by Josie Dew
More museums in Waiouru, this one the Army Museum, which made a change from all the kauri gum, logging and gold-mining ones that we have frequented over the rest of the country. Any mention of armies, wars or weapons and Gary is in his element, but, much to my surprise, I too found the Army Museum to be an engrossing place, albeit in parts very sad. Although New Zealand has never had a foreign war of its own, it has sent thousands of its young men to die in other people’s. In the Gallipoli campaign alone, 7,473 out of the 8,450 New Zealand soldiers who disembarked were either killed or wounded.
Museum visits over, it was on down the same way I had come up, past more drivers roadside signs: ‘STOP REVIVE SURVIVE’; ‘TIRED DRIVERS MAKE MISTAKES – TAKE A BREAK’; ‘“PEACH TEATS” – CALVES LOVE ’EM!’; ‘THINK BEFORE YOU DIG – THINK PIPELINES’; ‘FLATHILLS FOR FOOD’; ‘HUNTERVILLE – HUNTAWAY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD’. At one point I even had a truck of carrots overtake me with a sign on the rear tailgate saying: ‘WARNING: CARROTS ON THE MOVE’. What, to a little holiday bach by the sea, perhaps?
And then along came the junction at Bulls, with its copious assortment of Bull-adorned stores: BULLOCKS; YE OLDE BULL; COMMEST-A-BULL; SOCI-A-BULL; COMPUTE-A-BULL. All I can say to that is bull the other one.
For the last flapping flat sweep to Wellington, I was back in the cockpit of the van, marvelling at how easy motoring is compared with the wind-blasted, jelly-leg-making rigours of cycling. When it started raining hard (again), instead of stopping at the side of the road to heave my jacket on hurriedly while being drenched by spray from a stream of trucks and then being blown for a Burton in the spanking wind, all we had to do was wind up the windows and flick on the wipers. As easy as that. Gary says: ‘Trucking is the way to go, Jose!’ But I’m not so sure. Although it’s a bit of a novelty travelling at ease at speed in an armchair, the trouble is everything happens too fast and there’s no sense of endorphin-popping satisfaction that comes from the element-lashed struggle. Also, driving doesn’t feel like travelling. It feels like a hermetically phoney sham.
And so here I am back in Kaikoura for the third time. Am beginning to feel quite like a local, which is perhaps why I’m walking around with my hands tucked up into my sleeves. Seems to be what every third resident is doing. But then it is cold, a snarling wind hurling itself against the town off the ridge of snow-heavy mountains.
Balclutha, South Otago, 15 August
This new style of bike touring (chasing after vans) is quite fun for a change. Whereas I normally make a meal out of my mileage, I’m now moving down the map as fast as a witch. The good thing about New Zealand is that because there’s a dearth of roads and people, it’s not hard to spot Gary. Out in the bushy sticks, he’s either waiting for me in a lay-by reading the paper, or in a town I’ll inevitably find him ensconced in a museum or in a cafe scoffing down an all-day breakfast. Some days, he eats three breakfasts a day. One day he even ate four. I say: ‘What about your waistline, Gary?’ He says: ‘Never mind that, Jose. I’m on holiday!’
This is true. So I let him be. I, after all, am at work. At least, that’s what I try to tell him. Gary thinks I have a funny idea of work.
*
The last few days I hit the 4,500 mile mark (7,240 km) on my bike computer while bowling south across the Canterbury Plains to Timaru, where the hills start again until somewhere around Makikihi (‘Kiki Dee’s mother’) where they decide to peter out to become flat until Oamaru (site of penny-farthing races, yellow-eyed penguins, little blue penguins and a motel with a placard outside saying ‘SPEND A NIGHT: NOT A FORTUNE’). It was in Oamaru that I heard an advert on Port Radio, the local station, berating people for littering the land. ‘Don’t be a tosser,’ said the no-messing voice, ‘use a bin.’ You couldn’t get away with an advert like that on British radio – there’d be too many complaints from Tunbridge Wells.
After Oamaru: more hills. And a surplus of swedes for sale at the side of the road. Not normal swedes these, but ones as big as Viking helmets. Then came the peculiarly large Moeraki Boulders (Devil’s Marbles) – huge spherical boulders scattered along the beach. They were formed some 60 million years ago and two of them have been found to contain dinosaur bones. Maori legend has it, in the way that Maori legend does, that these boulders (about fifty altogether, with circumferences of up to four metres) were gourds that fell out of the voyaging ancestral canoe when it was wrecked nearby.
I met up with Gary in the cafe on the cliff overlooking the boulders. The car park looked like a gathering for a 4WD convention – big, shiny, bike-bashing tinted-windowed gimmicky beasts – and for some reason the loud-voiced owners were all wandering around in rolled polo-neck jumpers. Maybe it was a tosser-bonding thing. Some of these polo-necked owners were causing much fuss in the cafe: apparently the coffee wasn’t hot enough and one woman was complaining like a braying donkey to the woman behind the counter, accusing her of microwaving the milk, which she said tasted ‘bloody disgusting’. Gary was quite happy with his. As for my tea – lovely.
The weather, which had been cold and often wet, turned to snow as the humping great hills of Dunedin approached. The front page of The Press was full of pictures of snow and closed roads and headlines reading: ‘TORNADO KILLS TWO’; ‘LIGHTNING STRIKES FARMER’; ‘NEW STORM ON WAY’; ‘WEATHER DANGER NOT OVER’. We were told: ‘Hundreds of people have been stranded by closed roads and cancelled flights as extreme weather grips the nation.’ Forecasters were warning of a southerly snow storm brewing to rival the October 2000 blast that caused extensive damage around this area. Oh well, it’s all part of the package of travelling around New Zealand in winter. Trouble is, it’s not far off the mark of what I had thrown at me in summer.
Dunedin is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh, underlining the Scottish origins of the city since the first Presbyterian settlers arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. People round here speak with a Southland burr, which some say sounds like a Scottish accent, but is more Kiwi with a mouthful of Rs.
Clinging to the walls of the natural amphitheatre at the western end of Otago Harbour, Dunedin is a seriously hilly city. One of its streets, Baldwin Street, is officially the world’s steepest street at 38 degrees. I fancied bursting a lung by trying to cycle up it, but owing to current weather conditions of ice and hard-packed snow, it was impossible to walk up it, let alone cycle.
On through Waihola (‘questionable Spanish greeting’) and Milton with its store advertising ‘FROSTY BOY ICECREAM – OFTEN LICKED NEVER BEATEN’. Just outside Lovells Flat I passed Old Sod Cottage, making me briefly wonder who the old sod may have been. We’re now the only people in the small, snow-covered motorcamp in Balclutha (Gaelic for ‘town on the Clyde’) owned by an old boy watching TV in a small cabin. I don’t think he is very well. He’s surrounded by more bottles of drugs than a pharmacy and, oddly, more hose fittings than a plumber’s merchant.
You could tell we were in the thick of sheep country around here. Apart from all the sheep, that is. Everywhere there was a profusion of stock trucks and lay-bys. These lay-bys were definitely not for picnics. They were, according to the signs, STOCK TRUCK EFFLUENT DISPOSAL areas for the trucks to jettison their loads of effluent into a tank rather than spill it all over the roads. Then there were the stores with names like ‘Dave Bateman Shearing and Manure Supplies’. And the Otago Daily Times went into great detail reporting the latest stock sale. Not stocks and shares or Hang Seng Indexes, but far more riveting things saying how ‘top lambs made up to $111 and prime ewes up to $66 on a small yarding at the Waiareka stock sale’. Apparently there was ‘a large yarding of store cattle’ too (what a relief!), which ‘sold strongly throughout the sale’. Just in case you’re wondering, ‘Top 1-shear ewes’ were going for $61–$66 compared with ‘Top lighter ewes’ (presumably this type come with convertible roofs to reduce the weight), which were being snapped up for between $41 and $45. Then there were the ‘Prime steers’ and the ‘Store cattle’ and the ‘Bobby calves’ and the ‘Simmental cross b
ulls’. I’d never heard of Simmental bulls before. I wonder if they bear any relation to simnel cakes and make their appearance on the table only at Easter?
While we’re on the subject of the Otago Daily Times, towards the back of the paper they had a game called WORDPLAY, which introduced itself by saying, ‘More offerings in our regular word feature in which readers take a word from the dictionary, add, subtract or change one letter, then supply a definition.’
Here’s what M. Urquhart from Owaka came up with: Lumpered: sauce gone wrong; Blank statement: no money left; Implessive: admired by orientals; Clampion: a person who immobilises vehicles; Inmaterial: a stubborn stain.
Debbie Williams from Mornington had offerings along the lines of: Subduet: tame the singers by force; Agundance; plenty of weaponry; Pardone: chef’s excuse for under-cooked food.
Well, I suppose you’ve got to amuse yourself down in these parts somehow. There’s only so much fun you can have with livestock.
Riverton, Southland, 18 August
Snow still lined the road as I cycled out of Balclutha past WONGY’S COD AND TATIES, SOFT ICES, THICK SHAKES. Thick streamers of smoke leant from the morning chimneys. I was following the Catlins Coast, one of the more forgotten corners of the country. The area is constantly strafed by roaring south-easterlies while the unforgiving relentlessness of the sea has moulded the coastline into plunging cliffs, windswept headlands with skeletal bushes and contorted remains of trees, deserted white sand beaches, rough boulder-strewn bays and gaping caves. The area is a lot quieter now than it was in the nineteenth century when all those extractive industries competed to lay siege on New Zealand. First the sealers arrived, then the whalers, then the first settlers intent on farming. Next, along came the timber millers, the loggers attacking the dense stands of native beech forests to serve the voracious needs of the Dunedin market. The gold-diggers weren’t far away either. But before any Europeans had appeared on the scene, the Catlins once teemed with Maori hunters, as the region was one of the last refuges for the flightless moa.
As I rode through this fantastic stretch of hilly country, along a road that was half sealed and half slushy tyre-skidding potholed dirt, the weather that threw itself at me was a monkey’s breakfast of sun, snow, rain, hail and sleet. But all the time the air was sharp and aggressively fresh and pure, and felt like new.
After riding past no signs of habitation save for the odd sheep station all morning, I arrived in Owaka (‘forceful hitting of female species), the largest place in the Catlins. Which isn’t to say that Owaka is big. There was a pub, a petrol station, a Four Square, a motel, a ‘Blowhole’ backpackers, a takeaway, a tearoom, a restaurant called Lumberjacks, a cyber cafe (of all outback things) and a museum the size of a broom cupboard (closed, but it could have been ‘open by arrangement’ – arrangement of what, I wonder: dusty ornaments?). There was also a sign offering Bottom Bus tours. Tours of bottoms in a bus. Now that’s unusual.
In the summer people come to the Catlins to swim with the Hector’s dolphins that frolic in the waters close to shore. In fact all along this coast the area is so thick with wildlife it’s like a natural zoo. There are fur seals and Hooker’s sea lions (sounds saucy), whales and elephant seals, blue and yellow-eyed penguins, shags and sooty shearwaters (obviously avian chimney sweeps), blue ducks and yellow heads.
At Curio Bay, Gary and I wandered among one of the world’s most extensive and least disturbed examples of a 160-million-year-old Jurassic fossil forest, embedded in the rocks. The forest became petrified after being buried by a volcanic eruption (I’m not surprised, I’d have been pretty scared too). Over time the wood had been replaced by silica, leaving the remaining structure of the trees. It’s quite a thing to jump across the rock pools from trunk to trunk knowing how incomprehensively old these trees are. The prehistoric cyads, tree ferns and ancestors of the matai and kauri resemble fossils found in South America, confirming that New Zealand was once part of the great southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland.
The last burst into Invercargill, the most southerly city in the world, was as flat as a tray and almost Roman road-like with long stretches of straight. Every wind-blasted tree down here was a sculpture. Like Dunedin, Invercargill was originally a Scottish settlement – many of its wide, wind-funnelling grid-type streets are named after rivers in the Highlands. To the Maori, the area was known as Murikiku, ‘the tail end of the land’. To the tourist bureau people, who possess a worrying penchant for branding anything they can get their hands on in a measure of desperation, Invercargill’s motto is ‘The Friendly City’ – a cry for help if ever I heard one. During my cycles around New Zealand a lot of Kiwis not from Invercargill had warned me about the city. They said it was a rough place full of hoons and drunk drivers (whose conduct prompted one newspaper to describe it as ‘bantam behaviour’ – ‘intoxicated young men, chests out, strutting from bar to bar, eager to take on anyone who annoys them’). I’d also been told more than once that Invercargill was the ‘Gum Boot Capital of the World’ (I thought Taihape was, but I’ll let them fight that one out) and that it never stopped raining. Well, they were wrong on this last one. I’ve been in and out of Invercargill several times now (in from the Catlins, out to Bluff and back from Bluff) and the weather has been cold and perfect with clear blue skies and, currently, no wind. In fact this unusual lack of wind even made headlines in the Southland Times saying how the maximum gust yesterday reached a mere 15 km/h, and that at 6 p.m. the wind was clocking in at only 6 km/h. This made for riveting reading, especially when you’re used to a continuous battering.
Perching at the tip of a peninsula in the shadow of a massive aluminium smelter massed with fishing fleets (oysters are the town’s claim to fame), the bleak outpost and straggly port of Bluff is known as the Land’s End of New Zealand even though the South Island’s southernmost point is actually Slope Point in the Catlins. (As south as this south point may be, it is a still a long way north of the most southerly part of New Zealand – Campbell Island – lying 590 km south of Stewart Island, which is but a penguin flop from Antarctica.) But because SH1 runs between Bluff here in the south and Cape Reinga on the north of North Island, the two points are taken as being the End to End of Enzed. The actual highway terminates opposite Land’s End NZ B&B and The Drunken Sailor Cafe and Bar at the Stirling Point signpost, indicating distances to the likes of the South Pole (4,810 km – not far!), Sydney (2,000 km), the Equator (5,133 km) and London (18,958 km – blinking miles away!). Kiwis call this point the End of the Earth, even though on a clear day, like today, you could see another bit of Earth in the shape of a large island 35 km away over the notoriously rough Foveaux Strait. Had I not been with Gary on a hasty schedule to get back to Auckland to see him off on his flight home, I would have taken the boat from Bluff to what the Maori call ‘The Anchorstone of Maui’s Canoe’ (the weight that held the other islands together), otherwise known as Stewart Island, a virtually unexplored area of nearly 2,000 square kilometres.
Maybe another day.
The flax-lined dead-end road to Bluff was flat and exposed. There were deer farms and yellow-bright bushes of gorse, and more swedes (75c each or 3 for $2) for sale. Any trees around here were scrub-like and wind-warped, having grown at a drunken angle leaning to lee, blasted by the endless southerlies. Talking of drunks, you could tell what the local beer was around here, not so much from the pubs and billboards, but from the amount of bottles of Speights (‘Pride of the South’) hurled on to the verge and into the ditches. The local paper, like many New Zealand papers, listed the worryingly large number of names of those convicted for drink driving over the past week:
AINSWORTH, Brett, 43, engineer, 900mcg, fined $2500, disq 12 mths. AMUIA, Tavita, 22, car groomer, 829mcg, 100 hrs community work, disq 8 mths. BEYNON, Michael, 34, roofer, 465mcg, disq 6 mths, vehicle confiscated. HAAR, Patrick, 42, bricklayer, 95 mcg, supervision 9 mths, disq 12 mths. HARTLEY, Mildred, 65, retired, refused blood, 150 hrs community work, disq indefinitely, vehicl
e confiscated. LAL, Bevan, 28, vinyl layer, 176 mcg, imprisonment 6 mths, disq 12 mths. THOMPSON, Raymond, 48, labourer, refused blood, imprisonment 10 weeks, disq 24 mths. VANDERCOLK, Matthew, 20, stable hand, 483mcg, fined $400, disq 6 mths …
And on and on and on.
For the fourth time I was in and out of Invercargill, past Withy Woos Farmyard Zoos, the Ballance agri-nutrients factory, the South Pacific Meats Ltd meat processing plant, Clifton Wool Scour, Brick ’n’ Cobble Maori Construction, the Robin Hood Milk Bar and Headhunters Hair Design. Still on the broad coastal plain it was a flat fast ride to Riverton, where I found Gary parked on a hill at the sparse and mostly residential caravan park (dubious bogs; chaotic shambles of a kitchen; strange old man in cock-eyed blue bobble hat who kept following me everywhere). Settled in the 1830s by sealers and whalers, Riverton (‘The Paua Shell Capital of the World’) is one of the oldest European settlements in New Zealand and the road is lined with many of the original wooden cottages still in good nick. Riverton is keen on preserving the past. Two years ago the New Zealand Historic Places Trust offered a whaler’s cottage for sale for the sum of just NZ$1 (30p), so long as the purchaser promised to preserve it according to the trust’s specifications.
On one of our many encounters, the old boy in the skew-whiff blue bobble hat kept saying to me, ‘Never had so much rain as this year … never had so much rain. Just never had so much rain …’ Then he said that he thought it wasn’t right that Gary was driving when I was cycling and that I should ride 10 km, then Gary ride 10 km, then I ride 10 km again. I told him that I was keener on cycling than Gary and Gary was keener than me to sit in cafes eating all-day breakfasts so it worked out quite well. But the old boy still didn’t think it was right. He gave me an iridescent paua shell (big mussel-shaped shells found on local beaches), which he had been using as an ashtray and receptacle for his chewed chewing gum. ‘To remember New Zealand by,’ he said. Then he suddenly said, ‘Must go, mate. Got to get to the store for some fried kidneys. Full of iron you know.’