Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

  Along with heli-hunting, one of the unusual things that had happened in New Zealand during its short Pakeha-inhabited history was the itinerant life of the Puke Pub itself. It had started its days a mile north of Pukekura at the Waitaha River ferry crossing. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, someone had the bright idea of relocating it by Lake Ianthe, about five miles away. I’m sure there are easier things to relocate than pubs, but once Kiwis get one of their ideas of great ingenuity they’re like a bull with a dangling red rag in their sights and charge headlong in to give it their all. So the pub was scooped up and moved with great effort down the road as far as Pukekura. In the flummoxing way that laws work, there was a bill, or whatever the government had in those days, that said that pubs could not be moved more than a mile a year. So in 1905 the pub was plonked down in Pukekura. And there it stayed. Lake Ianthe was still waiting for its pub a hundred years on.

  From Pukekura I continued rolling up the coast through tall forests and native bush, sandwiched all the time between the sea and the Southern Alps and their various ranges like the Big Hill Range, the Ragged Range and the Wild Man’s Brother Range. At the base of bush-clad Mount Greenland I met up with Gary in Ross, a tiny rural village that had sprung to fame in the gold-rush days because it lay on New Zealand’s richest alluvial goldfield. It was here in 1907 that the Honourable Roddy was found, which at 99 oz was the largest gold nugget ever discovered in New Zealand. Named after the Minister of Mines, the Honourable Roddy ended up being given as a coronation gift to King George V, who melted it down to make royal tableware at Buckingham Palace.

  A quick burst on the pedals took me to Hokitika, the first place of any size since Wanaka (some 450 km away) with the first bank and supermarket. It’s another one of those towns that mushroomed overnight in the big gold rush of the 1860s, growing from a collection of forlorn rain-soaked canvas tents to a lively settlement of some 15,000 people (current population 3,500) and over a hundred hotels. The port here would have been one of the busiest in the country, with a score or more of ships arriving or leaving in a single day, mostly packed with Irish, Scots, Chinese, Australian and American immigrants. The quayside would have up to forty sailing ships mooring at any one time after running the treacherous sandbar at the entrance to the harbour. Spectators would line the shore to watch vessels negotiate this hazard by sailing broadside on to the seas. Between 1865 and 1867 a ship ran aground or was wrecked every ten days on average. At times the seafront had too many wrecks to count, and the flotsam sailed up the main street at high tide. More than forty ships were wrecked completely; the rest were raised by screwjacks and dragged across the bar to the river in an operation that became known as ‘making the overland trip’.

  Gary and I paid a visit to Jacquie Grant’s Eco Centre to have a look at ‘the biggest collection of giant eels in the world’. They resembled a large tangle of long logs and looked decidedly horrible, with squashy pug-nosed faces. And teeth. One of the female staff told us that they could live up to one hundred. That’s a hundred years too long in my book. I said jokingly to the woman that I wouldn’t want to find one of these at the bottom of my tent. She said, ‘Well, it’s quite possible! On their way from river to sea they cross land and people have found them in their tents before!’ She also said they go all the way to Tonga to mate. Gary said, ‘Much like a lot of tourists, then.’

  Over in the nocturnal house we peered at a fluffball of kiwis (which can live up to half the age of a giant eel), looking like a mixture between old men with metal detectors as they went rootling around in the leaf litter, and car mechanics dipsticking their long pointy nostril-mounted bills deep into the earth. Kiwis don’t look like birds, more like large hamsters with beaks. They are tubby flightless things with defunct vestigial wings, Woody Allen eyesight, turkey legs and feathers that are more like soft downy hair. Apart from the precious few hours they spend at night poking about for worms, they pass the better part of their lives sleeping – up to twenty hours a day. Maybe all that egg-laying wears them out, for kiwis lay the largest eggs for their size of any bird: each egg weighs up to a third of the female’s body weight. And they can lay up to a hundred in a lifetime. That could explain why, after all her hard work trying to prise the egg out, the female leaves the male to hatch it while she guards the burrow like a hawk.

  Punakaiki, Westland, 30 August

  Back on the bike I took off up the road passing the Coastpak factory – the ‘Buyers and Processors of Quality Sphagnum Moss’. This moss grows in abundance around here and was used during the two world wars as sterile swabs. These days it is hoovered up by Japanese and Korean orchid growers for its spongily absorptive properties, though I think they should leave it where it is – looks much nicer out in the wilds.

  The best part of the flat-to-undulating ride from Hokitika to Greymouth was the road–rail bridges, where trains share the same bridge with road traffic. I can imagine it leads to some exciting confrontations at times. The only drama I had while negotiating these accident-waiting-to-happen pinch-points was when a logging truck tried to overtake me (the bridges are one lane wide), which was not what I needed while concentrating hard on not getting my wheels caught in the wheel-swallowing grooves of the rail tracks.

  Six months after my last wonky-ankled visit, I was back in the drabness of Greymouth. Gary and I picnicked beside the big rock breakwater wall built about ten years ago following two disastrous floods and now directing the force of the river currents against the sandbar at the river mouth. Like Hokitika’s, this bar had been the cause of sinking too many ships in its time. A stone memorial was covered in plaques to commemorate some of the hundreds who had drowned on the bar. One of these engraved plaques conveyed the inevitable sadness of a death of a man, but also, in true Kiwi style, humour. ‘In memory of Kenneth Rands,’ it said, ‘who tragically lost his life age 48 yrs on the Greymouth Bar with the capsize of the FV CRAIG-EWEN. August 2nd 1993. OFTEN LATE BUT LEFT TOO SOON.’

  For once I seem to be in the right part of the country. Amazingly for such a notoriously wet coast, the sun has shone almost unbrokenly for the past ten days. Just across the mountains, Canterbury has been suffering with its snowiest month since 1988. Before that the snowiest was July 1939. Possum Pete told me that a good day on the West Coast was worth ten good days in Christchurch. He was right. It’s been the best cycling coast I’ve had in a long chalk. And the wild and rocky stretch of bluffs and headlands with their white lacework of smashed sea north of Greymouth has been no exception. Gary and I camped at Punakaiki – a gorgeous gasp of deserted skimming-stone beach and the famous Pancake Rocks, strange outcrops of stratified limestone enclosing surging tunnels and spouting blowholes.

  Collingwood, Nelson, 1 September

  From Punakaiki I charged northwards past Seal Island and Woodpecker Bay and on through Charleston (another old gold-mining town with a population of 300, though it once had 12,000 souls and 80 grog shops and a direct sea link with Melbourne) to Cape Foulwind (named by Captain Cook, who hadn’t taken kindly to the weather around here) and Westport, also once a prosperous gold-rushing place but now, despite its self-proclamation as the ‘Adventure Capital of the Coast’, an apparently uneventful place that a local man tried to make more eventful by telling us that Westport was the country’s only successfully mined source of bituminous coal. Though this may sound riveting (to those with a keen interest in bituminous coal) and prompted Gary to get me to join him taking a turn around the local Coaltown Museum (‘good fly-ball governors on the steam engine, Jose,’), it wasn’t enough to make us linger for long so I gave chase to Gary up the Buller Gorge.

  As we headed inland over the ranges the long unsullied skies finally gave way to an ominous cloudbank. Cold winds and sleet mixed up with bursts of sun and rain was the jumble of weather that threw itself at us through Murchison (scene of powerful 1929 quake), Tapawera (‘party of plastic containers’), Motueka (slightly hippy wholesome hot-spot), Pupu Springs (the largest in the southern hemi
sphere), Takaka Hill (silly steep uphill hill – adorned at the top, at Caves Lookout, with the ubiquitous burnt-out boy-racer Subaru Legacy – but with glorious hairpin-bend 15 km descent) and the tiny ‘township’ of Collingwood, containing one store, one cafe, one pub, one petrol station, one (very small) museum dedicated to yet more gold-mining and one lugubrious seal practising a bit of half-hearted backstroke in the river beside our camp.

  Auckland, 7 September

  That seal was definitely taking to the waters in the calm before the storm. Collingwood sits bang on Golden Bay (originally called Murderer’s Bay by Abel Tasman in 1642 when his clinker-built jolly-boat was rammed by a Maori canoe, killing four of his crew), which stretches in a long crescent, curving like a beckoning talon up to distant Farewell Spit – a long spit of sand beloved by godwits and dotterels.

  On the night of our arrival in Collingwood, Farewell Spit was clearly visible from our camp spot, but by morning the scene had deteriorated into one of raging seas and sodden skies. The wind tore in from the west with such Tasman Sea strength that, not for the first time in New Zealand, it was impossible to stand, let alone cycle. Gary packed my bike into the van and we took off east along the same road I had cycled towards Picton. By the time we arrived in Havelock I was a fidgety van-induced heap of annoyance, so Gary, to gain some peace of mind, turfed me out so that I could cycle (for the second time) the scenically undulating Queen Charlotte Drive to Picton. The following morning the rain had stopped, so with time to spare before our afternoon ferry to Wellington, Gary joined me on his steed to cycle Queen Charlotte Drive again. We rode almost as far as Havelock, passing several FART (Fight Against Ridiculous Taxes) stickers stuck to homemade mailboxes, before turning round and riding back again.

  Gary, who apart from when I’ve been cycling has been beside me for three months, has now gone – taken to the skies with boxed bike, twenty rolls of my film slides and four of my notebooks of notes. In a day and a half he’ll be back at home in an autumnal-heading hemisphere and I’ll still be here in Jacquie’s flat, looking out of the window at the fast-flying clouds over Rangitoto and the flags snapping like lunatics from those strengthened flagpoles designed to withstand wind speeds of 170 km/h on Auckland Harbour Bridge.

  Now that Gary has gone, Jacquie has moved back the mat around the foot of the toilet. She has a bit of a severe reaction to the thought of men standing up and spraying while they pee. Not to mention leaving the seat up. So from the outset of Gary’s arrival back in June, Jacquie asked him if he could sit down while peeing. And that’s what he had to do – lady pees, as he called them. When it comes down to it, none of us girls like spray or seats left up; it’s just that some feel stronger about it than others. Take MAPSU – Mothers Against Peeing Standing Up – which seems to be an American (where else?) organisation, dedicated to ‘transforming the way the world goes to the bathroom by 2010’. They have a website and they produce MAPSU T-shirts and print-out posters and the thesis that ‘the longer the urine has to travel, the bigger the dissipation radius gets’. Apparently, peeing standing up destroys families. MAPSU urges that ‘at some point you need to ask yourself, Is it worth it? What has peeing standing up cost me in my life?’ But that’s modern Western life for you. You didn’t get dragged under by such hand-wringing soul-searching questions when it was all just a matter of course to go outside and water the soil.

  Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, 3 October

  After Gary left I went into mourning for twelve days. I never thought I’d miss him so much, but soon after he had walked through the departure gates for his 9.45 p.m. ANZ flight to LHR, I noticed immediately that empty rush of air that comes when a person you’re accustomed to having around you is all at once gone.

  During this time I took myself off on various ferries with bike and accompanying clobber to some of Auckland’s outer islands, like Waiheke, which had houses called things like This’tle Doo. The west side of this island was fast becoming another Auckland suburb complete with boy-racing hoons, but the east side around the stony and corrugated dirt Man o’ War Bay Road and Cowes was wild and empty and lovely.

  I also sailed off to Tiritiri Matangi, a small scrubby island in the midst of the Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park. Tiritiri Matangi is a twitcher’s paradise containing a veritable mêlée of endangered birds. As it is classified as an ‘open sanctuary’, a guide took me under his wing. He was a tall elderly chap called Ashley and he sported a wild tuffet of hair like a tomtit’s tail that sprouted from the gap at the back of his baseball cap. With Ashley’s aid, I spotted many fine-feathered oddities such as stitchbirds, saddlebacks, whiteheads (popokatea), shining cuckoos, little blue penguins (the Aussies call them fairy penguins), Caspian terns and the flightless and endangered takahe – stumpy birds, producing a short klowp and oomf alarm note, that were once thought to be extinct. There were also a fair few robins. Not scarlet-breasted, these ones, but ivory white. Oddly, outside the British Isles, robins are skulking and secretive birds, shy and infrequently seen. Only back home do they have this flamboyant trust in humans, ever happy to perch on a handle of a nearby spade.

  Another scarcely seen bird I saw was the kokako, otherwise known as the wattled crow due to its big beady fleshy blue lobes hanging like fashion accessories off its throat. Ashley got very excited and told me that though he had been coming to this island for the past twenty years, he had never seen a kokako so close up or for so long. Which I can’t say is a comment that many men have made to me in my time.

  *

  In Gary’s last few hours in New Zealand we had taken the ferry to Half Moon Bay and then cycled down to Pakuranga to visit Frank and Jan Gardner. Frank had written to me a few years before, after reading my books, and invited me to visit him if I ever made it down this way. Straight away he was the sort of man that made you feel like you’d known him well for years, and Jan soon set to work feeding Gary with Danish pastries the size of UFOs while I was given a bunch of bananas and a pawpaw the size of a rugby ball. Frank, now retired, used to be an industrial chemist working with polyester resins. He also used to live in Manchester (his city of birth) and, like many Mancunians living on the doorstep of the Pennines, became a keen cyclist. So keen, in fact, that he would always ride so hard he would often get the bonk (that moment when a cyclist runs out of blood sugar and goes all wobbly and can’t do sums), reducing him to collapsing flat out on the ground – sometimes even in the middle of a pavement in a town with people stepping around him a little perplexed.

  The thick fog of smoggy pollution was so bad in Manchester as he was growing up that Frank decided he wanted to work in a city where the sun shone. So at the end of the sixties he moved to Sydney. ‘But I never found Australia that interesting,’ he said. ‘The only interest is in the detail – the birds, the rocks, the plants. But on the surface, Australia is just dry and flat and hot.’ Frank admitted he had never travelled as far as the middle of the country. ‘Jan has though – and it flooded!’

  Frank said about Australia. ‘Ah, land of our convict ancestors! You’ve probably heard of the would-be settler being asked by immigration, “Do you have a criminal record?” “No,” he answered, “I didn’t realise that it’s still compulsory.”’

  Since boyhood, Frank had always wanted to go to New Zealand. So one day not long after he moved to Australia, he came over here on holiday. ‘And I’ve lived in Auckland ever since,’ he said. The only trouble with New Zealand, according to Frank, was the country’s lack of history. ‘You won’t find any building here much past 1840,’ he said. ‘And even that is considered pretty ancient.’ Not so long ago Frank had been to a talk given by the Mayor of Devonport, who was interested in New Zealand’s young history. ‘He told us that one day he was standing with a friend on Mount Victoria when they started jumping up and down and realised the ground was moving. They investigated this earth-moving phenomenon and discovered an old filled-in gun emplacement. The mayor discovered the gun had been fired only once as a test and as it had broken every win
dow in Devonport the authorities decided that the country had better not have a war after that.’

  Frank asked if during my travels throughout the country I had ever come across references to No. 8 (fencing) wire. I had, but I’d never known exactly what people had been going on about apart from making something out of nothing. So Frank elaborated. ‘Kiwis like to believe that they lead the world in ingenuity and can make or fix up anything with a bit of No. 8 wire and so you often hear of a No. 8 wire mentality. It probably harks back to the days when goods arrived infrequently after a long sea voyage and people meanwhile had to make do. Even as recently as the late sixties I was asked to bring in some aluminium foil from Sydney. Even that wasn’t readily available.’

  Frank had wanted to know whether I would be flying home with Gary. Ah, that old onion. And something I had been debating on and off with Gary over the past month. Gary had been surprisingly enthusiastic (I think he would like me to turn a bit more normal and not feel this need to cycle fifty miles a day all over the shop), but much as I would like to go home and start nesting procedures, I also fancy trying to travel right around the world by bike and boat. So that’s my latest plan of action – to take a cargo ship to Australia and hope Gary might come out to meet me in Sydney for Christmas. And then I could cycle home from there, taking boats in between the watery bits. Shouldn’t take too long if I push my legs into gear.