. You could wring several bucket loads of water out of my skin alone. Hang me upside down and I’d pass as a very effective gargoyle.

  I aquaplaned through Nelson (big and busy) feeling too wet to explore and continued over Annie Saddle into the mountains. After I’d crawled up and round the multiple logging-truck-crushing hairpins of Whangamoa Saddle (a surprisingly enjoyable ride despite the near-death-sucking trucks and thrashing winds and surplus of sandflies) the rain finally petered out, though the low, unrelieved pewter of the sky remained. The tortured shapes of dead trees stood like gallows in the dark misty gloom of the day. Mount Duppa came and went, as did Rai Saddle.

  Outside The Brick Oven Cafe in Rai, I read on The Press’s headline board: ‘PATIENTS TOO FAT FOR HOSPITAL TREATMENT’. A tough-looking bloke, built like a centre prop forward, noticed me peering at the board as he emerged from the cafe and said, ‘Serves them right, mate. They should do some icksercise. For bist effect they should do some ear roebucks! My dad found ear roebucks iggserlint for losing weight.’ By the time I realised he meant aerobics, the Kiwi bloke was halfway through telling me how his sixty-five-year-old dad had got on his bike to lose weight and last year had managed to cycle up Whangamoa Saddle without expiring. Before the Kiwi rugby bloke (who was actually a vineyard engineer and commuted daily between Nelson and Blenheim) climbed back into his vehicle, he offered me a beer from his sucks peck (six pack).

  I found more personal ‘ifficts’ today. This time: a handbag hanging on a hook in a public toilet in Pelorus Bridge. If this were London or Paris or New York you’d probably be automatically programmed to think ‘bomb!’ But in New Zealand, where the height of all excitement is the televised shearing of a sheep, you see an unattended handbag and you simply think ‘lost handbag’. I was walking across the car park to hand in the handbag at the tearooms when a fraught woman intercepted me. She had stopped for tea in the tearooms with her elderly mother and then driven about fifty kilometres up the road before her mother realised she’d left her handbag in the toilets. I’m not really sure why they were fraught, because being Kiwis you’d have thought they would know that most people in New Zealand are more interested in watching sheep being shorn and drinking sucks pecks than wandering around stealing handbags.

  It is so wet, dripping and cold in Pelorus Bridge and the ground is so squelchy and waterlogged (‘It can rain here as much as 300 mm in one night,’ the Scenic Reserve ranger told me proudly) that I’ve camped in my tent on the floor of one of the draughty dank cabins, which is more comfortable than sleeping on one of the bare plastic mattresses. All I can hear is the loud rushing roar of the swollen Pelorus River and the sound of trucks’ pneumatic brakes as the drivers throw their vehicles into the sharp corner outside my window before rattling over the single-lane steel girder bridge.

  The only other people on site are an English couple from Cheltenham, sleeping on a mattress in a van they picked up for about £200 at the Sunday morning campervan market on the racetrack in Christchurch. They’ve both given up their jobs to travel for a year or so. The girl, who wears a trilby-style hat pulled low over her eyes like a 1930s gangster, leaving only her mouth to look at, is a dental assistant, whereas her chap said he’d jacked in his own business as an importer of racks – mostly American racks by all accounts. Racks for shops and shows. So far they’ve spent three months in Thailand and three months in Australia. They didn’t think much of Oz. ‘We just didn’t find the people very friendly. They’re much nicer here. And the scenery’s a lot more varied too!’ This from him, who I might add is wearing an interesting combination of clothing: long blue plastic mac, baggy white calf-length trousers (apparently fishermen’s trews from Thailand), socks and sandals. He has at least apologised for the socks and sandals, explaining that as they had just done a big wash he was forced into wearing the remnants of his clothing. I said I forgave him, but only just.

  Havelock, Marlborough, 14 May

  Today I managed the grand total of twenty torrentially raining kilometres (including plenty of truck-suckings) before I decided to call it a day. Queen Charlotte Drive, the hilly and narrow bay-hugging road from Havelock to Picton, was rumoured to be so spectacularly scenic that I thought I’d give the weather a day to improve its ways.

  As I entered the tiny town there was a garish sign saying: WELCOME TO HAVELOCK ‘THE GREEN MUSSEL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD’. Apparently these are green-lipped mussels (as opposed to red lips or purple lips?). All very lovely, I’m sure, but I think I’ll stick to porridge myself. I feel I’m on safer ground there.

  In the boomtown gold-rush days when gold was discovered down the road at Wakamarina (‘forceful hitting of elaborate docking facility for pleasure craft’) and thousands of miners flocked to the area to live under canvas at nearby Canvastown (‘tent city’), Havelock had twenty-three hotels. Which might not sound very many until you consider that Havelock today has a population of 500. The main street, although pretty uninspiring, still has a touch of the pioneering look about it. Two people that Havelock likes to put on their high horses, and who had their early education here at the local school before going on to bigger things, were Dr William Pickering of the US space exploration programme and Lord Rutherford, the nuclear physicist who first split the atom. Not a bad score for such a sparsely populated place. Maybe there’s something in those green-lipped mussels after all.

  I’m doing more cabin-camping tonight. Despite a comfy-looking bunk, I am sleeping on the floor within the confines of my inner tent because that’s where I’m happiest – plonked out on the hard flat ground. In the clean and spacious campground kitchen I found a magazine called PROPELLER ‘The Trailer Boat Magazine’. The main inside features were advertised on the cover with macho abridgements such as: BIG RIGS; RAMCO’S BIG BOYS; 35 HOURS WITH A FICHT. Whatever a ‘ficht’ is. I delved inside to discover that this
particular ficht was an ‘EVIN RUDE FICHT RAM 225’. Well, that’s good to know. I might have known a sheep would find its way in there somewhere.

  Havelock is sited right at the head of Pelorus Sound and the wharf was busy with fishing vessels with names like Loosen Up, Glitterwake, Silver Moon, Sin Bin and Yesss! Overlooking the wharf was the big warehouse belonging to ‘Sanford Havelock – Sustainable Seafood – Putting the MUSSEL into Marlborough’.

  After a wander in the rain, I walked up The Slip past the Slip Inn and returned to my camping cabin, where Radio Pacific was once again interrupted by the horseracing and an excitably hoarse man yelling out the current positions of Come Away With Me, Touch My Pocket, Straight Edge, Give It A Whirl Girl and Is She Faking It? Not being a horse person I soon switched stations and heard a presenter on News Talk ZB ask whether New Zealand and Australia should have a common border and a single currency. The first caller to ring in was not impressed with this suggestion. ‘I think that’s a stink awful idea, mate!’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you why. Do you know what Aussies think the capital of New Zealand is? About fifty bucks!’

  Picton, Marlborough, 15 May

  Saw the sun for the first time in days this morning. Why Queen Charlotte Drive is called Queen Charlotte Drive, heaven only knows, because it should be Queen Charlotte Cycle. The narrow winding road that hugs the hilly coast is made for bicycles. It dips, it dives and it springs surprises of utter loveliness around every corner.

  Back in Picton I met an Australian couple who told me they were from Perth. ‘That’s Western Australia,’ said the man, just in case he thought I thought he meant simply Perth, Australia. ‘There’s a difference. A big difference.’

  The man was a big storyteller and told me of every shark attack that had occurred in his area in the past year. The only remains of one of the victims was the woman’s bikini washed up on the beach. He also told me a story about an Aboriginal mate of his who went travelling to Alaska. Once there, he was out in the wilds practising some throws with his boomerang when the boomerang landed on the head of a bear. The bear took unkindly to this so gave chase to the Aborigine, who was a very good runner and just managed to outpace the bear all the way to a hut in the forest. He threw open the door, hurled himself inside and quickly slammed it shut again, but the bear was travelling at such speed that it shot straight through the door and out of the back wall, trampling another man in the hut to death in the process.

  14

  Wellington, North Island, 16 May

  Following another rocky crossing across the Cook Strait aboard the Inter-island ferry, Wellington slowly merged from the gloom looking just as wet and windy as when I’d left. This time I managed to locate the friends of a friend of a friend that I’d had no luck locating when I’d last been here getting wet and windblown. Not far from their home in Miramar, I stopped at a corner dairy store to buy them a bottle of wine. This was where I first met Caroline. She had just nipped out to buy a bag of sugar. I had no idea at the time this was Caroline, but I looked at her a little oddly because it was freezing cold and wet outside and yet she was wandering around the dairy in bare feet dressed for summer in winter. Likewise, she had no idea I was who I was, but still looked at me a little oddly – probably because I was dressed for winter in winter. Then she saw my bike and that was that – she led me down the pavement to her home apparently oblivious to the fact that she was wading bare-foot through icy cold puddles.

  Caroline used to be Tracy. But she hated the name Tracy so when she was six she changed her name to Caroline. She was married to Allan and they had four boisterous young children: Cameron, Morgan, Conner and Jamie. Allan and Caroline, who were both vets, met twenty years ago at vet school when they were dissecting an embalmed dog. ‘So I always tell people we met over a dead dog,’ said Allan. Another slightly unusual thing was that Caroline’s dad, Richard, had been born with his heart on the right-hand side of his body instead of his left. He’d been told he wouldn’t live past fifty, but he was now sixty-seven. Judging from my brief sighting of him in Twizel, where he ran a salmon farm with Caroline’s mum, Margaret, he looked in good nick.

  Before I left, it came up in conversation that Allan and Caroline had a friend whose surname was Leper, pronounced Leaper. The Leper married a ‘de Post’ and they double-barrelled their names together so that they were now known as an athletic-sounding Mr and Mrs Leper-de-Post.

  Ohakune, Ruapehu, near Lake Taupo, 18 May

  Now that Gary has a definite date for flying to New Zealand (June 6), I’m putting my legs into gear and high-tailing it back up to Auckland. Over the last couple of days I’ve ridden 250 windy and wet, chilly hilly kilometres. Because the two state highways, SH1 and SH2, are the only roads into and out of Wellington and because both are death highways (I had already experienced the unpleasant busyness of Death Highway 2 when cycling into Wellington via the Hutt Valley back in February), I decided to take a train to free me from the vehicle-rushing suburbs. This was easier said than done. Firstly, the guard was no help at all. There was a big step up between the platform and the guard’s van – quite a struggle when you’ve got short legs and a severely weighty bike. All I needed was for the guard to balance the back of the bike while I climbed up into the van to haul it in. Instead, the rotund guard just stood with his hands on his portly hips and said, ‘It’s not our duty to help. I’m not risking putting my back out just to give you a hand.’

  So, feeling much vexed, I shoved the whole lot in myself.

  The train was supposed to depart at 8.40. Half an hour later we were still sitting in the station. A long-awaited announcement told us that the delay was due to the train ‘waiting for an engine’. Always a useful addition to a train. ‘And then, when the engine arrives,’ continued the disembodied voice, ‘we will make the connection before testing the brakes.’ You’d have thought they would have run through all these elementary preliminaries back in a siding.

  A lot of backward and forward shuntings later, we were finally off. But only for ten minutes before we ground to a sudden stop. Nothing happened for a while. Eventually an announcement informed us that we were currently having an ‘operational stop’. Whatever that meant. Maybe they were running back down the track to retrieve a lost wheel. Eventually, we moved forward with a lurch. Only to stop again. With a lurch. We then managed about ten minutes of walking-pace travel, before stopping again. This time the announcement explained this was because ‘we’re waiting to cross a southbound train’. Hopefully not literally. A derailment would be all we needed. When the guard walked through, a woman in front of me complained at the late-running of the train. ‘This train is always late,’ he replied. ‘And anyway, this is nothing. Last night the train took three hours to cover a distance that normally takes fifteen minutes.’

  Just when I was beginning to lose the will to live, the train came to rest at Paraparaumu station. I don’t think we were supposed to stop here, but I took the opportunity of a platform to hurl my bike off the train and exchange the slow-moving clutches of the carriages for the Kapiti Coast.

  Having become so fidgety on the train, I was now eager to go and I hit SH1 with alarming enthusiasm. With blurring legs I tore through the likes of Waikanae (‘forceful hitting of organ of sight’), Otaki (‘how sticky!’), Manakau (‘personnel despatched to steer bovine into action’), Levin, Foxton, Himatangi (‘he’s a flavoursome smell’), Sanson and Bulls. So far the road had been flat and open and windy. But heading north from Bulls to Hunterville the road took a few dives as the hills closed in. By the time I hit Vinegar Hill, things had started to twist and turn. Then came viaducts and steep river cliffs as I followed the far-below rushing Rangitikei River into Mangaweka – an odd wishy-washy nowhere sort of place with an oddly sited low-flying tearoom situated in a battered roadside DC3 plane. Mangaweka also offered an eighty-metre bridge-plunging bungee-jumping option for those of a deprived childhood. I thought about camping near the giant corrugated-iron boot in Taihape, the region’s prime farming t
own, which prided itself as being ‘The Gumboot Capital of the World’ as well as ‘The Halfway to Everywhere Stop’, but the Abba (‘Dancing Queen’) Motor Camp down Old Abbattoir Road was closed – quite a relief really as it looked (and sounded) a pretty unappealing place.

  More uphill panting took me through Hihitahi (‘hello, hello, thank you, hello’) until I emerged on a bleak tussock plain erupting at the edges with volcanic cones of snow-crusted mountains. At the approach to Waiouru, the New Zealand Army’s main training base, a sign at the side of the road warned: ‘FOR YOUR SAFETY STAY ON THE ROAD. LIVE FIRING AND EXPLOSIONS AT ANY TIME’. A shame this, as I was dying for a pee and had hoped I might be able to sneak a quick one in behind a tuffet of tussock. But with admirable mind over bladder, I managed to hold on until I arrived at the litter-strewn public conveniences in Waiouru.

  Waiouru is a cheerless place consisting of a wide-open strip of takeaways, fast-food cafes and service stations sprouting incongruously out of the desolate windblown plateau. It’s the sort of place most people pass through on the way to other places. You don’t really want to stop unless you have to. Waiouru is also the place where you don’t want to get stranded in winter. Plenty of people do, though, because it sits at the southern tip of the Desert Road – a remote and exposed road often closed because of ice and snow. The population of Waiouru hovers just over one-and-a-half thousand and if you live here you are likely to live either on base, or off base in army-owned houses. The climate is hard around here and the clusters of army houses are bleak. A garden in Waiouru looks to be nothing much more than a flax bush and a spindly knot of conifers shaped in a rough sort of topiary by the wind. Every house has a satellite dish. Obviously people don’t want to spend any more time outside than they have to.