by Josie Dew
Wanaka, Otago, 24 August
News last night was about how an American woman ate fifty-seven lobsters in one go. I hear she is still alive, though she deserves not to be.
Since waking up yesterday morning in Arrowtown (surprisingly attractive old gold-mining town of weather-timbered shop fronts and white stone churches shaded by ancient sycamores) the weather has been unexpectedly glorious – icy cold but blue. Perfect, in fact, for cycling the Cardrona road over the Crown Range. At 1080 metres, the Cardrona road is the highest highway in New Zealand. Apart from the number of motorists driving SUVs with skis and snowboards on the roof without taking the black-ice state of the road into consideration, this ride rates as the most fantastically enjoyable and scenic ascent and descent of switchbacks I’ve had yet in this severely mountainous land. I flew down the Cardrona side of the mountain into a clean, ice-capped wind, at one stage passing a high deer fence draped with hundreds of bras, among other items of intimate underwear. Just a Kiwi thing, I believe.
Before I knew it, I was back in Wanaka. Only difference since I was last here at Easter: the poplars were no longer golden, there were no tents in Lakeland Holiday Park, all the outdoor stores had swapped their stock from bikes and tents to skis and snowboards and polar tech wear. Oh, and my ankle worked.
Harihari, South Westland, 28 August
If cycling over the Crown Range was top-notch for snow and views and plummeting hairpin cornering and the inexplicable appearance of multiple fence-strewn bras, Haast Pass had to be top for dense rainforest-like bush and … well, rain. Because it’s the rain that makes the rainforest-like bush so dripping and leafy and lush. And it’s the rain that sends the water surging with powerful force over the outlandish-sized riverbed boulders at the Gates of Haast (site of an iron bridge that spans the river) and cascading over the Fantail and Thunder Creek waterfalls. And it’s the rain that helps to form the drips into overhanging icicles like lethal daggers the size of organ pipes.
But it wasn’t the rain that rained down on me. For once it was moving up the country just a step ahead. All I’d had since leaving Wanaka was sun from a raw winter sky. Lake Hawea (beautiful milky-blue lake overlooked by Mount Grandview) slid past on my right, as did the equally alluring Lake Wanaka on my left. Then came Makarora (‘Paul McCartney bellowing’), where the hills rose all around like the walls of a fortress, with the tiny hamlet (containing a cafe) sitting in a cleft, sheltered by the land.
Gary and I camped across the road from the cafe with a cyclist from South Korea. Pusan Man, we called him. He was cycling in a woolly hat and a heavy camouflage army jacket. When I rode up behind him he looked like a moving bush. Strapped to the back of his bike were two spare tyres and a hot-water bottle. Attached to his handlebars was a mini MP3 player that he plugged himself into when he rode, so that he moved along the road with no ears and imitating a bush. I thought: heaven help him. But heaven would help, because he was a Christian. I only found this out when he mentioned he wasn’t that keen on cycling (‘velly hard work travel method’), so I asked him why he did it, and he said he only cycled because it brought him closer to God.
Haast Pass is the southernmost road crossing of the Southern Alps. It’s named after Sir Johann Franz Julius von Haast. Who the devil’s he? I asked myself when I first heard his name. I also asked Gary, but because the question involved no references to undersquinted abutments or flyball governors he just gave me a look like a sheep in the rain. A little research later, I discovered that von Haast was an Austrian geologist who, obviously not in the name of modesty, named the pass after himself even though it was the gold prospector, Charles Cameron, who had been the first European to cross the pass. The Maori (who in the naming of grand passes of course didn’t qualify in the eyes of the new settlers) had known about this route for centuries, using it to cross the Main Divide on food-gathering expeditions and in search of greenstone. These Europeans only discovered the route in the 1860s. When the great Haast gold rush of 1867 came along, considered to be a ‘duffer’ to hundreds of miners who found no gold, the Otago Provincial Government, excited by the prospect of a new goldfield, decided to have a track cut over Haast Pass. But when little gold was found the project was shelved and only revived at the prospect of a port at the settlement of Jackson Bay. By 1876 there was a rough walking track, which was improved sufficiently for a herd of cattle to be driven over in 1877. It wasn’t until 1929 that an attempt was made to begin a road between Hawea and Haast, but nothing much happened until 1956. The road was eventually finished in 1960, with a link through to Fox Glacier in 1965. The whole lot was finally topped in tarmac in 1995. Quite a long-winded fiasco, all in all.
One part of the descent of Haast Pass is so steep that you feel as if you’re going to be bucked clean over your bars. There was even an ‘oh-fuk-a-ta-ne – my-brakes-have-failed!’ runaway ramp to try to lessen the impact of an out-of-control crash. I continued plunging downwards alongside the swollen Haast River and on past Roaring Billy Falls, Roaring Swine Creek, Orman Falls, Imp Grotto, Dancing Creek, Dizzy Creek, Dismal Creek (things are going downhill fast, and not just in gradient), Glitterburn and Snapshot. About 10 km from where the broad Haast River meets the sea and SH6 swings north across the bridge, I passed a sign that said: ‘ONLY 60 KM TO PARINGA LODGE’. Only 60! Not that I wanted to stay at Paringa Lodge, mind you, it’s just that a sign like that can only be written for motorists. You wouldn’t say to a cyclist who had just heaved themselves 80-odd kilometres over a mountain divide: ‘ONLY 60 KM TO GO!’ Well, I suppose you could, but I’d only hit you.
The scenery seemed to be getting better and better. From Haast the road runs up the coast, squeezed between the sea and the mountains. I bowled along over Coppermine Creek and Waita (‘there’s a fly in my soup’) River, past Bald Hill and Seal Point. For a short while, the winds that normally torment this coast pushed me along as fast as if I was being chased by a pack of snarling rabid hounds before deciding they preferred to smack me in the face. Some of the trees around here, trying to make a stand against the weather, were so one-sidedly warped by the winds howling in off the stormy expanse of Tasman that they look as if they’d had a bad hair day: bald on the back with manes blown into a scraggy thicket on their east face.
Onwards and upwards through a forest of spindly, sky-scraping kahikatea, New Zealand’s tallest tree. The West Coast was everything I had always imagined the rest of New Zealand to be: beautifully wild and sparsely populated with empty roads, unruly rivers, primeval forests, formidable mountains and waves crashing like avalanches on to a ruggedly deserted shore. Rudyard Kipling referred to the region as ‘last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart’.
But although the sun had been shining down unbrokenly on me, the West Coast doesn’t have a reputation for good weather. Rain tends to fall in buckets amounting to some 5 metres (nearly 17 feet! – or well over three times taller than me) a year, which at least accounts for all the luscious rainforests and dazzling greens. Many Kiwis refer to the area not so much as the West Coast as the Wet Coast. When Abel Tasman sailed this way in 1642, he was so unimpressed with the weather and what he could see of the impenetrable forests and inhospitable rampart of mountains that he hastily scarpered north. Captain Cook called it ‘an inhospitable shore’. The next to pass comment on the unfavourable conditions was the Frenchman Jules de Blossville, who noted in his logbook in 1823 that the coast was ‘one long solitude, with forbidding sky and frequent tempest’. His countryman Dumont D’Urville shortly afterwards summed it up in one word: ‘Frightful’. So off-putting was the West Coast that European exploration inland didn’t begin in earnest until the middle of the nineteenth century. After spending 550 days in the wilderness, and reduced to a diet of fern root, penguin, rat and finally his own dog, Thomas Brunner described the region as ‘the very worst country I have seen in New Zealand. For what reason the natives choose to live here I cannot imagine.’ But the natives – the Maori – took well to the area, they ventured across the mo
untains in small parties, prizing the West Coast for its quantities of fine greenstone.
It’s no wonder the West Coast is so empty of people – or Coasters, as they are known. The population stands at around 38,000 (a mere 1 per cent of the country’s 4 million people), slightly less than when it peaked at 40,000 during the gold rush days of the 1860s when men lit their cigars with £5 notes.
Since those hardworking, hard-drinking, hard-fighting days, there’s still an air of Wild West to the place. A notice in the window of Fox Glacier general store was advertising not prams or kittens for sale, or ironing or baby-sitting services like you get in the post office window at home, but a rifle for sale (‘BSA 270 Wooden stock, blued barrel, very accurate, excellent flat shooting calibre with great hitting power, ideal for West Coast thar, deer, chammy’). And in today’s paper, I’ve just read about a man who’s been charged after a West Coast armed offenders’ squad call-out found him with unlawful possession of swords, blow pipes, a bayonet, knuckledusters, batons and ‘other homemade weapons’.
Fox Glacier, like its neighbour the Franz Josef Glacier, is all about icy brilliance and eerie magnitude – those vast white tongues of old winter snow compressed to ice and descending down a valley about 100,000 times slower than a river while locked in a series of retreats and advances. Though these ones seem to be doing a lot more retreating than advancing. A sign at Fox Glacier said: ‘IN 1750 THE GLACIER WAS HERE’. Sounds all a bit like the usual ‘I WOZ ’ERE’ graffiti you find carved into rocks and trees and bus shelters to me. I never knew glaciers could be such louts. Anyway, the tip of the 1750s glacier was a lot further towards the sea than it is today. Now it’s shrunk back by a good five minutes’ cycle ride.
So what makes a glacier like an army, with all this advancing and retreating? Well, if I’ve got this right, if the ice melts from the lower glacier faster than ice accumulates in the upper glacier, the glacier will retreat. But if ice melts from the lower glacier slower than ice accumulates in the upper glacier, the glacier will advance. So when the icy armies of Franz Josef are advancing, they are responding to heavy snowfalls (with fortunately precious little collateral damage) that occurred at the upper glacier about five years ago. Seems this response rate is much faster than the world average for valley glaciers, which is 10–15 years. Franz Josef likes to puts its skates on and is known as a ‘dynamic glacier’ (what, as opposed to a slothful couch-potato one?) and can advance or retreat at rates of over a metre a day.
Well, I stared at the wall of dirty ice of the Franz Josef for a considerable amount of time and didn’t see it move an inch. Maybe I should ask for my money back. Not that I had spent any money, mind, as in New Zealand you can walk up to these large lumps of ice for free.
There are some big old hills … sorry, saddles around here for cycling up and over. And if that’s not enough, there’s a mount, in the form of Mount Hercules – a surprisingly enjoyable mount for cycling over if ever there was one. That is, apart from the hoons and boy racers out for a spin from Franz Josef.
Earlier, I’d found Gary polishing off an all-day breakfast and a Mrs Mac’s steak and cheese pie at the cafe in Whataroa (not ‘what a top oarsman!’ but ‘tall foodstore platform’, even though I couldn’t see any tall ones around – just ground-level ones like the one Gary emerged from looking like he’d eaten a fried egg too many). Whataroa was like something out of a spaghetti western, consisting of one straight windblown street (devoid of human life) lined with a scattered assortment of slightly shanty shiplap abodes. The only thing missing was a few big tumbleweed globes bowling across the road. A mini van parked on the pavement doubled up as the local school bus (there was a yellow sign with the silhouette of skipping schoolchildren that got propped up in the window when it was needed) and the tour bus for Rainforest Nature Tours (Whataroa is the home of New Zealand’s only white heron breeding colony). The only thing I saw moving (apart from Gary) was the odd Westland milk tanker that came rumbling down the street.
Gary and I camped behind a pub in Harihari (an almost identical version of Whataroa) and the wind was blowing a spanking gale. When we arrived here, there was a goat in the field behind us. But when I last looked it was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it had been blown away.
Hokitika, Westland, 29 August
I met up with Gary in Pukekura (‘remedy for sickness’). This metropolis (pop. 2) on the edge of the podocarp rainforest consisted of the Bushman’s Centre containing the Bushman’s Museum and, across the road, a pub, unsettlingly called the Puke Pub. The Bushman’s Centre had a model of a giant sandfly hanging off the outside wall. Not that you needed a reminder that you were back in sandfly territory – the little buggers were everywhere, greedily piercing their blood-sucking proboscis into any exposed skin. Inside the cafe, which contained stools and benches lined with possum fur, Gary ate an all-day breakfast followed by a Pete’s Possum Pie. The wrapper of the pie not only had a list of ingredients including ‘prime N. Z. possum meat’, but gave a short history lesson about how ‘possums were introduced into New Zealand in the 1800s to establish a fur trading industry’. The khaki-green wrapper containing a picture of a possum went on to tell you how possums ‘have now become a major pest, destroying huge amounts of our native forest. When you sample our pie you are helping save New Zealand forests.’ So full marks to Gary here for doing his part towards the preservation of native Kiwi foliage. It was no good being a vegetarian in a place like this, where the population (Justine – originally a Lancashire lass – and Pete, of Pete’s Possum Pie fame) did not have much favourable comment to pass upon shrubbery-munching persons, and where you could buy stickers for sale declaring that: ‘VEGETARIAN is an old Indian word for Piss Poor Hunter’.
Mrs Possum Pete told us that some people are so disgusted by the place that as soon as they walk through the door they walk back out again, appalled. ‘And the health and safety people are always trying to close us down,’ she added.
The miserable sods. I think there should be more of these sort of places, myself. Puts all those squash ’ems I keep passing in the road to good use.
Some eateries around here were all for BYO (Bring Your Own Bottle), but The Pukekura Road Kill Restaurant had a slight variation on the theme as it was down to you to bring your own road kill. Their motto was: ‘You kill them. We grill them.’
As for the Puke Pub Possum Menu, well, there was quite a choice. There was the Road Kill of the Day. Or you could have the Guess that Mess Daily Special (‘Possum straight from the highway to you’), Wheel-Tread Possum toasted sandwich (‘All sorts of foreign filling’), Headlight Delight Pie (‘Fresh from the roadside’), Sandfly Steaks (‘Human Revenge’) or Shovel Flipped Roadside Pizza. There again, if time wasn’t on your side, how about the Bag ’n’ Gag (‘Our daily take-out lunch special served open face – Anything Dead on Bread’)? Even dogs were catered for by way of the Possum Supreme Dog Food.
As for drinking at the Puke Pub, the Sale of Liquor Hours were strictly ‘From Open to Close’. And should you feel like a jug or a mere swift half, just make sure you arrived sober, as ‘pissed bastards won’t be served’. Well, it’s good to be upfront about these things. No point dallying politely around the bush.
Talking of bush, let’s head into the Bushman’s Museum – a darkened room filled with a few soporific possums, some eels the size of telegraph poles and, out past a sign warning: ‘TALL MEN AND DUTCH GIRLS MIND HEAD’ (Possum Pete was of the opinion that Dutch girls seem to have legs that go on for weeks, though Mrs Possum Pete said some people took unkindly to this and obviously had ‘no sense of humour’), a large pig called Sir Ron Trotter. Back in the crepuscular museum and to the sound of a few possums scratching around half-heartedly in their pens, Gary and I sat down in an empty audience of chairs to watch a film on deer hunting which came with the warning: ‘This video does contain a small amount of shooting. It may not be suitable for children or adults that come from Planet Bambi.’
Sounded good to me, so I continued si
tting and this is what I learnt. Along with rabbits and possums and other vegetation-destroying animals, deer were first released in New Zealand in the middle of the nineteenth century for the pleasure of well-to-do hunters to shoot for sport. But things soon got out of hand with so many mammals running amok, killing and decimating native forests and bird life. By the 1930s professional deer cullers, centring on the West Coast, had headed into the mountains in an effort to remove large numbers of these feral animals that were destroying the fragile landscape. Over the next couple of decades or more, two million deer had been shot. But there were still a lot out there. During the 1950s feral deer were in demand for the start of a venison industry, which has since grown into the country having three million deer farms and a $260 million export market for venison.
But it was back in the sixties that capturing the deer was at its most exciting. Before the invention of a net gun, a Kiwi called Tim Wallace had the idea of having men jump out of low-flying helicopters on to the backs of fleeing deer. There was film of this and it looked like the most ridiculously dangerous pastime (but most amusing to watch) you could imagine – a sort of chaotic deer rodeo, only instead of leaping from steer back to steer back at ground level, these cowboy-like men (one of whom used to be Possum Pete) were dropping out of helicopters from a height of thirty feet or more dressed in no more protective clothing than a pair of old faded jeans and a checked logger’s shirt. And it wasn’t exactly a soft landing. Many of these deer had antlers which, judged wrong, must have felt like landing on a fence of spiked railings. Some of the deer were so terrified by the helicopter and having a man landing on their back that they would go completely berserk and charge straight over the edge of a precipice, sometimes taking the heli-hunters (as they were called) with them. Over eighty men were killed in what became known as New Zealand’s Last Great Adventure.