by Josie Dew
Later, in the chaotic kitchen, I was leafing through a pile of ancient Australian Women’s Weekly magazines, one issue of which advised me in the ‘Home Hints’ section not to discard ‘a rubber hot-water bottle that’s sprung a leak’, because ‘filled with scraps of soft material, it makes an excellent kneeling pad which can be easily washed’. This from a certain R. Moran, Helensvale, Qld. What a marvellous tip! Could preserve my knees for years to come if tip utilised for inner-tent-kneeling activities. I was interrupted from picking up any more indispensable ‘Home Hints’ by the reappearance of my bobble-hatted friend. He pointed to a small domestic appliance on the counter top, shaped like a mini microwave but burnt black from its never having been cleaned. It was called ‘A Lean Mean Grilling Machine’.
‘Cooks a steak in ten minutes flat,’ said my bobble man. ‘Beauda-full!’
I asked him how long he had been living on this site.
‘Two months,’ he said.
‘And how long do you think you’ll stay?’
‘When the left hand tells the right hand what to do,’ he said.
He told me he used to live in Bluff. ‘The windiest town in the country,’ he said, clapping both hands on to his bobble hat as if to signify holding it down in a strong wind. ‘The main street there runs west to east so is bang on full frontal to the winds. In Riverton, you know, the main street runs north to south, so you can plot a course from the two towns!’
Later, when I went to wash up, the old boy was still there, staring at his ‘Lean Mean Grilling Machine’. He looked at me as if he had never seen me before and asked me what I was doing. So I told him. He then said he thought I should cycle 10 km, then Gary should ride 10 km, and then I should ride 10 km again. I told him that he had already told me that, but I don’t think he realised. ‘I’m sixty-six …’ he said before ambling back out into the cold night and back to his dilapidated caravan.
Tuatapere, Southland, 19 August
Just when you thought I must have exhausted all capitals of the world, I arrived in another one: this time ‘The Sausage Capital of the World’. Gary, who likes his sausages (generally accompanied with fried egg, hash browns and beans in abundance), was pleased about this, though I can’t say there’d been that much evidence of any sausages so far apart from a small shabby blue shop next door to the Four Square (which incidentally had a caged parrot outside that barked like a dog). The shop was called ‘LL BUTCHERY’. Written across the front were the words: ‘Quality Small Goods “A” Grade Meat SAUSAGE CAPITAL’.
Never mind sausages – the town had plentiful supplies of saws and axes. At least it did in the little local museum. Once known as the ‘The Hole in the Forest’, Tuatapere went back to its early days as a sawmilling centre for the bushmen cutting their way down through the extensive lowland forests of native trees that once covered the area. Along with old black and white photographs showing the local loggers embroiled in the town’s annual sawing and tree-axing competitions, the museum was full of various axes and cross-cut saws from those industrious forest-ruining wood-chopping days. There were axe handle slashers, mattock hoes and grubbers, timber twitches (used on rail tractors) and log hooks for hauling massive logs on the Waiau River. The museum was just a side room reached through the tourist office. No one else seemed very interested in the place. The tourist woman had to get up and unlock the door and turn on the light before sliding the door shut again and closing us in. It was not a museum of carefully lit display cabinets. They didn’t have enough money for that. Instead, displays were simply placed randomly on shelves and tables. Anyone could quite easily have walked off with anything if they felt that way inclined.
Perched on a shelf over by the building’s electricity meter was an old bottle. A few token explanatory words told me that this bottle was a ‘Tea Bottle, Favoured by early Bushmen’. A little anonymous ditty followed:
Let those who never drink strong tea
Stick to their way of thinking
But let them never interfere
With other people’s drinking.
The tourist office museum woman told us that a local man had found a 12-foot moa skeleton in a cave not far away so brought it in to show the museum. This museum then sent it off to a large museum for intricate study. And that museum still had the moa because it said it wouldn’t send it back here until this tiny non-money-making museum got a $100,000 humidity controlled display cabinet. ‘As if we can afford something like that!’ said the tourist office woman. ‘So we will never see that moa back here again.’
It’s a shame the Maoris had to eat all their moas. I’ve seen a few skeletons of them during my time in these Antipodean parts, but I think clapping eyes on a live moa would have been quite a sight to be seen. A large sight too. The largest moa was the Dinornis gigantis, which attained the lofty height of three metres when standing to attention. All moas seem to have had a digestive system based on the foundations of Chesil Beach. As birds don’t have teeth for chewing, moas encouraged plant digestion by swallowing up to five kilograms of pebbles (usually quartz – they had high standards those moas – because of its hardness) as gizzard stones to grind down the tough cellulose and fibres.
Tuatapere (which means ‘ceremony before singing and amusement’) may once have been a hive of milling, but it is now a rather slumberous farming centre. The only urgency about the place came care of the local radio station. At home, the adverts on local radio tend to centre around the opening of the latest optician or two-for-one deal down at the Cock and Bull, but around here they were about the best chemicals to use to prevent aborted lambs or, as one low rustic voice said, to ‘come and test drive the latest Massey Ferguson!’ Ooh, yes please.
Kingston, Southern Lakes District, 21 August
The road from Tuatapere to Te Anau was a joy of virtual emptiness, making up for the bone-chilling nor’westerly that cut like a knife. The gorse was yellow and wafting rich on the wind. There were larks and harriers and oystercatchers and paradise shelducks and tyre-squashed pukeko and possums and mailboxes of a mannequin’s woman’s torso and a man’s lower half padded out with a cricket box. And near Clifden Suspension Bridge there were roadside signs saying things like ‘SYD SLEE PINE CONES $3 A BAG’; ‘HORSE POO 50c’; ‘HUNTERS – BE SAFE BE SEEN’. Recently a hunter had been shot by another hunter who mistook him for a boar.
As I was riding I had layers of mountains on my eastern elbow rearing their heads into the pure air, where colours were honed by the sunshine to an almost surreal radiance. The near low ones were grassed, the mid-distance mid-height wooded, the far-off wall of jagged peaks rock and snow. This is the southern snub of the Southern Alps, the ridged ruffle of land that the earth’s crust of this lively country had scalloped and buckled to half the height of Everest. Away to the west and south lies the World Heritage site of Fjordland National Park, the largest in New Zealand, covering 1.2 million hectares along the remote south-western coastline of the South Island. It contains fourteen fjords, from the famous Mitre Peak-reflecting Milford Sound south along the coast to Preservation Inlet, some stretching as far as 40 km inland as they trace the paths of the ancient glaciers that created them. Most of Fjordland is swathed in impenetrable bush. Wet bush. It rains a lot out there. The area is as inaccessibly isolated as it has always been. If Captain Cook were to return today to the same Fjordland inlet that he dropped anchor in over 230 years ago, he would recognise it still, for nothing has changed.
On past Belt Mountain, Diggers Hill, The Knob, Chimney Peaks and over Jericho Hill until I found Gary beside a big boulder on which a plaque said: ‘THIS ROCK MARKS THE APPROXIMATE WATER LEVEL OF THE RAISED LAKE AS ORIGINALLY PROPOSED’. We were standing fairly high up overlooking the broad plain of the Waiau River. Just over the way lay Lake Manapouri (‘lake of the sorrowful heart’), which at 444 metres is New Zealand’s second deepest lake and site of the country’s largest power station, generating one-tenth of the nation’s electricity. In the 1970s it was proposed to increase the l
evel of the lake by 12 metres to provide more water storage for the hydroelectric station, but the prospect of irreparable damage to what is the most beautiful of New Zealand’s lakes I’ve seen so far outraged New Zealanders and led to the Save Manapouri campaign becoming the country’s greatest environmental battle. Nationwide protests and a petition with over a quarter of a million signatures eventually led to the government scrapping the project. Some of the other information where Gary and I were standing included the words of Henry David Thoreau: ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’
By the time we were camping in Te Anau (‘The Walking Capital of the World’) the sky had caved in and a brutish storm detonated all around. The area had had a lashing of storms of late, so much so that the one-way road to Milford Sound had been closed for eight days due to avalanches. So that hit the idea of cycling up to this overly photographed hot-spot on the head.
This morning a stinging, sleety rain fell diagonally on me as I rode towards Kingston past overflowing rivers and floods, sheep, deer farms, turnips, tussock and toetoe grass blowing merry hell in the wind. Higher up, the mountains were covered in fresh dumpings of snow, but down here the untidy heaped hills were a fantastic scrubby colour of purples and browns and ochres. At Mossburn, where a sign said, ‘Welcome to Mossburn: “The Deer Capital – Northern Southland Naturally”’, I turned off for Five Rivers where I joined SH6, the main state highway that stretches the length of the South Island (over 1,400 km) via the great West Coast.
The trouble with these big highways is the big traffic. Suddenly I had been catapulted back into the land of cyclist-sucking double-trailer trucks and fast 4WDs – most of these ones full of snow-seeking hoo-hahs with snowboards and skis piled high on the roofs. I was now cycling over Jollies Hill Pass directly into the full blast of the sleeting nor’westerly and could hardly move. My face stung from the needles of icy rain and, no matter how hard I tried to ride, my body grew progressively more numb. Despite the slush-spraying roads and the ferocious buffeting winds, the drivers’ behaviour was appalling. All travelled too fast, too close. Then three 4WDs, following an oncoming truck, overtook the truck in a convoy, all gunning towards me at well over 100 km/h. They missed me by inches, but none of the drivers in their heated music-thumping sealed tanks looked as if they cared. Just north of Jollies Pass, the driver of an aggregate truck travelling in the opposite direction deliberately swerved into my lane and, with hand on horn, drove directly towards me before pulling away at the last second. Up in his cab, the driver thought this was the biggest joke; opening his mouth wide, he pulled a face of ugly guffaws.
At Garston (‘New Zealand’s Most Inland Village’), I sheltered for a moment beside the public toilets and an information board about the large amount of Chinese gold-mining that went on around here. Across the road at the Garston Hotel, where a lot of motorists stopped for a drink at the bar, a woman emerged with a bucket of water to sluice away a large pile of vomit from outside the door. By the time I got going again the wind was even stronger and my hands and feet were painful lumps of bloodless inefficiency.
On one long stretch of undulating road, two more vehicles overtook directly into my path. Moments later came the shock of a great cracking smack into my head. At first I thought a passing motorist had hurled a rock at my helmet. But then in my mirror I glimpsed a huge shape falling out of the sky towards me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the massive shadowy shape of a bird as big as a buzzard dive-bombing towards me. Thwack! A direct hit. No matter how fast I tried to cycle, the bird, an Australian harrier, kept attacking my head. It’s bad enough having an aggressive bird the size of a small seal crash into your head when you’re walking out in the open far from anywhere or anyone (Iceland’s great skuas spring to mind), but when you’re trying to control a heavily laden bike in sleeting gale-force winds on a lunatic-speeding highway with the cross-sucking pull of passing vehicles, not knowing which angle the bird is going to come from next, it’s an utter nightmare – enough to send you into a panicky nervous wreck. I turned into a nervous panicky wreck and, despite the near impossibility of cycling fast into the thrashing wind, I cycled fast, my legs whirring, my lungs bursting, using up every reserve of strength I could muster.
By the time I rolled into Kingston and spotted the camper parked just down the road from an all-day breakfast cafe, I was in no great state. Hyperventilating vigorously, I stumbled through the sliding door of the van and collapsed on a seat, shaking with cold. Gary, cocooning me in his arms to try and get a bit of warmth generated, didn’t know what had happened to me. And I couldn’t explain. I was totally incapable of any coherent speech, which I suppose is nothing new.
Arrowtown, Southern Lakes District, 23 August
Kingston, with its grand population of 100, consisted of a small smattering of houses, a pub and a cafe-cum-store. There was also a motorcamp, which on the evening we arrived was a semi-frozen slush of mud. Apart from a couple of workmen living in a wreck of a caravan, no one else was staying. I told Gloria McEntyre, the motorcamp owner, about the episode with the dive-bombing harrier. She told me that during the early summer, when a lot of cyclists come this way, it was usually the aggressive magpies they had a problem with – so much so that some cyclists painted a pair of large eyes on the back of their helmets to deter further attack. ‘Harriers have been known to attack people,’ she said, ‘but usually only when they are protecting a nest or sheep carcass.’
Every night since Gary and I have been sleeping in the camper I’ve had the sliding windows on my side open wide above my head. No matter that it’s winter with below-freezing temperatures – I like a good dose of fresh air. So far I’ve woken up with leaves on me, rain on me and, during our Kingston stay, a small snowdrift on my head. This time, not for the first time, the windows froze over, making it impossible to slide them shut. Gary wasn’t impressed.
Kingston had been hit by a heavy snowstorm over night and by morning everything was white and deadened by the grip of hard snow. Gary wasn’t overly happy about me attempting to cycle to Queenstown, but being stubbornly difficult, I insisted I’d be fine. As it was, the gritters and snowploughs were soon busily at work clearing the road that hugged the shore of Z-shaped Lake Wakatipu.
Lake Wakatipu (or, to give it its full name, Wakatipuawaimaori – meaning a succinct ‘the freshwater trough where the giant goblin lies’) is New Zealand’s third largest lake after Taupo and Te Anau. It fills a glacier-carved valley, surrounded by steeply rising mountains, and has an oddly behaving water level that rises and falls about 125 millimetres every five minutes. The scientific explanation is that this phenomenon is caused either by wind or by variations in atmospheric pressure. The Maori have other ideas and put it down to the giant demon that kidnapped a beautiful girl and took her back to his cave in the mountains. But while he snoozed the girl was rescued by her lover, who set fire to the giant. The giant’s body burned a hole deep into the ground until the only thing left was his heart, which survived after the flames were doused by a torrential downpour. Rainwater filled the valley in the shape of the giant, but his heart is still beating, causing the water to rise and fall.
I followed the lake as occasional blizzards swept off the jaggedly towering Remarkables and Hector Mountains and out across the water to the mountains on the other side – Lambing Saddle, Mount Dick, Symmetry Peaks and the Centre Spur. The weather had put off a lot of people and so the traffic was light to nonexistent. As I climbed up the icy road of the Devil’s Staircase, I had the place to myself.
More capitals, this one Queenstown – ‘The Adventure Capital of the World’ – a busy place overflowing with bug-eyed adrenalin junkies spending a couple of hundred dollars to be strapped to someone or something and hurled off a high place. While cycling around New Zealand I kept meeting other tourists who were amazed I could spend so long here and not do any of the extreme things that so many people came here to do. Things like bungee-jumping, sky-diving, jet-boating, heli-skiing, parapenting, parab
ungeeing, river-sledging, scree-luging, cave-rafting, canyon-crunching, white water-drowning, paracrashing and scuba-dying.
I can’t say any of these things took my fancy. The chancy uncertainty of cycling (mostly) alone seemed to be quite exciting enough. And you didn’t have to queue up to do it, wear identikit tour-group costumes or fork out large sums of dosh for the pleasure. The simple pastime of surviving overly close encounters with 50-tonne logging trucks, dive-bombings by aggressive head-whacking Australian harriers or plummeting down the multiple hairpins of a mountain pass with ballast-laden panniers and bike-slamming crosswinds at 40 mph – or just cycling and camping in a land of unpredictably severe weather – flooded my veins with such a surge of adrenalin that I felt no need to throw myself off a totteringly high bridge or building attached to nothing more than a large elastic band wrapped around my ankles (and paying an arm and a leg for the privilege) while hoping that the supervisor or jumpmaster, or whatever they’re called, was concentrating when they attached the correct life-saving clip to the appropriate toggle.
Up the road from Queenstown rushes the Shotover River, which gained a reputation as the ‘richest river in the world’ because of stories such as that involving a pair of nineteenth-century prospectors who set out to rescue their dog from a rock crevice and discovered over 11 kg of gold in a single day. The river still yields gold but these days most people flock here to be strapped into the Shotover Jet for a water-skimming ride between the sheer faces of the canyon walls. At Arthur’s Point, Gary and I watched as one load of mouth-gaping jet-boaters climbed back up the hill after their ride, giving each other a lot of jet-boat-bonding backslaps and high-fives in the process, while shouting things like, ‘Kicking!’, ‘Awesome!’, ‘Man alive!’, ‘Sweet!’, ‘Fin-tis-tic!’ and ‘Ultimate experience!’ That was quite enough of that, thank you very much, so we took ourselves off to Arrowtown.