God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

All rights reserved

This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Mt Madeline from Alabaster Hut, Hollyford-Pyke Route, South Island

See www.moxon.net for more information

Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a six-month trip I made to New Zealand in 1996/97. This was part of a much larger, three-year journey that took me through Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Nepal, from 1995 to 1998.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled the world for three years, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

North Island

Auckland

Written: 18 November 1996

Auckland is the first place I’ve seen that genuinely nestles. Looking at the city from a vantage point like Mt Eden, the way that the buildings crowd round the edges of the city’s many green volcanoes reminds me of the way a cat rubs the back of his neck against your leg; Auckland positively embraces its peaks. Some of the cones even have cows grazing on them; there can’t be too many western cities that have cows in their very midst.

How worrying, then, that the volcanic field on which Auckland sits is ‘dormant’ – for which read ‘could wake up at any time’. The most recent addition to Auckland’s igneous family is Rangitoto, a wide, forbidding peak that suddenly appeared in the middle of Auckland harbour some 600 years ago, and whose activities only stopped about 200 years ago; it’s pretty untouched by humans, and its looming slopes – which always look dark, even in bright sunlight – dominate the view. My hostel was situated right at the bottom of the biggest cone in the city area – Mt Eden, a luscious, green hill with a big crater in the top – and although most sane people wouldn’t consider living in a dormant volcanic field, it’s water off Aucklanders’ backs.

‘It’s no more dangerous than driving a car... actually, it’s considerably safer,’ a local friend told me. He’s right, of course, but when you hear that the most likely spot for the next eruption is Takapuna, home to some of the most expensive houses in Auckland, it makes you wonder how bad the casualties will be when it finally happens. New Zealand is a time bomb waiting to go off, but you’d never know from looking at it.

Initial Explorations

My arrival in Auckland was made considerably easier by the wonderful hospitality of Doug, the director of the computer company Acorn New Zealand, his wife Raewyn and their two daughters, who put me up in their house and gave me a job at Acorn on the technical support team, starting straight away. This job would end up funding most of my Asian travels, but first I needed to sort myself out with a roof over my head.

Before long I’d settled into my own room at the Berlin Lodge in Mt Eden, a rather pleasant suburb only 20 minutes’ walk from Acorn’s office. When I moved in it seemed that the hostel was full to the brim with lots of incredibly friendly people from Bangladesh, who appeared to have bulk-booked the place. It was rather refreshing; the place was being run by a German, it was full of strange accents, languages and smells, and it didn’t seem to be full of the normal backpacker crowd. I instantly loved it.

I spent my first weekend exploring Auckland with a middle-aged American called Paul[1], who proved delightful company and a source of top-notch travel advice. Auckland is a tiny place, with only a million inhabitants, and it’s simplicity itself to explore. There are trees everywhere, the air is clear, the traffic problems are minimal, and you can walk almost everywhere with ease, like a lot of the cities in this part of the world.

One of my most enduring memories of these first few days was in an area where New Zealand excels and Australia fails, namely Indian cuisine. Although there isn’t the proliferation of Indian curry houses here that you see in the UK, the ones here are of a very high quality, and the sight of blobs of meat and potato stewed in a thick, brown gravy with pools of dark, dank oil floating on the top was enough to make me go weak at the knees after an almost complete lack of Indian restaurants in Australia. A civilisation that knows what you mean when you say ‘vindaloo’ can’t be all bad, and I was more than happy to slip into an easy life of regular income and luxury food while hunting for a suitable vehicle to take me round New Zealand.

Working in Auckland

It wasn’t long before work threw out some exciting opportunities. Because the Acorn market is still relatively thriving in New Zealand, especially when compared to Australia, there are stories everywhere begging to be written down, and somehow I managed to get Acorn to employ me on my way round New Zealand. They commissioned me to write a portfolio of case studies of their prime school sites, as well as a collection of articles on their dealers, and they even promised to give me a job when I returned to Auckland to round off my stay.

I would end up working for Acorn for a whole month before heading off round the country to write a total of 59 articles, each netting me NZ$100. I couldn’t believe my luck; travelling round New Zealand was going to mean loads of paid work, lots of hospitality, and lots of interesting stories. Each time the teachers would be different, the stories would be different, and the schools would be different; what a wonderful way to get a unique view on the culture of what the locals call Godzone (short for ‘God’s own country). I couldn’t believe my luck – and all this from a chance meeting in Perth.

Working is also a guaranteed way to get a social life, perhaps because it’s easier to be social if you have an income. The combination of the Berlin Lodge and Acorn would introduce me to some wonderful people, and while I was lounging round in New Zealand’s biggest city, I spent most of my time following the usual city pursuits of eating, drinking, exploring and talking with friends I met on the way, like Greg[2], Thomas, John, Anne-Marie, Sjouke, Ian and countless others. As I discovered in the Australian outback, when you’re travelling alone, you’re never on your own for long.

The Domain

On the Labour Day long weekend I visited Centennial Park to the west of Auckland, at the southern tip of the Waitakere Ranges. The views were stunning, but this was where I learned why Aucklanders always carry umbrellas or raincoats around with them, even when there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Auckland’s weather is completely unreliable, and while Melbourne might be home to ‘four seasons in one day’, Auckland feels like it’s managed to invent a few more of its own. As the locals say, ‘If you can see the Waitakeres, it’s going to rain; if you can’t see the Waitakeres, it’s already raining.’ Too bloody right.

I next spent the public holiday on Monday wandering around Auckland Domain, the big park in the heart of the city (as in Australia, city parks are called ‘domains’). I sat there watching the kite flyers, snap-happy tourists, panting joggers, lovebirds, touch rugby players, picnickers... all the classic park scenes, in fact, except this park has a completely rugged bush area, which to all intents and purposes is a wild forest, bang in the middle of the city. What a delight, even if the weather still wasn’t playing ball.

Refuge came in the form of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, with its fascinating Maori exhibits and rather run-of-the-mill ‘old’ European displays. Although Captain Cook circumnavigated New Zealand just before Australia, England didn’t colonise the country until well after Australia; Auckland, for example, wasn’t settled by Europeans until the 1840s, by which stage Australia was well and truly colonised. This means that ‘old’ is even younger in New Zealand than ‘old’ in Australia, and this feeling even extends to Maori history.

Where the Aborigines have been around for at least 20,000 years – and recent discoveries in the Western Australian desert point to a much longer ancestry, possibly around 40,000 years – the Maoris only arrived in New Zealand in any numbers around 1350 AD. This was when they migrated from Polynesia, kicking out the existing inhabitants, the Morioris, who were themselves settlers from an earlier migration from Polynesia at least 1000 years ago. As a result Maori culture is not only considerably Polynesian in style, it has a much shorter history than the indigenous population of Australia. The Aborigines were nomadic, truly tribal, and had a unique culture; the Maoris built villages, fought each other, farmed, and their dances and rites feel – to an outsider like me – very like the ones in Polynesia. It’s fascinating to explore the history of Maoris when compares to the Aborigines; they’re like chalk and cheese, except for the devastating effect of colonialism, which they very much have in common...

Fireworks Over Auckland

The Kiwis celebrate Fireworks Night[3] in style. It’s a bit strange that a country on the opposite side of the world should celebrate an event that happened 12,000 miles away and hundreds of years ago; the Australians don’t even know who Guy Fawkes is, let alone what he did, but New Zealand is much more like England than Australia, and as in the UK, the locals will use any excuse for a party.

Unfortunately the rather mollycoddling attitude that is responsible for the Draconian drinking laws in this land has also decreed that Joe Public cannot buy rockets – they’re far too dangerous, apparently – so public displays are fast becoming the norm... but when Greg and I went up One Tree Hill on the night of the fifth, armed with a six-pack and an umbrella, we saw a city fizzing gently as hundreds of families let off their Roman Candles and the public displays spent thousands in seconds. It wasn’t as impressive to look at as you would have thought – to see a firework you have to be looking at it when it goes off, and with a 360° view, you miss most of them – but the delayed sound of hundreds of bangs was completely bizarre. Greg, a veteran of the South African army, said it sounded just like a war zone; I had to take his word for it, but I could easily see his point.

Surf Casting in Whatipu

Me and fishing aren’t exactly good bedfellows; while I love the sport, my catch rate is terrible, a fact that hasn’t escaped my friend and fishing partner Bill, who said in his last letter that he’d discovered the secret to successful fishing – to go without me. Suffice to say that visiting Whatipu did little to change this, but at least I found a new method in which to expend heaps of energy while achieving nothing: surf casting.

Surf casting, as far as I can make out, involves standing on the beach, casting a line baited with pilchards as far out into the sea as possible, sticking the rod in the sand, and settling back with a vodka and coke. At least, that’s how Greg, Thomas and I went surf casting, and between us we managed one tiny fish (courtesy of Thomas) and a crab (courtesy of me). Successful? No. Entertaining? You bet. The area we visited, Whatipu (pronounced ‘Fatty-poo’), is at the northern tip of the western entrance to Auckland’s harbour, and it’s as rough as hell, with scary cliffs and a tide to make you think twice about even going ankle deep; this is no swimming beach. It is, however, ruggedly beautiful, and was a perfect setting for Three Men, No Fish, Lots of Vodka and a Beach.

It was almost impossible to imagine we were only a few miles from Auckland... but then again, that’s New Zealand all over.

[1] I’ll never forget what happened when Paul asked me why Vegemite was not so much a spread as an Antipodean religion; my response was that if he wanted to find out why, he could help himself to my jar, but I forgot to tell him to only use a little bit, so he layered it on like thick jam. When I came back from work he declared that Aussies and Kiwis were obviously quite insane worshipping a spread that burned the roof of your mouth off; I didn’t have the heart to tell him that not even the biggest fan of Vegemite would put it on toast that thickly.

[2] I thoroughly liked Greg, and bizarrely all the photos I have of him show him either in jeans and camouflaged shirt, or camouflaged trousers and blue T-shirt. This isn’t particularly noteworthy, but I mention it so I can gratuitously shoehorn in one of my favourite Kiwi advertising slogans, the one for Camouflaged Condoms. The sales pitch? ‘Don’t let them see you coming...’ Pure genius!

[3] I think – though I could be wrong – that Fireworks Night is only celebrated in the UK and New Zealand (Australians don’t bother, that’s for sure). The night of November 5th is given over to fireworks, bonfires and jacket potatoes, to celebrate the failed attempt by Guy Fawkes and his gang to blow up the Houses of Parliament with a cellar packed with gunpowder (hence the name of the attempted coup, the Gunpowder Plot). It’s fun, unless you happen to work in an Accident and Emergency Department... alcohol and gunpowder can be a dangerously explosive mix.

Whangarei

Written: 13 October 1996

Whangarei was the first place I visited outside Auckland. Ten days after I landed in New Zealand, I found myself heading north for two hours in a hire car, stopping only to avoid a lorry that had managed to overturn and block both lanes of the main road; the roads in New Zealand twist and turn wickedly and are rarely level, what with all the hills, mountains, valleys and forests in the way, and the journey made me extremely glad that I’d aborted the crazy idea of cycling round New Zealand before it had even got off the ground. I don’t know if the rugged terrain is the reason for the slightly dubious quality of New Zealand’s driving, but it certainly can’t help.

I was visiting Whangarei on business, to help on a stand at a small education show where Peter, the newly appointed Acorn dealer for the area, needed a bit of help getting to know the products and how to sell them. I met up with him at the show, managed to lock myself out of my car (NZ$25 later, I had the keys in my hand and felt a right wally), and met up with Mel and Sue, a lovely couple who looked after me and put me up in their house for the weekend (Sue’s brother is the marketing manager at Acorn). The show was a bit quiet, but it was a pleasant weekend, and it all helps to fill the coffers. I also got to see what all the fuss is about: although the drive I did was far from scenic in relative terms, it was so luscious and green that I now know driving round New Zealand will be a wonderful experience.

The highlight of the weekend, though, was the election. I turned up in Australia just as the election was kicking in there, and a year later I’ve arrived in New Zealand to find myself in the middle of party political broadcasts, election promises, and a fair splattering of confusion. The confusion is mainly because unlike previous elections, this election is New Zealand’s first MMP election (that’s proportional representation to you and me). MMP means everyone gets two votes – one for the local MP, and another one for the party you’d like to see running the country – and most people I spoke to got quite confused when trying to explain the new system to a foreigner. None of this mattered, though, as Mel and Sue had some friends round on the Saturday night for an election party, so we all drank far too much wine, had a ball, and watched the results roll in (quite a fun experience when you know nothing about the personalities involved). I learned a lot about Kiwi politics as well as a lot about New Zealand, not least from a wonderful Dutch couple who had emigrated here years ago, and who had really lapped up the lifestyle[1].

In the end the election concluded with no party having a clear majority, which means the politics will keep on going while someone tries to form a coalition government. It all seems a bit silly, really, especially as the chances are high that the party that got the most votes, the National party, won’t get into power because the third party (New Zealand First, a party lead by an MP who defected from National) holds the balance of power, and almost definitely won’t want to form a coalition with the Nationals. Ah well, that’s proportional representation for you.

[1] As well as the sense of humour. I must thank Hank, the male half of the couple, for my first taste of Kiwi humour:

Two paedophiles on a beach, one says to the other, ‘Hey! Get out of my son!’

Well, I laughed, anyway.

Rangitoto

Written: 3 November 1996

Despite having a deep and abiding love of the weekend lie-in, I’d still said ‘yes’ to the offer of a kayaking trip with a couple of guys from the hostel, so at 8.30am on the morning of Sunday 20th October, Greg and I drove to Orakei harbour, where we met John (also from the hostel) and Thomas (a German molecular biologist and friend of Greg’s). John was taking a group of kids out kayaking as part of his weekend job, so he set us up with our boats and life jackets, and off we sailed into the harbour, Thomas and I in one two-man kayak, and Greg in a single. Our destination for the day was Rangitoto, the island that dominates the skyline outside Auckland’s natural harbour.

Kayaking through a city bay is a simply stunning experience. On one hand you have the hustle and bustle of a busy port – big container ships, posers in their expensive speedboats, yachts hoisting their spinnakers to catch the breeze, a breathtaking city skyline seen from an unusual angle – and on the other hand you’re out there alone, with no sounds except the slapping of the waves against the kayak, the quiet gliding of seagulls, and the splashing of oars against water. It’s a radically different way to see a city, and the trek across the harbour to Rangitoto took well over an hour of paddling away, all the while discovering muscles that I didn’t think had any business to ache quite so much. Poor old Greg found the single boat almost too much, and by the time we beached on the island he was exhausted, while Thomas and I felt reasonably well.

But you can’t hang around all day on the shores of an island like Rangitoto. Being a volcano, the island has a classic cone shape, and where there’s a mountain to climb, you’ll find me raring to go. After dragging the kayaks beyond the tide’s reach, we set off in search of the summit, checking out some strange lava caves on the way, and wondering how anything could survive on this barren and rugged island, let alone the forest that covers the entire landmass. After a pretty challenging walk – enhanced by too much beer the night before, and the fact that I’m not as fit as I was when running up the peaks of Western Australia – we cracked open a bottle of Australian red and took in the most awesome view of Auckland you can imagine. The crater was quite a sight, too, a huge and perfectly conical hole in the top of the mountain, a stark reminder that at any time Rangitoto could blow its top.

The return journey was even more beautiful, this time heading towards the amazing city skyline that had previously been behind us. Unfortunately, Greg was having serious problems with the single kayak – he’d hurt his back on the way over, which is never a good idea when you’re in a one-man vessel – so John directed us while Greg and I swapped places, right there in the middle of the sea. I got to paddle my way back all on my own, and it was just wonderful. Kayaks have two little pedals with which you steer yourself, and once you’ve worked out that it’s pretty hard to roll yourself over, and that the secret is in long, slow strokes, it’s a delight gliding through the gentle waves, gradually getting closer and closer to shore. I was wet, knackered and totally happy...

Kayaking to Motutapu

Not content with kayaking to Rangitoto and back in a day, the four of us concocted a plan to explore the waters of Auckland for a whole weekend, so Saturday 2nd November saw us heading off into the bay in a motley collection of sea kayaks. The trip was bittersweet; the islands of Rangitoto and Motutapu are quite stunning, and kayaking round them and spending a night on an island like Motutapu is wonderfully peaceful and very enjoyable. But the pain of kayaking over 30km in two days is intense, especially when you haven’t done that sort of exercise before, and I’ve never been so glad as the moment we landed on Sunday afternoon, with sore arms, aching backs, blisters on our fingers and salt water rubbed into every crevice.

Still, that Saturday night on the island was great. We weren’t supposed to camp there, so we found a secluded bay with a little forest and set up camp, hidden from view. We collected driftwood, lit a fire and collected a bag full of mussels off the rocks, cooking them up on the hot coals. Greg and Thomas went out in a kayak with a couple of fishing lines and returned after an hour with five luscious snapper, which we hungrily devoured after Thomas and I cooked them on the fire. Combined with the copious alcohol and lack of rain, it turned into a classic night out in the bush. I’d definitely do it again... but next time I’ll probably take the boat.

Finding Wheels

Written: 18 November 1996

Zed lives! He might be younger than his brother Oz – the trusty 1977 Corona that got me round Australia – but it’s obvious from that jaw line and the obstinately old-fashioned looks that he’s still a Toyota Corona. He’s also quite a lot bigger, being a 1984 station wagon, and with the white paint and dodgy stereo he’s certainly got a different character to the little monster that made it round the emptiest continent in the world, but as far as spacious accommodation goes, Zed’s got it just right.

With a foam mattress in the back, enough water to feed the strangely thirsty radiator, and a road map, I’m ready to tackle the Land of the Long White Cloud from tip to tail. With insurance, AA membership and all the other little security devices secured, I’ve got until the end of March in New Zealand, not long enough to see everything, but long enough to put a serious dent in the map.

My workmates have been towers of strength, helping me out with advice galore. Buying a car is one of the most traumatic events I can imagine, but after a couple of false starts, and a rashly placed deposit on a wreck that I (thankfully) didn’t end up buying, I finally discovered Zed and liberated him from one of the most down-trodden, miserable suburbs on the planet; without my friend Anne-Marie’s down-to-earth advice, I’d have probably lost my marbles in the search for my wheels.

It’s also opened my eyes, travelling around and exploring Auckland in the search for cars. Auckland might be beautiful when it comes to Mt Eden (where I’ve been staying), Epsom (where I’ve been working), Parnell (the trendy area) and the beautiful harbour; but when Auckland is grim, it’s very grim. Every city has its downside, and with the current wave of Maori and Islander[1] trouble, gang warfare is a way of life in quite a few areas, crime is high, and the murder rate is surprisingly large for such a small population.

But not only have I sorted out my wheels, and therefore my house for the next few months, I’ve also got my tramping gear sorted out (‘tramping’ being the New Zealand term for long-distance walking). I’ve bought a very light, compact tent that I can shove in my backpack and take on tramps without breaking my back, I’m slowly breaking in my new tramping boots (and ripping my ankles to pieces in the process, as per usual), and I’ve got my bedding sorted out for the back of Zed. All this is making my feet itch worse than a plaster cast, and it’ll be a fun day indeed when I finally set off to explore.

I don’t have a plan; it’s not like Australia, where there’s one road round the outside, one down the middle, and that’s your lot. The South Island is easier to circumnavigate – it’s long and thin, so it’s up one side and down the other, with the odd foray into the mountainous middle to brave the passes – but the North Island is inconveniently round, with both the coasts and the middle worth a visit. Nothing’s too far away, though, so I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to visit most parts of the country, but I’ve been putting off the detailed planning until I’m actually on the road. Perhaps that’s the best idea, seeing as my plans for Australia changed by the day; plans are made to be broken, after all.

[1] ‘Islanders’ are people from the Polynesian islands like Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and so on.

Wellington

Written: 26 November 1996

‘Unseasonable rain’ they called it as I headed south from Auckland towards Wellington, on the first leg my exploration of New Zealand. As I pulled in to Taupo for my first night sleeping in the back of Zed, the news reader on the radio said, ‘There have been strong gales throughout the North Island, ripping roofs off buildings and bringing trees down on power lines. The worst area hit is between Taupo and Rotorua, but the whole of the north can expect very heavy rain and serious wind.’ I didn’t need to be told; when you’re trying to get to sleep in the back of a Toyota Corona parked precariously close to the edge of a huge lake, you know when there’s a bloody great storm chucking down more water than you’ve ever seen, while threatening to blow your car on its side. I swear that there was so much rain in the air that the fishes in the lake didn’t know which side of the horizon they were supposed to be. New Zealand is known for being wet, but it seems a whole lot wetter when you’re actually in it.

Luckily I still managed to get a good night’s sleep, safely tucked up in the back of Zed, and the next day I headed down the west coast to Paekakariki, on the Kapiti Coast. On the way I stopped off at Otaki, home to a large beach that was being so battered and bashed by the raging sea that I cowered in the car, hiding from the flying sand and ocean spray. The Kapiti Coast itself was scary; foam kept blowing onto the road from the sea, which had turned a dirty brown from the violence, and I spent Tuesday night in a lay-by, where the wind ripped through the trees and made a hellish racket.

Normally I wouldn’t travel so far in weather like that, but I had to get to Wellington for the Wednesday to give a presentation to the Wellington Acorn Users’ Group. However, when I finally made it to Wellington at lunchtime, the sun came out, the sky cleared to a pure blue, and after the manic storms of the previous two days it felt like paradise. Walking round the city, which is a very pleasant little settlement on a calm harbour – though much smaller than one would expect from a capital city – I discovered the botanic gardens, a little beach, and buildings that defied description, like the Beehive, the home of New Zealand’s parliament. I rather enjoyed Wellington, I have to say.

Though there is one genuinely annoying thing about Wellington, and that’s the wind, which is beyond a joke. It’s not just a quaint little oddity of life in the nation’s capital; it’s a daily struggle against ruined hairstyles and constant litter shooting across the street. It’s a cliché, but Wellington is the windy city, and it takes some getting used to.

Around Wellington

I spent most of the week working, first in Wellington, and then in Palmerston North, where I visited four schools, wrote four case studies, and stayed with Judy, the dealer in Palmerston. Judy is a bon viveur, no doubt about it, and if it hadn’t been for my body feeling like it had been put through the ringer, I’d have risen to the challenge. Even so, we ate well and drank well, and generally had a ball, as one should always do when one is working. The schools we visited were interesting too, ranging from small schools in the middle of nowhere, to very rich public schools that made all the others look distinctly shabby. It’s certainly a great way of getting to see a country from the inside.

On Saturday I left Palmerston for Otaki Forks, a DOC[1] campsite in the heart of the Tararua Forest Park. The area was heavily forested and mountainous, and I went for a couple of little walks just to get myself going after my recent illness. It was pleasant to settle down without any work to do, but it would have been nicer if it hadn’t been so cold and windy; if it isn’t raining here, it’s blowing. Summer had better hurry up and arrive: knowing that the weather is ‘unseasonable’ doesn’t help much when I’m chattering away in my tent, warming my hands on a candle.

Luckily Monday saw the beautiful weather return, and as I drove through the Tararua Ranges back towards Wellington, down the windiest and narrowest road I’ve ever seen, the landscape really began to thrill. I spent the night in Eastbourne, a little beach town on the opposite side of the bay to Wellington, where I lounged on the beach, and even went for my first swim in the New Zealand sea – freezing isn’t the word! Still, when you’re living in the back of a car and sleeping where you park, you’ve got to get clean somehow. I took a tiring but enjoyable bush walk up the hills behind the village, and as the sun went down over Wellington and the lights began to twinkle, I felt, for the first time since leaving Auckland, really pleased to be on the road. Perhaps my cold was finally lifting with my mood.

[1] DOC – the Department of Conservation – is in charge of National and Forest Parks, and runs a huge collection of out-of-the-way campsites that are very cheap and very picturesque. They’re a highly recommended source of information on the outdoors.

Low Patch

Written: 27 November 1996

When I wrote the following, I was feeling pretty low. This has obviously happened before, such as when I had to wait around for ages in Melbourne for my car to be ready, or when I had to drop Queensland from my plans because I’d miscalculated the amount of time I had left on my visa. Both of those times I had good reason to be annoyed – delay and disappointment, respectively – but this time I had no good reason at all: I just felt really miserable and I simply didn’t want to be on the road.

Needless to say my mood lifted eventually, as it’s hard to remain miserable when you’re surrounded by the endlessly interesting world of travel, but for most of the first week after I left Auckland, I was a bit of a miserable sod. Yes, I had a nasty cold, and ill health can really spoil things, but these mood swings happen to all long-term travellers at some point, so I feel I need to document it. But please read the following section with a huge pinch of salt, and I apologise in advance, because when I whinge, I whinge. At least that part of me is still English.

The Three Month Blues

Even cats don’t fall on their feet this well, and they’re genetically programmed to land right side up. Then why do I still feel a nagging doubt about this whole New Zealand thing? The last time I sat down to write, I edited my original transcript to remove all these little whinges about my current travels, as I put my grumpiness down to continuing flu; but even though my health is much better, there’s something not quite firing on all cylinders here in New Zealand.

To be honest, I think I’m just suffering from a bout of cynicism. Yes, the countryside’s beautiful and yes, the travelling’s easy, but I keep finding myself thinking, ‘Not another bloody mountain,’ and I haven’t even reached the real McCoy yet. The people have been quite superb – of that there can be no doubt – but I think I must be suffering from what most travellers call the ‘three month blues’, except I’ve taken thirteen months to reach it, and it needed ill health to set it off. By all accounts the three month blues hit you when you’re beginning to get used to the travelling life, when you cease to be amazed by everything just because it’s new, and you begin to change from being a tourist to being a traveller; at that stage you get a little homesick, and just wish everything was back to ‘normal’. This doesn’t exactly fit what I’m feeling, but I can’t find any other reason for my current desire to jack it all in and come home. It’s not a strong enough feeling to actually make me book a flight to London, and a quick waltz around the nearest sunny bay brings me back to the happy reality of my situation, but I do need to address this, because there’s no point in obstinately travelling for ages just because I said I would.

I wonder if it could be that I’m simply not as impressed by what I’ve seen as I thought I would be; I just can’t make my mind up about New Zealand. One theory I’ve got is that because the human environment here is quite English – the physical environment is too mountainous to be English, but it’s still more English than the Australian outback, that’s for sure – I keep seeing a watered down version of home. This version has a very short modern history, an emerging culture in terms of music and art (though it’s a very strong emerging culture), and – to me – a lack of cultural identity. I’m sure a lot of Kiwis would disagree with me on this, but this does sometimes feel like a country of people from other countries, rather than a definite place with a definite identity. Any country where the sports presenters start talking about Arsenal beating Newcastle United, without once mentioning that they’re talking about the English football league, is going to struggle to feel exotic to a visiting Englishman.

It doesn’t help that a lot of the towns and villages I’ve seen so far are pretty uninspiring; they’re mostly modern and they all tend to look the same. The map might be smothered in little dots, but this isn’t Europe, and most of the actual towns are rather boring; the North Island might have some beautiful landscapes, but when settlements aren’t in those beautiful areas, they can be rather depressing.

The scale of the country is also a bit of a shock after Australia. For example, I drove from Auckland to Wellington in two easy days, and I could have done it in less time if I’d been in a hurry, but gone are the days of being able to drive and drive and drive, and still get nowhere. The weather is another big shock; after the dry climate of Australia, it’s really rather odd to be rained on constantly, especially when you’re living in the back of a car and notice every drop. And the west coast of the South Island, home to some stunning scenery, is the wettest area of all, so I’ll just have to get used to it (though I guess it’s an unavoidable trade-off to have such a green and pleasant land).

And yet I know that I haven’t even tried to scratch the surface, and that there’s so much potential in them there hills. I think that I might be suffering from a simple case of overload; I’ve seen so many amazing views, done so amazing walks, lounged on so many amazing beaches and explored so many amazing cities in the last year, that one more picture-postcard view is enough to drive me over the edge. The desire to have exhaust fumes blown in my face as another London bus chugs around a near-stationary Piccadilly Circus is worryingly strong...

But never mind; I am convinced that this melancholy will pass, if only because it feels more like a chemical imbalance than a genuine attitude problem. As soon as I manage to shake the feeling of grogginess and aching limbs by doing a bit of healthy exercise, I’m sure the same person that fell in love with exploring Australia will emerge. Besides, I’ve been living with unexplained bouts of grumpiness for as long as I can remember; it’s just that they’ve been considerably less common since I hit the trail. I get the feeling that this is the silver lining that will finally banish these clouds; I just hope it gets on with it.

South Island

Down the Casino

Written: 2 December 1996

At 6pm I finally managed to get through to Graham, who’d invited me to stay for a few days of work in Christchurch. He told me that if I could get to his house by 6.20, and I could play blackjack, then how would I like to go to the casino and help his local Rotary club spend NZ$3500 of someone else’s money, all for charity? As if I needed asking: half an hour later we were heading off to the town’s main den of iniquity.

The plot went like this. Each of the local Rotary clubs would put forward seven players, who would then play against each other; the winner from each club would then go through to the final, where they’d play the winners from all the other clubs, and the winner of that game could choose the charity to which the Rotary clubs would donate NZ$1000. At least, that had been the plan, but Graham’s club had a few last-minute cancellations; luckily, when I appeared, I was only too happy to fill the gap, so the game was back on.

The alcohol was completely free all night, and there were plenty of sandwiches and little nibbles, so I was counting myself a winner before we even started. As for the blackjack, it was a rather close thing; I hadn’t played blackjack for years – ignoring a few drunken hands in Perth – but the old skill was obviously still there, as by the last hand of the third shoe it was down to me, with NZ$2400, and a jovial bloke called Noel, with NZ$1900 (not bad, considering we’d started with NZ$500 each). In theory it’s pretty hard to lose from that sort of position, but Noel was a real gambler, and with it being someone else’s money he put his whole stash on the last hand, and it came up trumps. So Noel went through, thankfully as he was the much better player and I was beginning to get far too drunk for another game, and we all settled round to support our man.

Halfway through the game we were a little concerned, because Noel, being the classic big gambler, was down to just one chip, a blue NZ$100 disc, and all the others had stacks of brown NZ$500 chips, and huge piles of green NZ$25 chips. Quite how Noel came through to win I’ll never know, but it involved betting everything he had a number of times, and ending up with blackjacks all over the place; meanwhile our support was getting louder and louder, and the beer just kept on flowing. Before we’d known it Noel had won, against all the odds.

So we had a drunken team photo for the local paper and got invited upstairs into the High Flyer room, where all the drinks and food continued to be free (so I drank champagne all night, ate oysters and generally fulfilled all the fantasies I’ve developed while travelling on a budget). I vaguely remember having long, in-depth conversations with various important local figures, but by this stage I was well past the point of no return. It was quite an introduction to Christchurch.

Christchurch

Written: 3 December 1996

A number of people have told me that Christchurch is the most English settlement in New Zealand, and from the very first moment I could see their point; for a start, as I wandered through the beautiful botanic gardens, I found myself following the River Avon, surrounded on either side by Oxford and Cambridge Terraces. The gardens themselves are a gardener’s dream, with a water garden, a rose garden, a pinetum, a Primula garden, a daffodil woodland, a cherry collection, an herbaceous border, a fragrant garden, a conservatory complex, a New Zealand garden, a rock garden and more... they’re certainly comprehensive. All this is surrounded by huge swathes of park, a smattering of art museums and some very posh schools, and right in the centre of town is Cathedral Square, home to a beautiful gothic cathedral with a huge spire, the top of which is made of copper after the original stone one fell into the square during an earthquake.

It’s a bit strange, seeing red telephone boxes, school children in blazers and boaters, people punting down the Avon, trees like weeping willows, oaks and sycamores, and street names that are almost entirely based on roads in England... but every now and then you look through the trees and spot a tussock-covered hill in the distance, something that wouldn’t crop up in the sort of English countryside that would be home to a city like Christchurch. Perhaps that’s why Christchurch, beautiful though it is, doesn’t quite convince as a genuine slice of England; I kept thinking of a watercolour with too much water and not enough colour, or a theme park version of Little England, though thankfully without the tackiness. Perhaps actually living in one of the cities Christchurch is trying to be – Oxford – has spoilt me. But by all accounts the Japanese tourists lap it up, as you can tell by the group photo stand in the square, where busloads of Asians cram onto the platform to have their tour shot taken with the cathedral in the background. At least that part’s an exact copy of Oxford...

Around Christchurch

I arrived in Christchurch after a long journey from Wellington, which consisted of a cold and rather rough ferry voyage across the Cook Strait to Picton; a dark arrival in the South Island at 2.30am; a restless night in the back of the car in a suitable rest area; the long and winding drive to Christchurch, down the east coast of the island strewn with rough volcanic rocks, odd weather, and dangerous hairpin bends (which I took very slowly indeed); and finally my arrival at the home of the local Acorn dealer Graham and his wife Bev.

Their hospitality was as wonderful as I’d come to expect from the Acorn dealership, and following a baptism by fire and a few days’ work visiting local schools and writing case studies, the weekend arrived and Graham, Bev and I headed out to the Banks Peninsula, a strange hand-shaped peninsula sticking out of the east coast of New Zealand, just south of Christchurch. The main town, Akaroa, is just beautiful, with an azure harbour broken by fingers of deep green volcano jutting out from the hills. The town itself is as pretty a seaside town as you will find, with an interesting mix of French and English architecture; apparently the French inhabitants and English inhabitants didn’t mix, and there was a self-imposed apartheid in the town, both socially and architecturally, something that has disappeared in all but the buildings. After a leisurely lunch and a lazy walk down the sea front, we met Bev’s parents who were holidaying in the family bungalow – a lovely couple, full of stories about New Zealand – before winding our way back home through a sudden rainstorm.

This struck me as odd, because I’d been told that Christchurch was one of the driest places in the South Island. In New Zealand the west side is very, very wet – the weather comes from the southwest over the sea, where the clouds pick up plenty of water, ready to dump it all on the west coast and the Southern Alps. This means that the east coast gets comparatively little rain, so where places like Milford and Taranaki on the west side get metres of rain every year, the likes of Christchurch and Napier get far less (Auckland, meanwhile, being on both the west and the east at the same time, gets an intriguing mixture of both, with one type of weather coming straight after the other). As a result, Christchurch weather is most enjoyable, which explains a lot about the lifestyle there... but it still rains. After all, this is New Zealand.

Dunedin

Written: 7 December 1996

On the way to Dunedin, I made an overnight stop at Waikouaiti – home to a beautiful little beach where I played my guitar and tried to play my harmonica, much to the delight of the local wildlife – and in the morning I headed south of Oamaru to the Moeraki Boulders.

The Moeraki Boulders are pretty weird. They’re big, round balls of rock, which isn’t so strange when you’ve seen the likes of the Devil’s Marbles, but they’re not in the middle of the Australian outback, they’re on a beach, and they’re not formed by cooling and contracting rock splitting into cubes which then erode, as the Marbles were. No, the Moeraki Boulders were formed by accretion, a similar process to that which an oyster uses to create a pearl. Nobody knows how or why the Boulders were formed – except for the Maoris, of course, who have their own story of their creation – but they’re certainly an odd sight, sitting there in the middle of the beach. It made for a very pleasant stop en route, but I had to get to Dunedin for work.

Delightful Dunedin

When I arrived in Dunedin I met up with Mac, the local Acorn dealer, who turned out to be a real find. Mac is an ex-pat Englishman who, along with his delightful wife Gill, has spent his life in all sorts of interesting places, such as the Bahamas (where he was an air traffic controller), Australia and now New Zealand. They live in the countryside – and by the countryside I mean the middle of absolutely nowhere, in a tiny village called Owaka, population about 380, some 120km southwest of Dunedin – in a beautiful house that is mostly self-built. They heat the house via a radiator from a solid fuel range in the kitchen, which also doubles as an Aga-type cooker; they grew everything in their beautiful one-acre garden from seed, from trees to hedges to flowers; they brought up their three children in the country, against the problems of low income, harsh weather and a depressed job market; they’re both qualified teachers and are very well educated; and they’re wonderful company.

I wax lyrical about Mac and Gill because they really looked after me for my entire stay in Dunedin, putting me up in their idyllic home for all but one night. I spent three days working with Mac, visiting schools throughout the Central Otago region and writing articles about them; this entailed spending hours in the car with him, and the conversation never ran dry. Come Friday night we polished off a number of beers and a fair old amount of Wilson’s whisky – distilled in Dunedin, no less – and talked well into the night. What a wonderful couple.

Dunedin Folk

For the only night that Mac and Gill couldn’t put me up, I was offered a room in the Cable Court Hotel in Dunedin. As luck would have it, the night I was there coincided with the hotel’s Christmas party, to which all residents were, naturally, invited. So there was the marquee in the car park – with a stack of chilled beers as big as an alcoholic’s wet dream, and a barbecue on the side – crammed with people from all sorts of places, as well as a large number of locals who knew the proprietors, and to cap it all, it was all free (even the room, as Mac’s company was paying for my luxury accommodation).

I drunkenly nattered to all sorts of people, and made friends with a bunch of folk musicians who played round the pubs of Dunedin. Of course, as always seems to happen with folkies, they were heading off to a session later in the night, and they invited me along; with the amount of alcohol I had drunk, I had a rip-roaring time. I eventually got a lift back to the hotel with a guy named Dudley, who, it turned out, was from the same small village in Staffordshire as me. It’s a very small planet, this.

So yes, I had a delightful time in Dunedin, with its odd architecture and steep, hilly streets. I had an even more delightful time in Owaka, staying in the countryside with Mac and Gill, and by the time I left them on Saturday afternoon, I drove off down the coastal road, heading west along the south coast of the South Island, with not a cloud in the sky. It felt good to be alive.

Southern Scenic Route (East)

Written: 10 December 1996

Leaving happy Dunedin behind, I drove off down the coastal road, heading west along the south coast of the South Island, with not a cloud in the sky.

My first stop was a little walk to Purakaunui Falls, a gushing torrent of water surrounded by forest that reminded me of the rainforest around Strahan in western Tasmania. As it was getting late, though, I drove straight to Papatowai, home to a beautiful little campsite and the prettiest little bay. That night it hit me that I was well and truly back on the road again, with very little work left and lots of time to explore the South Island; apart from a handful of write-ups in Christchurch, I had no work scheduled until Nelson, just before I’m planning to return to the North Island.

The next day I followed the coast road for a bit more, in search of a number of little walks and lookouts on the way. This is one of the most pleasant aspects of driving through this sort of scenery; I love the large number of nature walks and tracks that only take a few minutes to walk, but that take you through scenery that you’d think you’d have to travel to the ends of the earth to see. The Tautuku Bay area was my first stop, with some beautiful views from Florence Hill over sweeping forest, reaching right up to the golden sands of a huge beach. This is native bush country, and slowly but surely the bush is advancing into the sea as more sand gets washed up onto the beaches.

Just down from Tautuku Bay, where I rather surprisingly found an obstacle course tucked away in the rainforest, is Lake Wilkie, an inland lake that’s hemmed in by sand dunes. A pretty little boardwalk took me through the forest to the lake, which is apparently left over from the ice age. The bush is slowly reclaiming the lake, and there’s an interesting collection of signs explaining the process. It’s a serene place, with still brown waters and lots of frogs that swim away as you approach, making the water shimmer as you walk along.

Porpoise and Curio Bay

My next port of call was so pretty I decided to stay the night, as I had a number of letters to write. Porpoise Bay is a beautiful half-moon bay with golden sands that stretch as far as the eye can see; here you can see Hobson’s dolphins – a rare breed of dolphin – playing in the surf, which is a wonderful sight as you take in the views and soak up the sun. But the most amazing thing about Porpoise Bay is that it backs onto Curio Bay, a different kettle of fish altogether. Curio Bay is rocky in the extreme, with a large shelf of what looks like savage, lumpy volcanic rock, bashed by the sea but exposed at low tide. This shelf is in fact a petrified forest, the remains of a 16 million year old forest that was covered in volcanic ash back in the Jurassic period and preserved, turning into hard rock in the process. It’s a strange sight, walking along among these stumps of stone that look exactly like tree stumps – complete with rings in the trunk – except they’re made of rock. There are trunks that have obviously fallen over and turned into rocky bark, and all sorts of little stumps everywhere, sticking up out of the rock pools. Talk about surreal.

However, one of the biggest drawbacks of camping by the sea in New Zealand is the dreaded sandfly. There were sandflies on the coast in Western Australia, but New Zealand has managed to elevate the sandfly to an art form: an art form with teeth. Wherever you go, especially in wet, coastal areas, there are swarms of tiny flies, each of which can give you a nip as nasty as a mosquito. I’ve invested in the recommended insect repellent, but if that doesn’t work I may be reduced to taking the advice of a bushman I met in Monkey Mia: mix 70 per cent baby oil and 30 per cent Dettol, and smother yourself in it. You might smell awful, but the sandflies stay away[1]... as well as any other sentient beings, I shouldn’t wonder.

On Monday I headed off from Curio Bay, only to find that my clutch wasn’t working. For some reason it gave absolutely no resistance when I pressed my foot on it, and only bit in at the very fullest extension; by some quirk of fate, all my clutch fluid had run out overnight. Still, I wasn’t going to sit around all day doing nothing and praying for a psychic mechanic to stop by, so I crunched my gears all the way to Slope Point, down some of the most confusing dirt roads I’ve ever encountered. At least, I think I found Slope Point, the southernmost point of the South Island, but I could have been anywhere, to be honest. Never mind: I would definitely have seen Slope Point at some stage during my meanderings, even if I didn’t know exactly which point it was, and it wasn’t long before I managed to find a garage and some brake fluid, and all was solved. It demonstrated something, anyway: a year ago I wouldn’t have even known that a clutch needed brake fluid, but after a year driving round strange countries, you soon pick up what goes on under the bonnet.

Happily, the car behaved impeccably once I hit the bitumen once again, and I completed my circuit of the southeastern corner by continuing on to Invercargill, before turning northeast for Dunedin and back to Christchurch once again.

[1] In the Malaysian rainforest this would prove an invaluable piece of advice – it genuinely works. Though you do smell awful.

Christchurch

Written: 16 December 1996

The second time I visited Christchurch, I was very kindly put up by another Acorn stalwart, Steve, and his lovely wife Jenni, in their house out near the beach in northeast Christchurch. The whole stay was very pleasant, more so because of Steve and Jenni’s kids, two-year-old Ellie and nine-month-old Benjy; Ellie took quite a shine to me, driving Steve and Jenni to distraction with her constant demands as to whether Mark could come too, whether Mark was up yet, did Mark want a biscuit, and so on. Mark was quite happy with the attention, to be honest; it appealed to the unrealised paternal side in me.

I stayed with Steve and Jenni for four days, fitting in such pleasantries as a game of golf with Steve and Simon (another Acorn nut and great company to boot); a Christmas tree buying session with Steve; a Christmas tree decorating session with Ellie; a tyre shopping trip to replace all my tyres, inspired by the rather sad flat I got soon after my arrival; a total of four interviews and articles, my final work until Nelson; a pizza and video session on Saturday night with Simon and some of his pals, which, after living the life of a traveller, was worryingly enjoyable; some very, very strong and very, very drinkable beer at Chats, a lovely little pub round the corner from Steve’s house; and some final planning for Christmas and the rest of my time in the South Island.

Peel Forest

Written: 18 December 1996

By Monday I’d finally finished off all the work I’d been doing in Christchurch, so I hopped into the car once more, promising to come back for some more of that wonderful Christchurch beer when I cross back over the Southern Alps via Arthur’s Pass in late January.

I stopped for the night at a rest area in Rakaia Gorge, a beautiful river valley with the towering Mt Hutt on the far side. The wind whistled down the gorge like a busy football crowd squeezing down a small alley, and it was a good job I was kipping in the car rather than a tent, or I’d have been blown to bits – it’s amazing how safe you feel in the back of a big old Toyota, whatever the weather. It was a very clear night, so I lay there looking at the moon and stars, thinking how pleasant it all looked as the trees bent over and bits of bush went hurtling down the valley. It was even more obvious when I got up for breakfast and my Coco Pops nearly got blown away, forcing me to retreat into the passenger seat for my chocolate fix (a treat to myself after eating porridge for a month).

Windy Tuesday morning saw Zed and I trundling up the road to Peel Forest Park, a delightful reserve on the foothills of the mountains just north of Geraldine. Peel Forest is famous for its native bush, something that is getting rarer with the onslaught of farming and commercial forestry. Until now the only forests I’ve seen are the pine forests of the North Island and the towering kauri forests of Northland, but native bush is much more interesting; when you look at pine forests, they’re a rather monochromatic green, but native bush is much more varied and its texture feels far more organic. As for walking through it, it’s like temperate rainforest peppered with some seriously big trees, with the native podocarp trees (such as New Zealand’s biggest tree, the kahikatea) towering above the rest of the forest, forming three distinct canopies: upper, middle and scrub.

I went ballistic in Peel Forest, spending the whole day walking my legs down to the knees. I tackled walks like the Allans, Fern and Kaikawaka Tracks; I visited some lovely little waterfalls such as Emily Falls, Rata Falls and Acland Falls; I wandered along the interesting nature walk of Dennistoun Bush... and I loved ’em all. As for the big trees, they have to be seen to be believed; they reminded me of the karri trees in the southwest of Western Australia, but these were different again. Disaster nearly fell when I drove off from one of the walks having left my trusty (and by now slightly crusty) bush hat on the roof, but luckily it had blown into the middle of the road, so I was able to spot it fairly easily when I drove back. That was a close shave...

That night all hell broke loose. If I’d thought Rakaia Gorge was windy, I was in for a shock. Despite the fact that I’d pitched my tent behind a row of thick bushes, one of my guy ropes snapped and the main tent pole smacked me right on top of my head as I was trying to read my book, so I abandoned the idea of sleeping under canvas, took the tent down and retreated to Zed. Thank goodness for my Corona; I wouldn’t have been able to finish my chapter without him.

Twizel

Written: 19 December 1996

After a good night’s sleep in the immovable Zed, while the storms raged around me, I set off for Twizel. The journey was quite stunning; I’ve reached the mountains now, the real mountains, and it’s quite breathtaking, with all these peaks glinting in the sun with their snowy summits and savage slopes.

The first real sight on the way was Lake Tekapo, which suddenly appeared spread out in front of me as I crested a hill. It took me a few seconds to realise that my mouth was hanging open, because in front of me was this stunningly turquoise lake, complete with a backdrop of perfectly formed mountains; and when I say turquoise, I mean turquoise, because it was as if someone had put colouring in the water. This distinctive tint is down to rock flour – tiny particles of rock suspended in the glacial melt water – and it is an otherworldly sight. The little town of Tekapo sits innocently on the end of Lake Tekapo, complete with the sweet little Church of the Good Shepherd, whose view from the altar must take some beating, and which I managed to photograph once the ubiquitous busload of Asian tourists had finally packed up and driven off. What a gorgeous place.

After following the tourist route that runs alongside a similarly turquoise canal – part of the area’s dam system – I arrived at Lake Pukaki. Lake Pukaki is another stunner; I arrived at the south end, from where you can easily see Mt Cook, the highest peak in New Zealand and Australia, towering over the skyline. Unfortunately it was a bit cloudy when I arrived, so I couldn’t actually see Mt Cook itself, but all the other peaks were visible, and with the almost fluorescent lake, it proved a beautiful spot for lunch (complete with copious Kiwi fruit, the most wondrous fruit that, now it’s in season, only costs 95 cents per kilogram... which is a lot of Kiwi fruit for not a lot of money). Lake Pukaki is at the end of the Tasman Glacier – Tekapo is also at the end of a glacier – which helps explain why there’s so much rock flour in the water, but it also means the water is bloody cold. Apparently people swim here in the summer, but there’s no accounting for taste.

When I got to Twizel, a little town south of Lake Pukaki, I dropped my final film of article photos into the chemist to be developed, checked out the local DOC office, and booked into the lovely Ruataniwha motor camp, perched on the banks of another turquoise lake, Lake Ruataniwha. I downloaded my email, did my washing and settled down to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and total lack of wind. I rounded off the day with a quick walk down to the shores of the lake just as the sun started to sink behind a set of rolling hills, picking out every little undulation on the hillsides. It reminded me of the mountains in the Pilbara, as Scott and I camped at their feet on the final day of our bushwalk, all those months ago.

And as I stood there, looking at the sun sinking slowly behind the hills, I thought of all the other sunsets I’d seen around Australia and New Zealand. The sun slipping down behind the dunes of Cleaverville Beach; the orange glow of the Perth skyline as the sun sets behind Kings Park; Kata Tjuta coming alive with the dying beams of sunset; the Ningaloo reef reflecting every ray at Cape Range; the deep red gorges of Karijini simulating sunset halfway through the afternoon; the humid and bloated sun dropping behind the wetlands of Kakadu; the stripes and domes slowly fading as the moon rose over the Bungle Bungles; and now, the sun casting shadows through the pine forests overlooking turquoise Lake Ruataniwha. It’s wonderful to kick back when the sun’s setting and think of all the places where you’ve seen the same thing look so different. Therein lies the legacy of travel: memories.

Mt Cook

Written: 22 December 1996

Thursday came with the rain. Until now the rain has been annoying but it’s generally been pretty warm, but here in the mountains it’s cold, and when things get wet they don’t dry out. The drive to Mt Cook village was pleasant enough, but when I arrived the clouds had gathered en masse, spilling over the mountains and dribbling constant rain on the village. I’d been planning to pop up a couple of the mountains and staying in some of the DOC huts, but the weather rained on that idea, so I did a quick walk up to the Red Tarns (a tarn being a mountain lake) and then hit the public shelter.

Public shelters are great in the wet, because everyone who isn’t living in an expensive hotel hangs out there for shelter. For some reason the shelter was full of Australians, most of whom were staying at the campsite and had taken refuge from their leaky tents in the cold but dry shelter. There were three mad men from Melbourne who were planning an assault on the Copland Pass, one of the toughest walks in the area; Ben and Mira, a lovely couple from Perth who were cycling round New Zealand; Grenville, a mountaineer from another planet who seemed to want to die before he got old; and a Swede who’d decided to join the Copland Pass team, despite his lack of gear and training. It was all good entertainment as the rain drove down; by all accounts the weather in New Zealand is particularly miserable this year, with spring arriving very late (if at all). If I hear the word ‘unseasonable’ once more, I’ll probably break down.

So I spent a couple of days just hanging round the shelters, sticking it out and sleeping in an increasingly condensed car, and enjoying the camaraderie of huddling together with others while the elements did their worst. The snow poured down on the mountains while the rain poured down on us, and the NZ$1.60 pies we got from the pub tasted like heaven after all those camping rice dishes.

And then there were the keas. Keas are New Zealand’s mountain parrots, and they’re a highly intelligent and endangered species. It’s easy to understand why they’re so endangered, because they’re the ornithological equivalent of juvenile delinquents. Leave any food around, and the keas will steal it; leave the seats on your bicycle overnight, and the keas will have torn them to shreds by the morning; stay in the public shelter overnight, and the keas will wake you up in the middle of the night by dropping stones on the tin roof and letting them clatter down the corrugations. There are even stories of keas locking trampers in their huts, having watched how humans push the bolts shut. One wonders if the kea is endangered because no matter how much you like birds, you end up wanting to kill the little buggers every time they fly in for a squawk. Still, they’re pretty good fun, as long as it’s not your kit that’s being ravaged.

The Hooker Glacier

Saturday morning started in exactly the same way as the previous two days, with despondent skies and constant rain, but by lunchtime there were signs that the sky might be clearing, so Ben, Mira and I decided to hedge our bets and go off on a short walk up the Hooker Glacier, the one that leads to the foot of Mt Cook. How to describe the views? When the clouds finally cleared, there in front of us was this beast of a mountain, reaching up to an almost-perfect pyramid peak, snow-capped and icing-sugar white. The tranquillity, only broken by the huge glacial river that you cross on two swing bridges, simply has to be experienced; these mountains have been here a lot longer than any of us, and they’re quite content just to sit there, minding their own business, like old men on a park bench staring at the world passing by.

It’s worth introducing the mountains, even though it’s hard to really understand these peaks without seeing them firsthand. Mt Cook is the biggest, of course. It sits at the northern end of the Hooker Glacier, with three main peaks; the one you can see from Mt Cook village is a lovely pyramid shape, but the highest peak is just behind it, which you can only see by viewing the mountain from a different angle. On the western side of the glacier (that’s the left as you look at Mt Cook) is Mt Sefton, with the Footstool just to the right of it; Mt Sefton is very snowy and icy, and there are regular booms as the snow avalanches off the slopes. Of course, avalanches happen all the time throughout these mountains, but Mt Cook is much further away than Sefton, so you only really get to hear Sefton’s grumbling. Further to the left of Sefton are the Sealy Ranges, with peaks including Mt Ollivier and Mt Kitchener, and the Mt Cook campsite sits at the base of this range. To the east of the glacier (the right) is Mt Wakefield, the first peak in a range that stretches all along the glacier’s east side, right up to Mt Cook, and further east still is the Tasman Glacier.

Back to the Hooker Glacier, though. Glaciers are huge ‘rivers’ of ice that slowly move downhill, carving out valleys and leaving behind rock debris known as the moraine. The Hooker Glacier is a beast indeed, and walking up to it involves following the valley that it has carved over the years – mainly in the Ice Age when it stretched a lot further than it now does – until you reach the terminal lake, which is formed by the melt-waters of the glacier. Cold isn’t the word; terminal lakes aren’t exactly swimming pools, which is made pretty obvious by the icebergs that float past. In the spirit of adventure, Ben and I scooted up along the moraine shores of the lake, almost to the strangely blue glacial wall, but it was pretty hairy scrambling along slopes that could collapse at any moment, so after a short exploration we headed back to camp to watch the sun set over the mountains.

The sunset was another to add to my ever-growing list of memorable twilights. The orange glow of an iridescent snow peak with clouds swirling round the ranges, moving at breakneck speeds in the savage crosswinds at that altitude, is as unique as any sight you’ll see. Mt Cook is 3754m (12,315 ft) high, some 2992m (9815 ft) above the town, which is big in anyone’s book. The view from the hills around the campsite was just perfect, and we spent the night celebrating the break in the weather with the Copland Pass group, who were planning to head off in the morning; inspired by all this activity, Ben and I started to concoct our own little plan.

The Mueller Hut

Sunday arrived to clear skies and savage winds. The heavy snowfalls on the mountains were most noticeable on Sefton and the Sealys, but Ben and I were determined; we were going to climb the 1006m (3300 ft) from the campsite to the Mueller Hut, right on top of the Sealy ridge. We packed our backpacks – well, I did, as Ben wanted to travel light, and only took a daypack of clothes and a bit of food – and we set off on the track to the Sealy Tarns, a pleasant set of lakes about halfway up the mountainside and well below the snowline.

Meanwhile we had a serious climb to tackle. The snow had long since obliterated all signs of a track, and we had to make up our route, not so easy as the hut is just over the top of the range and is therefore invisible until you’re almost on top of it. The route we chose was straight up to where we believed the hut was, skirting a precarious-looking snow slide and avoiding most of the drifts. The wind was strong, the snow was freezing, and I was glad of the ski pants and gloves I’d borrowed as I climbed a near-vertical snowy moraine on all fours, a full pack on my back. In retrospect we must have been slightly mad; one false step or one slip, both of which were very possible on the loose stones and rocks we were clambering up, and it would be a fall down a few hundred feet into goodness only knows what. To be honest we were both more than a little spooked by the whole thing, but the sight of the dunny roof after hours of sweaty climbing made it all worthwhile, and it wasn’t long before we’d made it to the hut.

One of the wonderful things about tramping in New Zealand – or, indeed, mountaineering, which is more what the trip to the Mueller Hut turned out to be, the way we’d gone – is the large selection of huts dotted around the National Parks. Australia doesn’t have such a proliferation of huts, which enable you to do long walks without worrying about where to stay, and it’s one of the reasons New Zealand is such a walker’s paradise. The Mueller Hut, one of the more popular huts in the Mt Cook area, is a cosy little building, sleeping 12 people and containing a kitchen with fuel and water supplies.

It also has what has been described as the best alpine view in the world, looking over the whole Hooker Glacier on one side – with stunning views of Mt Cook and Mt Sefton – and the Mueller Glacier on the other. It’s difficult to describe the sheer power of being up in the middle of a serious mountain range; it’s a bit like trying to explain to a teetotaller what it feels like to be drunk. In some ways the sight was just as moving as that of Uluru, because these mountains aren’t just lumps of rock and ice, they’re awesome enough to be almost religiously powerful. It’s small wonder that the Maoris regard Mt Cook – which they call Aoraki, or ‘Cloud Piercer’ – as a sacred place; I spent a lot of the early evening up at Mueller sitting in the freezing wind and just soaking up the whole environment (after having made a snowman, of course).

The whole Mueller experience was pure excellence. The other people in the hut were great company, and we played cards after dark as the wind howled and shook the hut, making it feel like the inside of a combustion engine. The wind has to be felt to be believed; it’s constantly gusting and at times blows so hard that you simply can’t walk into it, and have to dig your feet into the snow to avoid being blown over. It didn’t let up for one minute and blew throughout the night. Still, the bunks were cosy enough, if you could ignore the frosting breath and shaking walls, and soon enough we all woke up, on top of the world, to a crisp but still blustery Monday morning.

Imagine waking up to such a view; this isn’t a pleasant little alpine village ski resort-type view, it’s savage, elemental stuff, and it’s pretty invigorating. Wanting to extend our stay for as long as possible, Ben and I climbed up nearby Mt Ollivier, the peak of which is at 6288 ft; all the way we battled against evil winds from hell and sleet being blown in our faces. Luckily the snow had melted quite a lot since our ascent the day before, so we made the summit without incident, and the astounding views of the Mueller Glacier were well worth the frozen hands and feet. Unfortunately, by the time we got back to the hut and made a cup of tea, it was time to head back down to the campsite.

Climbing a mountain is one thing, but getting down is quite another. The whole point of climbing safely is not to fall down, but when you’re trying to walk down a slope that’s steeper than 45° and it’s covered in a good foot of snow (and often more) it’s challenging just keeping your balance. After skirting the ridge to avoid the rocks we’d originally followed up, we started to make our descent down a huge snow channel... and that’s when we really discovered how to have fun on a mountain. It all began with Ben slipping over and sliding down the slope on his butt, only managing to stop at the bottom by digging in his heels. I tried the same thing, but seeing as I was carrying a big pack with all our possessions in it, I just sank into the snow and didn’t manage a slide. Instead I just ran straight down the mountainside, taking huge moon steps through the snow, trying to stay ahead of the mini-avalanche that Ben’s slide had started. Before you could say ‘sheeeit!’ we were halfway down to the snow line, covering the same distance that had taken us a good hour to climb in about 30 seconds.

Still, the best buzz came when I found a huge snow slide that was still hard enough for me to go down with a pack on, and I slid down on my behind, discovering as I went that I could steer by clenching the relevant buttock; flying by the seat of your pants, I suppose you could call it. Sledging down a snowy hill might be fun, but throwing yourself down a mountain with a heavy pack for added momentum gets my vote every time. It certainly cut our descent time down, and we were down in the campsite after about two-and-a-half hours of sliding and tramping, compared to a day’s walk to get up.

Not surprisingly we spent the afternoon cleaning up; it was my first shower in five days, which made it practically orgasmic. We then popped into the Hermitage, the rather posh hotel in Mt Cook (at over NZ$200 a night) and soaked up the atmosphere, the firelight and the piano playing[1] while our washing dried, and then it was back to the camp for some well-earned rest. It was also pleasant to note that the weather had turned sour again, so we’d made it through the whole experience in the nick of time; my car felt particularly nice and warm that night.

[1] The piano man, all suited up and playing the sort of seamless popular-tune piano medleys that you tend to hear in hotels – guaranteed to offend no one and to bring a smile to the lips of any ancient and loaded widows in the room, in other words – had just one book from which he played his pretty little ditties. The name of the book? 101 Great Songs for Buskers...

A Glacial Christmas

Written: 25 December 1996

Christmas Eve came on a high-pressure front, bringing with it the best weather I’ve yet seen in New Zealand. By lunchtime there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, making Mt Cook shine like a huge beacon, and the three of us popped into town, stocked up on genuine Christmas fayre (as the retail trade likes to call it) and packed our packs. No way were we going to spend the Festive Season in the campground, where the over-zealous wardens had earned the nicknames of Mr and Mrs Himmler; nope, we were planning to go bush for Santa’s visit. The place: Ball Shelter, some 16km from Mount Cook village, up the huge Tasman Glacier. Ball Shelter sleeps about six, has very few amenities, and has stunning views of the Minarets, a pretty little multiple-peak mountain that’s heavily covered in snow; it certainly sounded like a pretty good spot for Christmas.

However DOC, the beloved Department of Conservation, weren’t quite so festive-spirited. The staff at the Mt Cook office were completely off-hand and told us that the walk up the Tasman Glacier to Ball Shelter was boring and that the views weren’t any good, which was an interesting approach. In the event they were quite, quite wrong; it would turn out to be a fantastic spot for the festivities.

The trek to Ball Shelter is along 9km of rocky paths from the terminal ice-face of the Tasman Glacier, and it was a very pleasant jaunt as we followed a small valley, surrounded by steep, rocky slopes on both sides (where avalanches happen frequently in winter). We hadn’t realised that this valley was running up the west side of the Tasman Glacier, so when the track finally went over the top of the little valley wall, suddenly there was the glacier laid out in front of us. Breathtaking isn’t the word; the glacier is about 3km wide, carving out this huge valley through the mountains under a covering of evil-looking moraine. It’s a lunar landscape, but one with watery potholes everywhere, gurgling and cracking as the whole mass slowly grinds down towards the terminal lake. The hut is precariously balanced on the side of the glacier, so that about 20 feet from the front door is a long, vertical, 150m drop into the depths of the glacier; it’s some view.

So there we were, the three of us, in the middle of nowhere, with not a cloud in the sky as the sun slowly slipped behind the craggy peaks. After lighting a fire and doing as little as possible after the long haul, we started to cook; but this was not just any meal, this was our Christmas meal. The menu was as follows, all created on a camping stove in the middle of absolutely nowhere:

Entrée

Asparagus spears in butter and black pepper

Main dish

Pan-fried loins of lamb

Petit pois

Carrots

Creamed potatoes

Dessert

Christmas pudding and fresh cream

Coffee

With mince pies

Beverages

Delegat’s Cabernet Merlot 1995

Guinness Extra Stout

Black Mac

Speight’s Distinction Ale

It was one of the best meals I’ve had on the road for some time – made all the tastier by the clean mountain air, no doubt – and the views made the front room at Mt Cook village’s famous Hermitage Hotel look pretty tame. Clear skies and twinkling stars framed the pastel-coloured afterglow on the peaks as a full moon rose over the Minarets; it takes a lot to beat that sort of vista. It was the perfect place for Santa to fly across the sky in his sleigh...

Waking up on Christmas morning to total peace is quite a novelty. Looking down at the Tasman Glacier, still gurgling away, made a pleasant change from staring through the mists of my more usual festive hangover, and before long we had the kettle on the boil and Christmas breakfast ready to go, consisting of:

Breakfast

Pan-fried chipolatas with sweet chilli sauce

Haricot beans in tomato sauce

Scrambled eggs

Focaccia

Real Ceylon tea

Laden down by packs and full stomachs, we sauntered back to the car park, had some lunch and drove back into the village to recover. We showered and went up to the Hermitage for a lazy afternoon staring at Mt Cook, Mt Sefton and the cloudless sky, and so ended an excellent and most unusual Christmas.

Queenstown

Written: 26 December 1997

On Boxing Day, after spending the night in the Blue Lake public shelter with Ben and Mira – where there were no Himmlers or camp fees, but then again, no right to be there either – I said my goodbyes and started south through the Lindis Pass towards Queenstown, making a lunch stop on the way at the historic Kawarau Suspension Bridge, a lovely little bridge across a deep gorge in the mountains. Well, it would have been lovely, but it’s near Queenstown, the tourist centre of the South Island, and so Kawarau is now a bungee bridge, and being right on the main highway, it’s an extremely popular and rather overcrowded stop-off for busloads of tourists. Still, it was interesting to see my first bungee bridge, even though it’s quite a small one at 43m high – the biggest, Skippers Canyon Bridge, is 69m high, and is also near Queenstown – but at NZ$130 a jump I decided to stick to watching.

As for Queenstown, I only visited it quickly to do some very expensive shopping and go for a quick wander; I was going to be coming back in January, so figured I’d explore it properly then. My first impressions were of a beautiful little town on the edge of Lake Wakatipu, with mountains sloping all around and plenty of interesting and trendy shops and cafés, full of beautiful people, posers and backpackers who were only after one thing: a laugh. I’d been warned that Queenstown is the Costa del Sol of the South Island, but I’m beginning to get immune to tourists now, after such a long time doing my own thing, so I bought what I had to buy and quickly moved on.

Kepler Track

Written: 1 January 1997

The little town of Te Anau is home to DOC’s headquarters for Fiordland National Park, and it’s also the start and end point of the circular Kepler Track, which I thought would be a good introduction to New Zealand’s longer treks. Stocking up for the Kepler was pretty easy, as it’s one of the more mollycoddled walks in the country, with relatively luxurious huts, gas cookers, plenty of beds and a very high standard of track. I decided to take a leisurely four days over the walk, which is about as long as you can take, so I bought all the provisions I needed, and after exploring Te Anau and its various points of interest, I headed north to Ten Mile Bush, the nearest DOC campsite to town, and settled in for the night. I never really got to see Ten Mile Bush because it was dark when I arrived, but when I woke up and saw that it was little more than a normal rest area, I popped up to the next one, Henry Creek, and spent Saturday unwinding and packing in preparation for the walk.

In comparison, Henry Creek was a divine stop. Te Anau town is on the southernmost tip of Lake Te Anau, and up the eastern side of the lake are quite a few DOC campsites, all primitive, but all situated in beautiful scenery. Crashing out on the lakeside, sunbathing and swimming, reading and sleeping... it was the perfect preparation for a long walk.

It helped that the weather was excellent, which was a relief as Fiordland is renowned for its serious rain; Milford Sound, for example, gets between 7m and 9m of rain per year, depending on which book you read, but whatever the figure, that’s an awful lot of precipitation. By the time I set off for Te Anau early on Sunday morning, I was about as ready for the tramp as I was going to get.

The Kepler Track

I’d chosen the 67km Kepler Track as a gentle introduction to real tramping; the walks to Mueller Hut and Ball Shelter in Mt Cook National Park were both ‘real’ tramps, but neither required carrying serious provisions (although we managed to pack a fair bit in for our Christmas Day celebrations, naturally). The Kepler, on the other hand, is one of the country’s eight Great Walks, which are slightly more expensive than other walks (or much more expensive in the case of the Milford and Routeburn tracks) but which are reckoned to be the classic Kiwi walks. Of course, all this has a whiff of marketing claptrap about it, because there are plenty of astounding walks in New Zealand that aren’t classified as Great Walks, but the scheme is a useful way of focussing tourists on those tracks that DOC has put money into maintaining, and the classification indicates that the walks are worth doing, which is handy if you’re visiting New Zealand on a short holiday and don’t have the luxury of time.

The Kepler Track is a round trip, beginning and ending just down the road from Te Anau, so I parked in the car park and set off early on Sunday, my pack bulging and muscles as yet pleasantly ache-free. Day 1 took me from Te Anau to Mt Luxmore Hut, climbing up the mountain along 14.1km of track. To be honest I found the rainforest section slightly tedious after a while, but during a stop for lunch at the limestone bluffs about two-thirds up Luxmore, I fell into conversation with another tramper, Jo from Sydney, and we fell in step – even though hers were shorter than mine – and the rest of the day flew by.

We arrived at the hut in early afternoon after breaking through the bush-line to wonderful views that made the long, slow climb worthwhile; we picked out our bunks, and decided to explore the area. The first stop, the Luxmore Cave, was well worth it; the cave is just a big slit in the ground, down which you can crawl with a torch, and before long Jo and I were stuck in pitch darkness, with only a couple of Maglites to guide us.

That’s when I remembered the guide on the tour that I had taken in the Bungle Bungles, who had taken us into one of the Bungle caves, turned off his torch, and made us stand there for about five minutes, while our eyes got used to the gloom. Slightly spooked, we did the same in Luxmore, and sure enough we could see all sorts of strange shapes and shadows from the tiny amount of light seeping in through the cracks; Jo had never experienced it before and was suitably impressed.

To round off the day and expend our excess energy we decided to hoof up Mt Luxmore itself, as the weather was clear and the views would be stunning. We were right; there, 1471m above sea level, the views were awe-inspiring, looking over Lake Te Anau to the northeast, towards Mt Aspiring in the north, and over Fiordland to the west and to the south. The climb also helped me build up an appetite; pasta, tuna, tomato purée, cayenne pepper and mixed herbs never tasted so good.

Into the Bush

Day 2 was a gorgeous trek through the mountaintops, made all the more beautiful by the continuing good weather. After 18.6km and a seriously steep descent through more rainforest – but this time a rainforest filled with babbling brooks, squawking birds and wonderful waterfalls – I arrived at the next hut, Iris Burn, in time for lunch. This points out one of the delights of easy tracks like the Kepler; the scheduled time for a day’s walk is normally five to six hours, but as with most DOC times, I ended up doing them in about three to four hours, so even with a lie in I’d make it to the next hut for lunch, leaving ample time for exploration.

Iris Burn sits in the big glacial valley through which the Iris Burn River flows, and just down from the hut is a powerful waterfall that’s created a clear swimming hole that would be perfect if the water wasn’t so cold; I went in up to my knees before realising that I couldn’t feel my toes any more. The ferocious sandflies were also a bit too hungry for my taste, so I headed back to the hut, where the night culminated in a search for a kiwi, led by the hut warden’s husband, but without success; we did, however, get to see lots of glow worms lighting up the forest canopy like the night sky.

Day 3 awoke to cloud covering the mountaintops, which just goes to show what luck I’d had in deciding when to do the track. Ahead of me by a day was a huge group who had met another huge group coming the other way, which meant there had been 76 people in the Iris Burn Hut the night before I arrived; and if I’d been a day later I’d have missed all the views on the mountain path. The 17.2km track from Iris Burn to Motarau Hut was, however, low level, so before long I was tucked up in Motarau Hut on the edges of Lake Manapouri, watching the world go by from under sandfly-proof clothes.

That night, being New Year’s Eve, I cracked open the 250ml bottle of port I’d been lugging for the last 50km (how’s that for dedication?), and the other English speakers followed suit with a bottle of gin and tonic, a bottle of bourbon and a small bottle of champagne to complete our makeshift minibar. We all managed to stay awake until midnight, when we went out on the veranda and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the tops of our voices, much to the bemusement of the Germans in the hut who were seeing in 1997 with some comparatively staid celebrations of their own.

Day 4, New Year’s Day, entailed a rather uneventful 17.1km walk through more forest, before I arrived at the car. The Kepler Track had turned out to be easy walking and a very pleasant introduction to the Great Walks, but it only served to whet my appetite; I now couldn’t wait for the next challenge.

Lake Ponderings

Written: 1 January 1997

The one thing I really miss – and I mean really miss – when I’m travelling through this world is my music. There are, of course, plenty of other things I miss as well, such as family, friends, pint glasses and regular income... but that’s about all I can think of, to be honest, and I’m surviving without the pints and regular income perfectly well. Music, however, is a really painful vacuum.

There I am, watching another sunset over a Fiordland lake, and everything’s perfect except for the soundtrack. Sure, the gentle lapping waves are beautiful, the chirping birds are probably rare and the complete lack of human intrusion is pleasant, but nothing would beat a bit of Pink Floyd to go down with the sun. Or I’m sitting in the middle of a busy New Zealand town – yes, there are some out there, believe it or not – and the riff from a Led Zeppelin track pumps through my head, making me want to start playing my air-guitar right there in the street. Driving requires all sorts of mood music, from vicious metal riffs to cool, ambient vibes, depending on the type of journey and the speed of the car, and although I have a few tapes that I’m playing to death, I really, really miss being able to take CDs from my collection at home and simply stick ’em on the stereo.

I’ve just finished reading a book about U2, something I picked up in Invercargill from the second-hand book shop for a few dollars; the subject appealed to me, despite being nearly ten years out of date, because I have fond memories of seeing U2 live at Wembley Stadium on their Zooropa tour. I was dumbstruck then – it was a powerful event – and reading this book really brought it all home, how much the idea of carving out a career in something like music has always appealed to me. I say ‘like music’ because I’m definitely over the ‘I wanna be a rock star’ stage – I have neither the talent nor the confidence, unfortunately – but whereas my dream job as a teenager was to be a computer magazine editor (a dream that I’d realised by the time I was 23), I now look at the perfect job as something slightly more artistically rewarding, whether it’s writing or something I haven’t discovered yet.

I’ve often given thought to what I will do when I return, and the possibilities are intriguing: I could work for a technology company; I could go back into journalism; I could go back to university and study a course that I actually care about this time; or I could move into an area which is totally new to me. There’s little use in planning anything at this stage, but whatever the future holds, at least the present is pretty damn rosy, so I have the luxury of being able to ponder my future without actually having to do anything about it.

Oscar Wilde once wrote, ‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?’ and the same can be said about travelling around Fiordland, the huge area of wilderness in the southwest of the South Island. According to the guidebooks it’s the highlight of most people’s trip to New Zealand, and it’s certainly been my highlight, though probably for different reasons to the bungee-jumping crowd. I’ve been tramping myself into oblivion, sometimes quite literally, and loving every minute of it. Perhaps my next career aspiration will be to be a professional walker? Who knows...

Hollyford-Pyke Route

Written: 9 January 1997

Not wasting any time after finishing the Kepler Track, I got straight back on the road and headed up the Milford Road, past Lake Te Anau, to Gunn’s Camp at Hollyford. While walking the Kepler Track, I’d decided on my next plan: to conquer the Hollyford Track. The Hollyford Track is a step up from the Kepler Track, being a 56km track from the road end to the sea... and another 56km back again. The track is much tougher and the overall distance much longer – 112km there and back compared to 67km for the Kepler round trip – but I was feeling pretty confident after and didn’t feel at all tired, so the Hollyford it was. I’d already stocked up with ten days’ worth of food just in case, so after a night at Gunn’s Camp, I headed for the start of the track.

You might be wondering what a tramper has to carry on his or her back for a walk like this; well, for a nine-day hike like the Hollyford, it’s a hell of a lot. For a start, this is Fiordland, so you need clothes for all types of weather, from boiling sun to freezing hail, so the clothes take up a fair amount of weight, with waterproof tops and bottoms, long trousers, shorts, T-shirts, sweatshirts, plenty of socks, swimming trunks... and more. Then there’s the food for ten days (and always take a spare day or two, just in case you get stranded), which in my case included 1kg of muesli, powdered milk, 40 Ryvita, cheese, meat paste, seven packets of rice, four tins of tuna, tomato paste, spices, coffee, sugar... all ready to be split into strict daily rations. Throw in my Trangia cooker and half a litre of meths, and it’s getting heavier. Add in a sleeping bag and inflatable pillow, a toiletries/first aid bag, and things like torches, candles, compass, maps, books and so on, and you have your survival pack for over a week.

I could hardly lift the thing as I set off for the track, but the pack gets lighter as you eat your way through your supplies. You also get fitter as you progress, so one thing’s for sure: that first lift is always the worst.

Of course, the rain started straight away. I couldn’t really moan, seeing as I’d had four days of glorious weather on the Kepler and Fiordland isn’t exactly known for its sunshine, but it did mean that the first day, from the road end to the Alabaster Hut on Lake Alabaster, wasn’t that thrilling; I couldn’t see much of the Hollyford Valley that I was walking down, and the promised mountains weren’t anywhere to be seen. Still, the motley collection of people I found in the hut soon dispelled all thoughts of the weather; if the Kepler had been full of rather predictable traveller-types, the Hollyford was full of New Zealanders from all walks of life. From the six Tararua Tramping Club members to the two mad adventurers who had braved insane terrain to get there from Queenstown, the conversation flowed as freely as the water down the panes.

I met a guy called Rick who had the same sort of plan as me – nine days to go to the end of the track and back – and a family from Timaru who provided their own little soap opera in family politics for us all to enjoy, with an ancient but tough-as-old-boots mother taking her three late-twenties kids on the track, as well as two tag-along American friends who were well out of their depth. The Hollyford, being constructed as a one-way track, ensured that I’d end up with most of these people every night (except the Tararuas who were heading south), and this seemed a reasonable prospect, as long as nobody snored. Luckily nobody did.

Tempting Tracks

One of the stories the Tararuas told was of the Pyke Loop. The Hollyford is a one-way track, but there is a continuation of the track up the coast and back down the Pyke river, coming out at the Alabaster Hut again; if you imagine the whole loop as a Y-shape, then the Hollyford Track goes from the bottom of the Y to the top of the left fork, and the Pyke Loop crosses the top of the Y and heads back down the left-hand side, back to the stem. Although this loop track sounds ideal, reducing the only repeated section of the walk to the last day from Alabaster to the road end, it’s not really a sensible option; it’s classed as a route rather than a track, which means it’s hardly marked, it’s not maintained, and if it rains you’re in serious trouble, with flooding rivers, big swamps and only two huts on the entire 60km stretch. When I’d first looked at the walk details for the Hollyford I’d briefly entertained the idea of doing the Pyke Loop, only to read that the walk was only suitable for experienced, well-equipped parties, so I’d stuck to the Hollyford. Half of the Tararua group had just returned from the Pyke Loop, and with mud up to your waist, fast-flowing rivers and seriously thick scrub lacerating your legs, it sounded like the Hollyford was the better bet. Still, the Pyke would have been an interesting option if I’d been with a group.

The second day took me through forest bog and along the first section of the cutely named Demon Trail, and up the eastern shore of the north-south Lake McKerrow (the left branch of the Y, if you like). The rain had mercifully stopped, producing some interesting views in the morning over Lake Alabaster, with wispy clouds hanging round the tops – ‘hogs backs’ as Rick said the clouds were called – but the track was pretty nasty, coming complete with big mud puddles to negotiate, and heaps of moss-covered boulders that were so slimy they were lethal underfoot.

It didn’t take too long, though, and it was a pretty little walk, and by lunchtime I’d arrived at the Demon Trail Hut, where I found a beautiful little beach where I washed all my clothes. By now the sun had truly come out, and apart from the sandflies, who were epic all the way along the track, it was bliss. I also met more people – Phil, Tash and Steve from Christchurch – and before long we were all yarning the evening away. Too late we all discovered that Phil’s snoring was about as loud as a human being’s can be, but after a day’s tramping it takes considerable noise to keep you awake, and besides, I’d packed my earplugs. There were some tired looking walkers the next morning, though...

Day 3 consisted of the rest of the Demon Trail to Hokuri Hut, almost at the northern tip of Lake McKerrow, and apart from a couple of breaks in the bush, it was mainly tricky and slippery track, undulating along the lakeside, but totally enclosed by thick forest. Hokuri Hut was a welcome sight, and here I met Bill and Gary, who had just come from a trip anti-clockwise round the Pyke Loop. They looked in a real state, with scratched legs, raw elbows, and some serious stories. Gary kept on going south, but Bill stayed the night and kept us all entertained with tales of places like Lake Wilmot and the Black Swamp, both evil spots by the sound of it. And that’s when I caught the glint in Rick’s eye.

Gary, you see, had got the wrong end of the stick. When I’d met him on my arrival at the hut, I’d told him that I’d have loved to try the Pyke, but I wasn’t equipped, and besides, I was on my own, off he went, leaving me and Bill in the hut. But when Gary bumped into Rick, who was still on his way to the hut back on the Demon Trail, they’d also got talking about the Pyke, and Gary told Rick that if he wanted to do it, he should talk to this guy with a beard in Hokuri Hut; me, in other words. So Rick told me this, and we laughed and dismissed it out of hand, but as Bill unfolded his story of a living hell, we started looking at each other in that ‘whaddya reckon’ way. And so was born the germ of an idea that grew, and by the time we went to bed we were seriously considering the Pyke Loop, against all common sense. It all depended on the weather, and it turned out we could get a weather report from the Lodge at Martins Bay the next day, as the Lodge is a private hut for guided walkers, and they have luxuries like radios and food.

Teaming Up

So on day 4, Rick and I set off together on the trail to Martins Bay, which marks the end of the Hollyford Track. The walk was pretty lovely as it followed the beach on northern Lake McKerrow, before ducking into more bush and arriving at the Lodge...and here we asked for the weather report, nervous as to what it might say. It turned out that it would be fine for at least a couple of days – and no Fiordland weather report can be relied upon beyond a couple of days – so we committed to our plan (and should have been committed, frankly); the Pyke Loop it was.

We pushed on to the Martins Bay Hut, which was along a glorious beach, and stopped for lunch there, right at the end of the Hollyford Track. All of a sudden, Martins Bay had changed from the end of the track to the beginning of the Hard Part... and the butterflies were there in my stomach. We were about to enter dangerous territory where people die, territory where you can’t afford to give up, because if you give up, you get stranded, and if you get stranded, you either get rescued, or you get discovered weeks later. We’d both told DOC of our intentions, as one always should, but they wouldn’t be searching until a day or so after we were supposed to return, and even then they’d still have to find us. It was a sobering thought.

We pushed through to Big Bay that afternoon, effectively crossing the top of the Y. It was instantly obvious that the type of walking had changed; there were no more lovely tracks, just little worn routes with the odd marker. At the same time, the walk instantly became much more interesting; the path from Martins Bay to Big Bay was mainly along the coast, passing a truly stinking seal colony and some amazing rock sculptures, and all the time we had this wonderful view ahead of us of these huge mountains, such as Mt McKenzie, with their snowy tops and barren slopes where nothing grows at all. Big Bay itself lived up to its name, and the long slog along the beach was getting a bit painful after such a long day, but with views like this, it’s amazing how you forget your aching feet and straining shoulders. The hut, right at the northern end of the bay, wasn’t one of the most delightful I’ve ever seen, but we didn’t care and, apart from one other person (who turned out to be a bit of a weirdo from Te Anau[1]) we were totally alone in one of the most isolated spots in New Zealand. It was quite wonderful.

Big Bay might have been isolated, but there was one surprise in store. People tend to leave their excess food in huts, just in case a needy traveller turns up, and among the bags of milk powder and sugar was a packet of blackcurrant Vitafresh, a cordial powder that makes dodgy creek water taste palatable. And there, emblazoned across the packet that dated back to 1995, was a competition; ‘Win an Acorn Home Computer’ it proclaimed, along with the logo and a picture of an ancient Acorn machine. Of all the places to find a bit of advertising from the company who were effectively paying my way round New Zealand...

Into the Wilderness

On day 5 we got up at 5am to make an early start, mainly because we wanted all the walking time we could get. The next hut, Olivine, was too far away for a normal day’s walk, and most people camp out halfway along the loop, but having no tents we had to try for the hut, or stay out in a homemade bivvy (which was a feasible proposition, just not as nice as a hut). Bill’s party had taken 14 hours to get from Olivine to Big Bay, so we set off with some idea of what lay ahead, and it all looked so easy on the map. If only we’d known.

The track started off with a reasonably simple trudge through thick forest – in which we managed to get lost, rather worryingly – and across a swing bridge, and then we struck out due east, heading towards the Pyke River. After about 10km of bashing through the bush we reached the Pyke, and here the fun started. After crossing the river, which was quite braided at this point and only just above knee deep, we hit the track, only to find it went through flax quagmire, not the most pleasant walking in the world. After wading through knee-deep water, by which time our boots were well and truly soaked, we decided that walking in the river itself might be a good idea, seeing as it hadn’t been raining that much recently.

This turned out to be a good idea. While the track passed through goodness only knows what, we simply stuck to the river, crossing it in a zigzag fashion and sticking to the insides of corners where there was plenty of silt to walk on. The added bonus of river-hopping was the astounding view as we waltzed through the deep blue water (which was pretty damn cold, but refreshing nonetheless after the bush); looking down the valley we could see the Skippers Range rising up ahead on the right, with the Little Red Hill Range on the left, and occasional glimpses of the mighty Darran Range in the distance. It seemed that the stories of a living hell had to be wrong; this was beautiful tramping.

Before long we reached Lake Wilmot, where we stopped for a late lunch. The lake was pure beauty, and apart from some confusion with regard to the map – the one I was using was a 1988 revision, since which the whole area has been flooded a number of times, changing the area considerably – we’d managed really well. After lunch, full of Ryvita and confidence, we picked up the track along the eastern shore of the lake, making great progress to the southern end of the lake by about 3pm. And that’s when things started to go wrong.

We lost the track pretty quickly, which wasn’t that surprising as we’d been following our noses, there being no markers at all along the lake track. The problem was that we’d seen two different versions of the route on various maps; the one on mine said to go straight on after the lake, sticking to the east side of the valley, but the more modern map had shown a different track, crossing along the southern shore of the lake to the western side of the valley, before following the river down (which flows out of the southwestern tip of the lake).

We tossed a mental coin and went for the more modern option, crossing the southern shore to the river; we figured that having come this far down the river, we could probably continue to follow it all the way down. Whoops: bad choice.

When a river flows out of a lake, it’s going fast and deep. As we reached the southwestern tip of the lake, it became painfully obvious that we weren’t going to be able to follow the river any more, even if we stuck to the banks, so we decided to try to follow the river bank a few metres in from the water, through the bush.

This was when it really began to fall apart; I have never experienced the likes of hardcore Kiwi river-flat bush, and I hope I never do again. Imagine the thickest thicket, and double it; our progress was by inches, there was no respite, and the only tracks we found were made by deer. It’s not just a case of slow progress either; by far the worst aspect of bush-bashing is the pain involved, and here we discovered the source of Gary and Bill’s bloodied legs – bush bastards like hook grass and bush lawyer, which take absolutely no prisoners.

Going Nowhere Slowly

It took us about an hour of bush-bashing to realise that it was hopeless; we were getting nowhere, and were in considerable pain to boot. We turned right around, smashed our way back to the lake – what a gorgeous sight after that hell! – and threaded back to the southeastern corner of the lake, where we nursed our pride and tried to save the day by finding the track. The relief when we found the first marker deep in the considerably easier bush was huge, and we followed the markers through beech forest until we hit the Barrier River; we constantly lost the track, but after our experiences with the river bush, we were determined to keep to the path now that we had it in our sights, so if we lost the markers we’d turn back and try again. Cries of ‘marker!’ from whoever was leading were like manna from heaven.

The Barrier River posed no problems, being only knee deep, and the next stage was relatively easy, passing through the river flats where Davey Gunn, a legendary figure in the area and original proprietor of Gunn’s Camp, used to run his cattle. After crossing the Diorite Stream, from which we could see some beautiful waterfalls tumbling off the Little Red Hill Range near the source of the Diorite, we hit more bush, which the map said was the last stretch before the hut. If only it was that simple; the track wound round and round, seemingly going on forever, and we kept stumbling on parts that had been completely washed out. What do you do when a track disappears into the river? You get inventive, but when the sun’s already ducked below the mountains and the hut has got to be close, it’s soul destroying.

How we made it, I don’t know; I was on autopilot as my legs followed the rutted track, even though I couldn’t see the ground through the bush. I now understand what it’s like to have a huge beer belly, when your feet become old friends that you never see any more, but eventually we got to the Olivine River, where a strange contraption awaited us: a cage bridge. This involved getting into a cage, one at a time, and winding your way over the river, a painful and tiring experience after the 14.5 hours we’d been walking... but at last we could see the hut, and boy, it looked cosy.

That night we slept like the dead, after cooking a hasty meal and passing on all our tips onto the two Kiwi women whom we met in the hut, and who were doing the Pyke the other way around. We got plenty of tips off them for the ensuing trip back to Alabaster, but we were so exhausted that most of it went over our heads, and when we woke up late on day 6, life was starting to return to normal after the struggles of the day before.

Well-earned Rest

The rest day is a long-honoured and essential tramping tradition. Back in the Pilbara, Scott and I spent a wonderful rest day on the George River, massaging ourselves in the fast-flowing rapids, and slowly getting our aching bodies back into shape for the return run. The rest day gives you time to reflect on where you are and how you got there; after all, tramping isn’t so much a destination, as a journey – indeed, quite often the destination is the same car that you left from – and the rest day is when you can sit down and enjoy the complete solitude and total lack of the human world that you can only get by walking for miles into the wilderness.

I spent most of the day writing letters, talking with Rick about the hardships we’d suffered to get to where we were, and counting my scars. It felt good to know that the worst of the trip was over – the journey to Alabaster sounded easy in comparison – and we spent the day revelling in the knowledge that we’d managed to conquer the Pyke Loop. If only I’d known what lay in store for the next day, as I watched the stars appear in the clear night sky; it’s not over until the fat lady sings, and she hadn’t even turned up yet...

Day 7 saw an early start of 6am and more beautiful weather, with strong sunlight and a gentle breeze to take the sting out of the ultraviolet. On paper the route looked pretty easy; follow the river for about 10km before hitting the northern tip of Lake Alabaster, from where it was plain sailing if you just walked in the lake, according to the Kiwis. How could we go wrong? One word: washout.

We lost the track relatively early on, when we came upon a dry river that crossed our path. We crossed that easily enough, but soon after we hit the bush again, and we realised we hadn’t seen a marker for a while. Never mind, we thought, we’ll stick to the river bank, where we assumed the path would have been if the river hadn’t washed the markers away. That was our mistake; the track actually headed inland, but we missed it, and the rest, as they say, is history. Bush-bashing our way through reasonably thick bush – not as thick as around Lake Wilmot, but thick enough – we eventually came out at the river again, rather lost, but heading in the right sort of direction. And that’s where Rick decided he needed to get out of the grass, pronto.

Poor old Rick; he suffered badly from hay fever, and first thing in the morning we’d walked through a field full of pollen-heavy grass. He’d gone in front, and it had looked like he’d got an exhaust pipe fitted, the way he stirred up the pollen from the grass heads; now he was swelling up all over in a fearsome rash.

He clearly needed a break from the bush, and there was the river, all shallow and silted, so we decided to walk down the river again. It had been such a success before, so why not? It all went swimmingly for about 3km, until we tried to cross the river back to the eastern bank, but by this time it wasn’t such a friendly, shallow trickle: by now it had got its act together.

It’s vital to take river crossings very seriously. The biggest cause of death in areas like the Pyke is drowning – indeed, Davey Gunn drowned in the Hollyford, and he would have known the dangers better than anyone – and as we tried to cross the river, now waist deep, it became increasingly obvious that if one of us was to lose his foothold, we’d be swept away. We aborted the attempt, and after a couple of further tries, we realised we would have to tramp back to our original crossing place, and resume the bush-bashing.

The whole river episode had been a waste of time and effort, but we looked at it philosophically; braver and more stupid trampers might have pushed on and tried the crossing, and they might have drowned. We, on the other hand, were suffering, but very much alive[2].

The Black Swamp

One good thing about the river escapade was that it enabled us to pinpoint our position on the map; we were just north of a river that flowed across the track, and we reasoned that if we could get to the river, we could walk up and down it relatively unhindered and find the markers. We soon found the river, and Rick headed west towards the Pyke, while I headed east. I must have walked for a good half a kilometre through waist-deep, brown water, not seeing or caring what lay in the muddy creek; I was just glad that this wasn’t northern Australia, or I’d have been chomped up by a crocodile in no time at all. By the time I returned, soaked to the skin and with boots full of silt, I discovered that Rick had found the track, and had been yelling my name for ages. That’s another nasty aspect of the bush; it eats all sound. But we were so glad to have found the track again, I didn’t really care.

Actually, finding the track turned out to be a mixed blessing. The next obstacle was the one with the most emotive name on the map: the Black Swamp. We’d heard stories about the Black Swamp, and every one of them proved correct. It stank of rotting vegetation; it was, indeed, a very black, swampy area, dotted with odd tussocks of vegetation with strange grassy growths appearing out of the top; and it was waist deep in gooey, quicksand-like mud, as both Rick and I discovered as we waded through it. We started out by trying to hop from clump to clump, but this turned out to be pretty hopeless with the combination of heavy backpack and unstable vegetation, and by the end of the swamp, which can only have been about 200m wide, we were filthy, soaked, and, frankly, having a ball. When you’re already muddy, you might as well wallow in it, and wallow in it we did.

After the Black Swamp we miraculously managed to keep to the markers, despite large numbers of washouts. I had decided to wear my waterproof over-trousers to keep out the hook grass, as my legs were too sore to cope otherwise, and progress was generally good, although the bush we bashed through was monotonous, dark and pretty soul destroying. As we emerged onto the beach at the northern tip of Lake Alabaster, I sank onto the ground and collapsed into lunch; we’d taken the best part of seven hours to get from the hut to the lake, a very long time for such a short distance.

The view, though, was like no other. It was quite dreamy sitting at the end of the lake and looking south towards Mt Madeline and the Darran Mountains (the highest peaks in the region), especially after the darkness of the bush. From here on the walk was as near to perfect as you can get; we skirted the eastern shore of the lake, walking in the water which only came up to our knees, and making full use of the beaches when they arrived. The map reading was pretty easy too, as the western shore had a number of obvious features, and it was a big relief to be able to gauge our progress after the numbing frustration of the bush. We arrived at the Alabaster Hut just in time for tea, and for a wonderfully warm swim in the sun-heated lake.

On our last night the sunset had to be seen to be believed. There were pinks and violets and purples and reds, all reflecting off the lake, with the strangest cloud formations making the sky look like a poster from the late sixties. It was no coincidence that we slept really well that night, and the next day the tramp out to the car was blissfully easy, with well-formed tracks, no mud and no bloody hook grass; it wasn’t long before I’d met up with Zed – a welcome sight, I can tell you – dropped Rick off at his bus stop, and hopped into a gorgeously hot shower back at Gunn’s Camp, probably one of the most pleasurable moments of a long tramp.

After eight days in the bush – one less than originally planned, but far more challenging and rewarding than originally planned, too – even the rugged and rustic charm of Gunn’s Camp, with its fire-fuelled hot water system and friendly sandfly population, was civilised. That night I slept the sleep of the just.

[1] Southlanders – that’s people who live in Southland, which includes places like Invercargill and Te Anau, right at the bottom end of the South Island – have an accent all of their own. The area was settled by the Scottish, and as a result the locals have a very distinctive ‘r’ sound, derived from the rolling r’s of the Scots. These days it makes Southlanders sound like people from Devon, but they tend to speak very slowly and have an odd habit of repeating themselves. All this tends to make Southlanders sound a bit simple, which is a shame, as they’re actually the salt of the earth. What a pity we had to be stuck in a hut with the only one who lived up to his accent...

[2] It’s a serious point, this. I later read in the paper about a German who died on the Tasman Glacier when he fell off a moraine wall while taking a photograph; I’d spent Christmas Eve on the Tasman Glacier, and I’d climbed plenty of moraine around there. There but for the Grace of God...

Bush Bastards

Written: 6 January 1997

The New Zealand bush is wild, and the bush on the Pyke Route is no exception; it’s laced with some of the most unfriendly plants you could ever hope to meet. Forget familiar forest friends like waist-high thistles and huge clumps of stinging nettles, because the bush is full of bush bastards – there’s no other word for it.

The first bush bastard is hook grass, an innocent-looking little grass with brown seeds stored in clumps at the end of the stalks. So far so good, but hook grass has a clever little way of spreading its seeds; each seed has a little hook on it which attaches itself to any hairy beast that brushes past it, enabling the seeds to stick to the animal and fall off at a later date, thus spreading themselves around. This is mighty clever, but human leg hairs just aren’t as hardcore as deer hairs, so hook grass is an incredibly painful way of depilating your legs. Imagine walking through tall grass that constantly pulls your leg hairs out, and you can probably guess how much I hate hook grass; next time I either shave my legs or I invest in gaiters.

The next bush bastard is bush lawyer. I don’t know how it got its name, but bush lawyer rips you up and draws plenty of blood, which could be a clue. After the walk I was covered in bush lawyer scars that looked like claw gouges, and every one of them hurt like hell when it happened. Bush lawyer looks lovely, like a small-leafed ivy, and it climbs in much the same way – everywhere, in other words. The only problem is that bush lawyer is covered in extremely sharp thorns that all point one way, away from the end of the stem. This means that if some lawyer is hanging down and you walk into it, it lodges its thorns in your skin and as you walk away it rips into you like a plough ripping into a field. By the time you notice it, it’s too late, as it’s never just one strand; it comes with friends that will be stuck on your pack, in your clothes, in your hair and around your neck. Turning around or struggling only makes it worse; the solution is to slowly remove each bit, wincing as you go, and trying to avoid sudden movements. Having two people helps, if only because the first person can warn the other person not to follow. Bush lawyer is surely the ultimate bush bastard.

Then there’s the unnamed grass with big thick blades that act like paper. By this I don’t mean you can write on it, add a stamp and send a pretty postcard home; I mean the blades lacerate you with paper cuts. You’re walking along, minding your own business, and suddenly you find that blood is pouring down between your fingers from a nasty slash across your knuckles. It might not hurt yet, but it will do in about a minute... and it’ll hurt like hell for about three days, because the blades are smothered in a mild poison that irritates the cuts as they heal.

On top of all these friendly little plants are the usual challenges you face when hacking through forests, like the creeper that hangs across your path, catching your pack, stringing itself round your neck, and tripping you up. Or the countless fallen trees covered in slippery moss that turn out to be rotten as you put your foot right through the bark and into an angry insect nest. Or the sharp sticks everywhere that you can’t see because there’s so much foliage between you and the ground, but which spike your legs, causing gashes and cuts. Or even the ubiquitous bushes that don’t scratch as such, but slowly grind down your skin until it’s red raw and incredibly sore.

Never underestimate the wild bush; it hurts. But we keep coming back, so there must be something in it...

Milford

Written: 10 January 1997

The next day, stiff and stretching, I struck camp, hopped into Zed and headed off to Milford Sound. Milford is the main tourist attraction in Fiordland, with its stunning fiord and huge cliffs rising almost vertically out of the water, up to heights of nearly 1700m: it’s quite a sight. The drive to Milford is spectacular enough, with a dangerously winding road that’s home to millions of breakneck tour coaches; the Homer Tunnel, which blasts its way through the mountains to get to the sea, is probably the scariest tunnel I’ve ever driven through. Barely wide enough to accommodate two cars side by side, it’s pitch black, leaks frightening amounts of water, and the road surface is dodgy to say the least. Add the slope of the tunnel – sloping down towards the Milford end at quite a rate – and it’s enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies, especially when you meet four oncoming tour buses in a row, as I did on my return. It’s incredible that it isn’t permanently blocked by accidents...

The sight when you finally come out of the Homer Tunnel has to be seen to be believed. Sheer walls shoot up into the clouds on either side of you, with waterfalls cascading down all over the place, and tucked right down at the end of this huge glacial valley is Milford Sound, a beautiful body of water with huge peaks and rugged wilderness that seems to defy gravity. Unfortunately all this is too much of a lure for the tourists, and Milford township consists of very little except the usual tourist traps – hotels, restaurants, lots of parking space and very little else – and I hadn’t seen so many tour buses lined up since Uluru. Add in the noisy and smoky ferries that cart crowds of sightseers up and down the sound and you end up with something that isn’t exactly serene. That said, the short walk to Bowen Falls, a spectacular waterfall down the slopes, soon takes you away from the bustle of the car parks, and the magnificence of Mitre Peak, the 1695m mountain that rises right out of the sea in front of you, is well worth braving the madding crowd for.

Then there’s the wildlife, which is mostly underwater. It’s pretty unique because Milford’s huge annual rainfall – between 7m and 9m a year – creates a 3-4m layer of fresh water that floats on top of the sound (as fresh water is lighter than salt water), and the peaty stain of the fresh water makes the top 40m of the fiord much darker than normal. This means that some very strange animals and plants live in Milford Sound, some that otherwise wouldn’t live that near the surface, and despite the busy tourism and the ‘been there, taken the photo’ attitude of most visitors, Milford deserves its place in the guidebooks. Just don’t expect to be alone.

Southern Scenic Route (West)

Written: 11 January 1997

Heading back to Te Anau on the Milford Road, I stopped off at a place called the Chasm to see some seriously weird water-sculpted rock formations – water, in case you haven’t guessed, plays an important part in Fiordland’s ecology – and eventually arrived in Te Anau, reported my return to DOC and decided to change my plans. With an extra day in hand I thought it might be fun to do the western half of the Southern Scenic Route from Te Anau to Invercargill, seeing as I’d already enjoyed the eastern half from Dunedin. Leaflet in hand, I filled up the car and set off... only to find that the weather, which had been incredibly good since I’d started the Kepler, decided to do its stuff. The Southern Scenic Route turned into the Southern Drizzle Drive, but about halfway through I found a place that didn’t depend on a wonderful view: the Clifden Suspension Bridge.

And here I spent the night, right by this beautiful bridge, built in 1898 and preserved in an historic reserve. It might be less than a century old, but it feels historic in the same way that Iron Bridge Gorge and the original Clifton Suspension Bridge do, and as I listened to the radio, rain gently dribbling down, I felt rather lucky. A cyclone – Cyclone Dorina – had just hit Auckland, ripping roofs of houses in Whangarei, gusting at 90km/h, blowing down power lines, causing floods and generally spoiling people’s holidays, and here I was in supposedly the wettest area of the country – and one of the wettest places in the world, in fact – with only a light splattering of rain.

Unfortunately the drizzle continued the next day along with the Southern Scenic Route, so it wasn’t long before I reached Invercargill, having driven through similar coastal scenery to the eastern arm of the Route: trees growing at desperate angles, farmland that must be a nightmare to maintain, and beaches that look innocent until the rip tide carries you off into the Tasman Sea. It was rugged but attractive, unlike Invercargill.

I know that cities aren’t best viewed in the rain, but Invercargill was just as depressing in the storm as it had been in the strong sunlight. On the other hand it is a city, which means it has supermarkets, so I visited a Pack ‘n’ Save and stocked up with a couple of weeks’ worth of food before setting off due south to Bluff.

I’d not had time to visit Bluff, the southernmost town in the South Island, on my previous visit, which was a shame; in the rain the visibility was pretty awful, and although I walked round the bluff to the lookout point where the signs helpfully pointed out all the little islands to the south – such as Stewart Island, a famous tramping spot – I couldn’t see a thing, and simply succeeded in getting soaked. But hey! I’ve been to Bluff, the Kiwi equivalent to Land’s End, and all I have to do now is visit Cape Reinga on the northern tip of Northland and I’ll have travelled the New Zealand mainland from tip to toe (especially as I’ve already been to Slope Point, the southernmost tip of the South Island). Trivia is a wonderful travelling companion sometimes...

Queenstown

Written: 13 January 1997

After visiting Bluff I took advantage of the lack of distractions in Southland to head north to Queenstown once again. My plans to camp in a dirt cheap DOC campsite at 12 Mile Creek were dashed when I discovered a bikers’ rally there for the weekend, so after pussyfooting about – something I tend to do when my plans get scuppered – I checked into a rather posh caravan park right in the town at the princely sum of NZ$10 per night, the most expensive place I’ve yet camped in New Zealand. Still, Queenstown is regarded as one of the most expensive places in the country, so I decided to treat myself, and despite the fact that in the dining room I heard every language except English, making it rather hard to believe I was in New Zealand, I enjoyed the pampering; I also enjoyed the real meat that I’d bought for my supper, my first meat this year after eating nothing but dried rice and the odd bit of tinned tuna on my tramps.

Sunday saw a slight clearing of the rain, so I popped up Queenstown Hill after lunch for stunning views of the Remarkables, the mountains round Queenstown, and Lake Wakatipu, on which Queenstown sits. It’s a lovely place... or, to be more accurate, it’s a lovely setting, as Queenstown itself is just another modern town, albeit somewhat more interesting than most, with its quaint tourist-friendly centre, Ye Real Olde English Pubbe and Real Old Kiwi Pub (both of which are stunningly new) and shops that stay open until 11pm (even on a Sunday). It’s a tourist Mecca, but as one of my hobbies is watching the world go by, I found it fascinating, even though it stirred up some strange emotions. As I wandered past the restaurants, where people tucked into exquisite dishes over bottles of wine, and tiptoed past the pubs, hearing beery laughter waft out with the smell of pies and pints, I couldn’t help being whisked back to the days when I used to spend a lot of my time in pubs and restaurants, back when I had an income and before I started budgeting in earnest. Right there, on the streets of Queenstown, it hit me how much I miss that lifestyle sometimes; cooking in a campsite is all very well, but I miss the social aspect of everyone going down the pub and hitting the curry house afterwards. There is a positive side to living on a budget – you really appreciate going out when you do, and it’s the only way I can afford to travel for a decent period – but eating in restaurants and relaxing in warm pubs are luxuries that destroy travel budgets, and sometimes it’s hard to be the one living on a shoestring with your nose pressed to the glass.

But despite the odd pang for a rich, western lifestyle, Queenstown was a great place to relax while waiting for the weather to roll away, as I planned my next walk.

Routeburn-Greenstone Track

Written: 17 January 1997

The next bout of activity I’d planned was the Routeburn Track, which starts just north of Glenorchy (itself to the northwest of Queenstown) and takes you to over the mountains to a point called the Divide on the Milford Road. There I planned to pick up the Greenstone Track, taking me back towards Glenorchy, but ending some 25km of dusty road and a good day’s walk from the start of the Routeburn (and my car). ‘Never mind, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,’ I thought, and jumped in the car for Glenorchy.

The Routeburn is interesting; before I did it I had doubts about whether it was going to be worth the effort. After the Hollyford-Pyke it looked like plain sailing, with only one extra challenge; with the huts being NZ$28 a night – it’s one of the most popular Great Walks and is priced accordingly – I opted to camp for only NZ$9 a night, but that meant adding over 2kg of tent to my already back-straining pack. The problem with the Routeburn is that it’s a bit of a surrogate for the Milford, which means it’s very touristy; some 10,000 people a year tramp the Routeburn, and most of them (like me) aren’t locals. I figured I’d just have to bite the bullet and put up with the crowds, though in the end the fact that I was camping meant I never had any real problems, even though there were plenty of people on the track. Sure, there were some busy spots, such as the Harris Saddle Shelter, but no self-respecting tourist is going to worry about saving NZ$19 a night for the privilege of lugging a tent around, so the campsites were pretty empty, and actually I rather enjoyed the tourist-watching.

So in the end the Routeburn turned out to be a real highlight, with less crowding than on the Kepler. The track itself is incredible; from east to west you climb steadily up until you reach the Harris Saddle, before winding your way down to the Divide, and almost all of the walk is above the bush-line, so you get some incredible views. It’s a more immediate walk than the Kepler; with the Kepler you’re above the mountains, which gives great vistas, but on the Routeburn you’re really inside the mountain range, with huge peaks rising right beside the track, making you feel very small indeed. I loved it, and it turned out to be the most spectacular walk I’ve yet done (apart from the Mueller Hut, but that’s a special case).

Trekking the Routeburn

Day 1 was an easy two-hour wander to Routeburn Flats, a lovely river flat where the sandflies weren’t too bad (at least compared to the Hollyford) and the views were wonderful. The weather, in an atypical display of sympathy, had cleared to sunny and hot, and the skies got clearer and clearer as the walk went on, which I appreciated as I would have been high enough to be right inside the clouds if the weather had turned.

Day 2 saw the most spectacular landscapes on the way up to the Harris Saddle, home to the beautiful Lake Harris and some of the most inspiring peaks you’ll ever see. It’s a bit pointless me going on about how impressive the views are, because it’s only possible to understand when you’ve actually been there, but suffice to say that the trek over the saddle would on its own make the Routeburn worth doing, and the short climb up to Conical Hill made me feel as if I was on top of the world.

All this is a very different type of walking to the Hollyford-Pyke; there it was all about river valleys, bush and bog, none of which tend to crop up on alpine tracks like the Routeburn. The differences between the two tracks were instantly apparent from Conical Hill, from where I could see right down the Hollyford Valley to Martins Bay; that was quite a sight, knowing that I’d spent a week or so hacking my way up the valley laid out before me. Skirting back down the western side of the range, I could see Gunn’s Camp, the Hollyford Road and all sorts of familiar sights, all brought to life by my previous tramp. It felt a bit like coming home...

That night at Mackenzie Camp was a delight, with especially beautiful views towards Emily Peak as it reflected in Lake Mackenzie. The campsite was a bit pitiful and, as with Routeburn Flats, rather cold and dewy, but at least it kept my milk mixture cold for my morning muesli, and meant that when I woke up, I had absolutely no desire to lie in and freeze in the perishing morning mist. Stalking down towards the Divide on day 3, I made good time to Lake Howden; from here I took a track up to Key Summit, which was home to more great views, especially of Lake Marian, and I also took the time to take in a nature trail. And that marked the end of the Routeburn; now for the Greenstone.

Back on the Greenstone

The Greenstone, while undoubtedly a lovely walk, did rather bore me. The reason? It’s another leafy, forested valley walk, and I’d had quite a lot of that already on the Kepler and Hollyford Tracks already. The solution? I hoofed it and walked all the way to the last hut, Sly Burn, in the one day, on top of the 11km or so from the last part of the Routeburn and the side trip up Key Summit. The views were wonderful most of the way, even though I was a bit tired of river valleys, and although my body ached and my feet throbbed, I made it to the hut to find there was one spare bed in the hut – mine! – and a refreshingly freezing swimming hole down the river bank. I almost felt human after my evening rice dish, and fell asleep on the soft, warm mattress the second I hit it.

The last day went beyond pain. The last couple of hours to the road end were sheer agony as I had some kind of muscle strain in my left ankle, and by the time I reached the road end, I really needed a rest. Quite how I was going to manage the next 25km along the road to my car, I didn’t know, but then the gods smiled on me. On my first attempt at a hitch, I snagged a ride from a Japanese tramper who was heading to the Routeburn to drop off his car, which was perfect, as that’s where I’d left Zed. As we bombed down the dirt road towards the car park, I realised just how far it would have been to walk, and I thanked my stars that I wasn’t going to be left stranded... and sure enough, after a short drive there was good old Zed, in one piece and looking like home to me.

Before long I was showering, beard-trimming and clothes-washing in the Glenorchy Motor Camp, feeling that happy and healthy glow you get when another tramp is consigned to memory. When you return from days in the wilderness, it’s surprising how acute your senses become. Without everyday chemicals, smells, culinary delights and washing routines to clog the senses, you really notice things that you normally don’t spot, like people’s perfume, from ladies’ cologne to men’s after-shave and deodorant; it hits you in the face when you walk in the door. The same happens on the track when you walk past day walkers, and it makes you really appreciate how much we pamper our bodies in everyday life. Then there are the good old taste buds; that Snickers bar and bag of crisps is never going to taste as good as just after a long tramp. Modern day noises, like car horns and telephones, all sound out of place, and real bedding feels like God’s gift to the Insomniacs. If you want to appreciate life’s little luxuries, opt out of them for a week and go bush.

And so ended my last big tramp for a while, after walking a total of 278km on the map over 16 days (that’s over 17km, or nearly 11 miles, per day). I’d never been this fit, this full of stamina, or this glad to sink back into the driver’s seat and enjoy the world through a car window. I’m even tempted to pamper myself a little more, after all that dried rice and pasta I’ve been eating...

West Coast (South Island)

Written: 21 January 1997

The night after finishing the Routeburn-Greenstone Track, I pampered myself with a couple of cold beers in the local pub, while chatting away to a fellow tramper whom I’d met in the caravan park, and who was full of stories of grizzly bears in North America and the desolation of Alaska. The next day was pretty desolate too, as I headed off to Wanaka over the highest road in New Zealand, some 1121m above sea level at the highest point. Unfortunately it’s also one of the most corrugated and disastrously steep roads I’ve ever driven on, so the stunning views and pretty little settlement of Cardrona were less memorable than the struggle to avoid falling off the cliffs. Still, it was a worthy detour, and got me in the mood for a little driving.

I shot through Wanaka, another picturesque town on another beautiful glacial lake, and kept driving over the Haast Pass to the wild west coast, stopping off at various stunning sights such as Knight’s Point (with its beautiful views up and down the rugged coast) and the glacial lakes of the interior. There were plenty of waterfalls and forest walks along the way, but after my Fiordland tramps, the last thing I wanted was more trekking through rainforest, so I just drove and drove until I found a little DOC campsite at Lake Paringa, yet another picturesque glacial lake that came complete with plenty of sandflies and masses of forest. It was pretty and wild, but to be honest, the appeal of forested wilderness is wearing a little thin after the overdose I’ve just had.

And that’s where the glaciers came in.

Fox Glacier

The next day I put my foot down and headed north to Fox Glacier, a tiny tourist settlement at the end of – you guessed it – the Fox Glacier. The weather was miserable, so I booked into the local caravan park, set up my tent in the howling rain, and drove off to have a look at the glacier. I managed the walk up to the glacier terminal – a very big affair that differs from the Hooker and Tasman Glaciers by having no terminal lake, so you can walk right up to the ice wall – but the weather was truly dismal, so I headed back to the relative comfort of the campsite.

As I was walking towards the communal kitchen, I thought I recognised the Jim Morrison haircut sitting by the window. Then I recognised the jacket, and then the person... and who should be sitting in the kitchen but Ben and Mira, with whom I’d gone climbing in Mt Cook, and who’d cycled all the way from Mt Cook while I’d been tramping in Fiordland. The irony was that here we were again, looking at Mt Cook and not being able to see it as the weather was so dismal, but this time we were looking from the other side, as Fox Glacier is another glacier that flows from the Mt Cook range. We nattered the night away, making friends with other campers in the way people do when it’s raining and there’s precious else to do.

The next day the weather cleared, as it tends to do on the coast – changeable isn’t the word for the weather I’ve been enjoying – so we made the most of it and headed off to Lake Matheson, a beautiful lake that reflects a view of the Southern Alps that has to be seen to be believed. It wasn’t perfect weather, but the view was still breathtaking, and when we got back to the campsite I stuck most of Ben and Mira’s panniers in my car and arranged to meet them in the next town, Franz Josef, so they could enjoy a lighter ride on their next leg. Meanwhile I did a quick walk up to a viewpoint over Fox Glacier, on the site of an old chalet where you could see right up the glacier to its starting point in the mountains; it was another stunning view in a country that’s full of them. And then it was back in the car to drive to Franz Josef.

Franz Josef Glacier and Okarito

Ben and Mira made excellent time without their baggage weighing down their bikes, and once they’d arrived we walked all around the Franz Josef Glacier together, before heading up to the Tatare Tunnels, a collection of surreal man-made tunnels into the mountains that are half full with water, and are about as spooky as Tunnel Creek (though considerably less so with Ben and Mira tagging along). Before long we moved on to a little settlement called Okarito right on the west coast, where we set up camp and made a quick dash to the top of the Okarito Trig Point.

Okarito is amazing. It’s a tiny little village right on the edge of the wild Tasman Sea, and it’s real frontier stuff. There’s a beautiful lagoon right next to the village, which is home to some extremely rare bird life, and the view from the Trig Point is probably as good as it gets. You can see all along the coast, and right into the Southern Alps range as it spreads out in front of you. Mt Cook and Mt Tasman are huge peaks on the horizon, with the other peaks of the area, like the Minarets, clearly visible in the distance.

We caught it as the sun was going down, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Okarito is the home town of Keri Hulme, author of The Bone People, and it’s easy to see how such a setting can bring out the artist in you. That night we drank a couple of beers that Ben had bought in thanks for me carting their stuff around – which was hardly difficult, I must say – and in the morning we were truly sad to leave, them on bicycle and me by car. I assumed I’d never see Ben and Mira again[1], but I really wished I would.

Yet again I was in a driving mood, which is not that surprising after the amount of foot travel I’ve been doing. I drove straight up to Greymouth, and after a quick lunch stop I continued north to Punakaiki, home of the eccentric Pancake Rocks, a coastal formation that defies belief. The rocks are made up of layers that make them look like piles of pancakes, and if it wasn’t for the immense popularity and accessibility of the area – and hence the huge numbers of tourists – it would be truly magnificent. Instead it’s a wee bit commercial, but still well worth the visit.

[1] I was wrong – I’d bump into them again in Nelson.

Arthur’s Pass

Written: 23 January 1997

I’d originally been planning to continue north from Punakaiki, but the weather had other ideas and turned distinctly miserable, so instead I headed back to Greymouth and turned inland towards the Southern Alps, hoping that things might improve away from the gusty coast. After a night in a rest area, I arrived at Arthur’s Pass to surprisingly beautiful weather, and made the most of it to scoot up Avalanche Peak, a fairly steep track up to the top of a mountain with wonderful views over the pass and surrounding mountains. My timing was impeccable: as I sat at the top surveying the view, the clouds rolled in, and the visibility changed from tens of kilometres to tens of feet in a matter of minutes. It just goes to show that carrying all those spare clothes, even on the shortest tramp, is a good idea, because I went up in T-shirt and shorts and came down in trackie bottoms, three layers and my Gore-Tex top, and I still felt bloody freezing...

It stayed cold and miserable for the rest of the day, so I hung out in the public shelter where I met plenty of interesting and chatty people (public shelters obviously being the place to be in shitty weather) and that evening, when the skies cleared temporarily, I managed to do the Arthur’s Pass Historic Walk, a short jaunt round a number of plaques that describe the history of the place. The driving wind only convinced me to head back indoors, and after putting up the tent (you can camp at the Arthur’s Pass public shelter quite legally) we yarned the night away while the wind whistled around the eaves.

The next day saw no change in the weather, but a group of five of us battled up the walk to Temple Basin, a fairly pointless exercise in the end as the views were non-existent and the rain was freezing. However, one good thing did come from the morning jaunt: it made us all more than happy to stay huddled up in the relatively pleasant shelter, and the rest of the day passed into history in the same way that my first few shelter-bound days in Mt Cook National Park had. Never mind: I’ve been incredibly lucky with the weather so far in the South Island, so I can’t really moan.

Thursday continued the rainy tradition, so I aborted my plans to visit Craigieburn Forest Park on the way to Christchurch and just drove straight to the east coast, where the weather was hot, clear and a big relief after the storms of the Alps. It proved a typically English subject for conversation as I tried to dry out the contents of the car.

Christchurch

Written: 28 January 1997

There are plenty of sayings peppering the English language that concern themselves with jealousy and bemoaning your unhappy lot – ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’ is probably the most classic idiom – but in New Zealand I feel I’ve found a way of slipping through the fence whenever I fancy; if my grass isn’t green enough, I find some that is, and visit it. It’s obviously a luxury that comes from being free of the constraints of job, mortgage and attachments, but that doesn’t make it any less valid.

It struck me when I arrived in Christchurch for the third time, after exploring most of the South Island, just how different life in civilisation and the wilderness can be. I might have thought that Glenorchy, Queenstown and Te Anau were bustling metropolises when I came back from days of tramping, but Christchurch, the biggest city in the South Island, highlighted the little things in life that you so often taken for granted. Playing golf with Simon and Steve was so different to walking in the bush; eating roast chicken and roast potatoes was a taste sensation after trail food; drinking ridiculous amounts of beer and cider and dancing the night away was something I used to do at least once a week in London, but it now seemed debauched and luxurious after weeks of living on a budget. Christchurch was pure western luxury, and I overdosed on it. That’s what I mean by being able to cross the fence; people working in offices look out on green fields and wish they were there, and people out in the wilderness dream of hot showers, decent food and beer on tap. In New Zealand I’ve been lucky enough to be able to hop between the two lifestyles at the drop of a hat.

So yet again Christchurch life turned into a succession of golf, drinking, junk food, comfortable beds and, worryingly, karaoke, and if it hadn’t been for my car being broken into while parked on a suburban backstreet, I’d have found it hard to leave. However, the shock of losing my hiking boots, guitar, harmonica, empty backpack, torch, knife and radio to a casual car thief gave me a real urge to head out into the wilderness once again, so after Steve kindly leant me his spare backpack, I headed north, aiming in the general direction of Nelson, a step closer to the volcanoes of the North Island.

Nelson

Written: 31 January 1997

On Tuesday I drove to Nelson via the Lewis Pass, a beautiful afternoon’s drive through stunning mountain scenery with the sun beating down from a clear blue sky. That night I stayed with Mike, the local Acorn dealer, and the next day I visited a couple of schools to the west of Nelson, before heading north to explore the area round Golden Bay. Talk about paradise: Golden Bay is well named, and it’s worth the drive up the steep and bendy road just to see those beautiful beaches stretching into the sunset, backed by tree-covered mountains and valleys. I made my way to Pakawau, almost at the northern tip of the South Island, and on the way I visited the Pupu Springs where clear, cold water pours out of the ground in such quantities that it moves rocks. After setting up the tent in Pakawau I drove north up a dirt road to the stunning and wild Whakariki Beach, one of the northernmost points of the South Island. I can think of far worse ways of spending a Wednesday afternoon.

That night, back at camp, I fell into a conversation with this bloke who was staying in one of the cabins, and he ended up inviting me in for a coffee. Robin was a Kiwi who had lived in England for 12 years, and he was spending time away from it all in Pakawau while waiting for a court case to come up; his business had collapsed and he was out on bail for some kind of fraud charge, and despite the circumstances, both he and his cat Floyd were excellent company. Robin even fed me, and offered me one of the beds in the other room (the cabins had two rooms, and he was on his own); it was quite a luxury after a roll-mat on grass.

The next day Robin drove me to a place called Bainham; as he lived in Nelson and had spent quite a lot of time exploring the area, he knew all the interesting places to visit. In Bainham the landscape is beautiful and the rivers have carved deep gorges through the mountains, and one of these gorges is home to a bungee jump and huge swing, so once again I got to see someone leaping into the unknown with only an elastic band for comfort. Our final visit was to the Devil’s Boots, strange rock formations that look like a giant’s boots sticking out of the earth, and then it was time to say goodbye, hop into Zed, and head off back to Nelson to visit more schools.

And just to rub in the fact that New Zealand is a small place, in Nelson I bumped into my Christmas buddies Ben and Mira for the third time. It had been bizarre enough seeing them again in Fox Glacier, but spotting them walking down the street in Nelson – and not even the main street – was truly freaky. They just laughed when they saw me; they’d already bumped into a couple of other people they knew, even though they’d only just arrived, and they’d been wondering whether I was still around. It’s a small place, the South Island...

North Island

Catchpool Valley

Written: 3 February 1997

After finishing my business in Nelson – five articles in all, not bad for a couple of days’ work in paradise – I drove to Picton and hopped on the late-night ferry to Wellington. The only problem with late-night ferries is arriving in a place when most self-respecting citizens are in bed, but ‘No worries,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just hit a DOC campsite,’ and indeed there was a very convenient camp just 50km from Wellington at the Catchpool Valley in the Rimutaka Forest Park. How on earth I managed to pick the only DOC campsite in the country that has gates that close at dusk, I don’t know, so after discovering in the pitch black of night that I was stranded in the middle of nowhere, I drove around until I found a secluded spot, and gratefully fell asleep in the back of Zed, thanking my lucky stars that I’d bought a station wagon.

The Rimutaka Forest Park stretches along the Rimutaka Range to the east of Wellington, and is home to plenty of pine forest, some pretty little valleys, and, of course, the weekend tourists from the city. That didn’t cause me any grief, as it was rather pleasant to see all the happy (and unhappy) families enjoying the sun, picnicking away in what they thought was the wilderness, but it brought something home to me. City dwellers, wherever they are in the world, can sometimes come across as quite antisocial compared to country folk, and despite my best smiles and g’days, the vast majority of people looked at the floor, metaphorically shuffling their feet as I passed them on the walking tracks. It seems that New Zealand has a similar but inverse problem to England, in that the further north you go, the more accidentally antisocial the people get (in England it’s traditionally the other way around, with southerners being less inclined to talk to strangers).

The two tracks I did in the Catchpool Valley were short and sweet, though predictably tame after the South Island. The Orongorongo Track, one of the most popular walks in New Zealand according to the blurb, was reasonable but not that inspiring; it’s popular because of its ease and its proximity to Wellington rather than its amazing scenery, no doubt. The Butcher Track, on the other hand, took me to the top of the hills, resulting in a beautiful view over Wellington harbour, far more impressive than the view from the hills above Eastbourne that I’d enjoyed on my first visit to Wellington, all those weeks ago. In the background I could see the South Island, and on top of the hill I found a peaceful pine canopy where the pine needles were comfortable enough for a Sunday afternoon snooze. My tramping stamina has dropped by a fair amount since Fiordland, no doubt a consequence of a few days’ of beery socialising in Christchurch and Nelson; you can’t have your cake and eat it, I guess.

Taranaki

Written: 9 February 1997

I’d been looking forward to getting back to the North Island, because I had a plan: to explore the amazing volcanoes of Taranaki and Tongariro. I thought I’d start with the Around the Mountain Circuit (AMC) at Taranaki, with a trip up to the top of Mt Taranaki itself if possible, because there was an Acorn dealer nearby whom I’d arranged to meet for some post-walk work; so I didn’t waste any time in driving straight from the Catchpool Valley to Egmont National Park on the western coast of the North Island.

Mt Taranaki was named Mt Egmont by Captain Cook after the Earl of Egmont, who sponsored his first voyage, but the Maori went to court to try to get the name changed to Taranaki, their original name for the mountain, and in an astounding case of trying to please everyone, the court ruled in 1986 that both names were valid. As a result, on all the maps you see ‘Mt Egmont or Mt Taranaki’ printed by the peak, but whatever you call it – and I prefer Taranaki, because it seems more appropriate – it’s a stunner.

Egmont National Park – at least that name hasn’t changed – is almost circular and encloses Mt Taranaki at its centre, and it’s fair to say that the mountain dominates the entire area. Taranaki is an almost perfect volcanic cone, with a beautiful snowy peak and, from a distance, only one blemish on its slopes, that of Fanthams Peak, another little cone. I didn’t appreciate just how immense the mountain is, because when I drove towards the peak, the weather was totally overcast and I couldn’t see a thing; but when I woke up on the morning of my trek, having slept in the back of Zed at the National Park’s headquarters, there it was, looming above me. The day started off as clear as a bell, and it wasn’t long before I was stomping off on the track, with my borrowed backpack filled to the brim, and my backup pair of faithful old walking boots on my feet.

The AMC is a swine, no doubt about it. It might look all innocent on the map, but it goes up and down more times than the New Zealand dollar’s exchange rate; volcanoes have huge lava flows down their slopes, so the mountain is a bit like your hand if you put your fingertips on the table with your palm facing down. This means that walking round the peak means climbing and descending throughout the day, but despite the physical challenges, it’s a beautiful track, and when the weather is clear, you can see for miles from the volcanic slopes. That’s when the weather is clear, though...

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Day 1 started well, as would most of my days on the trail, but it soon started clouding over and it wasn’t long before the rain set in. I’d decided to follow the higher alpine route because of the better views (the other route was mainly through forest), and after climbing up the aptly named Puffer – a really steep track that I thought would never end – I clambered around the mountain to Dawson Falls and started heading downhill towards Lake Dive, and that’s when the cloud kicked it. I could see it approaching from the west, in a big thick rolling mass, and before ten minutes was up I was surrounded by cloud, with a visibility of about 20 metres and a temperature drop from boiling down to seriously cold; the weather rolls in pretty quickly when you’re this close to the west coast, and it’s particularly noticeable when you’re up in the mountains.

Still, the rain kept off long enough for me to reach the hut at Lake Dive, at which point the heavens opened. Luckily the hut I was in had a stove with plenty of dry wood, and it wasn’t long before I had a roaring fire going, slowly drying out my sodden clothes. When I arrived at the hut I was alone, quite a rarity on a popular walk like the AMC, but soon I had company in the shape of Jacek (pronounced ‘Yatsik’), a Kiwi who had come over from Poland with his family when he was 11, back in the bad old days of martial law and Solidarity. He was very interesting company, and we decided to walk together for the rest of the trip, especially as the weather had made the track a lot more treacherous than normal, and a broken ankle is a bit of a downer if you’re on your own.

Friday saw us scramble over the alpine route to Waiaua Gorge, and again the visibility was pretty bad, although we did get a good view of the volcano in the morning before the clouds rolled in. Saturday was much the same, with the track wandering around through alpine scrub and rainforest to Holly Hut. This walk is probably the most physically demanding track I’ve yet done, with climbs and descents of about 1000m every day, and by the time we reached the huts I was totally exhausted, even more than I’d been on the Pyke Loop; I can generally walk for miles and miles on the flat, but put a hill in front of me and watch me squirm.

Saturday evening was fun, with a large Kiwi family taking up half the hut and entertaining us with tramping stories and wee drams of whisky, the generous souls. The Christmas pud and custard they gave us went down a treat, too; needless to say the family was only on a one-night trip, something that was more and more apparent as they unpacked sausages, potatoes, vegetables, bottles of wine and all the other delights that you take for granted in the outside world, but which suddenly become perishable and heavy when you’re on a long trek.

To the Top!

Sunday morning was very cloudy, but Jacek and I got up at 6am to try to get to the base of the summit track nice and early. Luckily the cloud was mainly round the northern side of the mountain, and as we came round to the northeastern side (where the AMC begins) the sky cleared slightly, showing a huge billowing mass of cloud pouring off the mountain towards the north; as with the Southern Alps, winds come in from the west and get forced upwards by the mountain where they condense into rain clouds, but slowly the cloud cleared from the peak until it was all blue skies, so I decided I just had to go up. Jacek’s knee had been playing up and he sensibly decided to give it a miss, so we said our goodbyes and I started the long haul up to the 2518m (8261 ft) peak, complete with a full pack and my trusty old boots.

There were two major problems, though. The most pressing, and the most painful, was that my trusty old boots were, by now, my crusty old boots; the soles were so thin it was like walking in crepe paper sandals, and with volcanic rock being the sharp stuff it is, I felt every stone, which wore out my feet far more quickly than it would have done in the old leather toughies that had been stolen in Christchurch. The second problem was that however I tried to adjust my pack, it was truly uncomfortable; I’d had my own pack stolen in Christchurch and had borrowed this one off a friend for a few weeks, and there’s just no substitute for your own backpack. After a four-day circuit walk with shoes from hell and a backpack that didn’t fit, the 45° scree slope and the serious climb to the top of Taranaki really took it out of me. I got to the top but it hurt, it really hurt; however the view was stunning, not because I could see for miles, but because a low layer of cloud was covering the country as far as the eye could see, and from the height of the summit I could see above the clouds, just like in an aeroplane. Mt Ruapehu, the highest peak in the North Island, was a cloudy hump in the distance, and the crater at top of Taranaki itself was quite stunning, and well worth the strains in my knees and back.

Climbing volcanoes is an art, though. You might look at a volcano and think it’s just a case of plodding up a 45° rock face until you topple into the crater, but however solid the thing might look from a distance, it feels more like a pile of sand than a mountain. Imagine trying to walk up a massive heap of gravel, and you’re not far off the experience of climbing a volcano; add in a full backpack weighing you down, and it’s definitely a case of three steps forward, two back. The best part, though, is coming down; on the snowy slopes at the peak I simply skied down on my shoes, with the backpack giving me enough weight to push me down, and on the scree I moonwalked down in half the time it took me to get up. I paid for it with aching knees, but with a kilometre of volcano to slide down, it was quite an experience.

Coming back to civilisation in the form of Dennis and Heather’s hospitality – Dennis being the local Acorn dealer in New Plymouth, and Heather being his wife – was pure luxury, especially as Dennis had stocked his fridge full of beers in preparation (it seems I’m getting a reputation for turning up at the dealers and demonstrating exactly what a bottomless appetite looks like). We spent the next three days travelling round schools in the Taranaki area, driving right round the mountain on the Monday and heading up the coast on Tuesday, with one local school slipped in on Wednesday morning. I can think of worse ways to earn NZ$500, and by the time I left New Plymouth I’d gorged out on barbecues, brews and excellent company, and was ready for the next volcano.

Tongariro

Written: 15 February 1997

With my work done in Taranaki, I didn’t waste any time in driving to Whakapapa Village, the main town in Tongariro National Park in the centre of the North Island. On the way I passed through sleepy Raurimu, where only the Saturday before a loony had gone crazy with a gun and blown a bunch of innocent people away. It was such a tiny little place, easy to miss in the blink of an eye, which just goes to show that in this day and age, it’s always the quiet ones that go off at the deep end...

Tongariro is the oldest National Park in New Zealand, having been donated to the government by the local Maori chief when he realised that it would otherwise be taken by force. It proved a sensible move – National Parks are protected, after all – and it means that the most amazing area in the North Island is relatively untouched by man. I arrived in cloud, as seems to be the norm for whenever I drive towards New Zealand’s volcanoes, and set up camp at the local campsite, only to discover that my tent had gone slightly mouldy since I last opened it, and it stank something rotten. Never mind; I’ve slept in worse places than a rancid tent, and I’m sure I will again.

As if to apologise for hiding the mountains from me yet again, the following day awoke to glorious sunshine, a huge bonus seeing as that’s when I was planning to set off on the Tongariro Northern Circuit, a three-day tramp through the volcano-ridden northern half of the park. I can safely say that I have never experienced anything like the might of Mts Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu (pronounced ‘Tong-a-reer-oh’, ‘Nara-hoe-wee’ and ‘Roo-a-pay-hoo’) and I doubt I ever will[1]. Unless you’ve been to a volcanic area, only the photographs can really show what the place is like, but I’ll have a go at describing it. Yet again a place in New Zealand goes beyond mere vocabulary...

The volcanoes of Tongariro are totally different to Taranaki. Taranaki is bush-clad until the tree line, and after that it’s tussock and, finally, rock and snow; it’s a classic dormant volcano, having last erupted about 200 years ago. In Tongariro the eruptions are much more regular – Ruapehu last erupted in June 1996 and smoke still pours out every now and then – and the whole area is pretty desolate; if you want to know what it’s like on the moon, come to Tongariro. I walked through areas where the ground was steaming with sulphuric clouds; places where the ground wasn’t visible through the huge clouds of steam rising from subterranean pools of boiling acid; spots where clear, cold water erupted out of the ground to form oases in the desert; craters so big you could hold rock concerts in them; and lakes whose fluorescence put the glacial waters of the Southern Alps to shame. It was another stunning walk, and totally different from the mountain walks, bush bashes and river valley tracks that I’ve been on so far.

The Circuit

The walk took me clockwise round the circuit, staying for two nights in huts. I went round Tongariro and Ngauruhoe – Ngauruhoe being a younger, parasitic cone on the side of Tongariro, but looking more impressive due to its size – and along the flanks of Ruapehu. Throughout the walk the weather was cloudless, which made a massive difference. I started off at Whakapapa, home to the famous Tongariro Chateau, an imposing hotel that was apparently used to house mental patients in the war (which only adds to the slightly eerie air of The Shining that the hotel has). From there I headed northeast through tussock and occasional clumps of forest; the first two hours of track were eroded, slippery and, to be honest, a bit of a pain, but once I reached the Mangatepopo Hut things started to hot up, quite literally. After a quick side trip to the Soda Springs, one of the few waterfalls in the area, it was time to start climbing.

The trek up towards the towering mass of Tongariro and Ngauruhoe was extremely hot and bothersome, especially as my legs hadn’t quite recovered from the ascent of Taranaki, but it was worth every drop of sweat. I gave the side trip to the top of Ngauruhoe a miss – an hour’s clambering up scree was something I didn’t fancy after the previous tramp – but round the corner from the volcanic cone was something even more amazing: the South Crater. Imagine a huge crater, surrounded by mountains, that’s big enough to fit a football stadium in, with a path cutting right across the middle, and that’s the South Crater: it’s a massive, flat-bottomed bowl on the top on the world that’s guaranteed to make you feel small and insignificant. Climbing up the side of the crater gave great views of the surrounding moonscape, and at the top was yet another surprise: the Red Crater.

The Red Crater is to Mars what the South Crater is to the moon; it’s red, steaming and gaping, and where the South Crater is flat and round, the Red Crater is more like a chasm in the earth, full of hellish shapes and colours. As you climb round the edge of the crater, the ground starts to steam with foul sulphurous fumes that smell just like rotten eggs, and just as you think it can’t get any more bizarre, the Emerald Lakes come into view down in the next valley. The Emerald Lakes are pure turquoise with bright yellow edges, and although you wouldn’t want to go swimming in them, they’re awesome to look at, especially in contrast to the barren lunar landscape around the volcanoes.

It was on this steaming peak that I met my first tramping companion, Delia from Sydney (though she was originally from Sweden, which she left when just four years old). We nattered and walked on together, heading for the Blue Lake across the flat expanse of the Central Crater, before continuing on to the Ketetahi Hut, our stop for the night. On the way we made a useful trade; Delia gave me a polarising filter for my camera that she no longer needed, and she got my dubbin (not much use to me without my leather boots) and some of my leaflets from the South Island that I no longer needed. I’d been meaning to get a polarising filter since I saw Scott of the Pilbara use one to bring out the blues in the sky, and it proved excellent timing; Tongariro through a polarising filter is truly something to behold.

Ketetahi Hut is just up the hill from the Ketetahi Springs, a pit of boiling water that throws steam high up into the sky. Delia and I went to visit the springs, which are technically on private land but nobody seemed to be watching, and that was where I got my first up-close taste of thermal activity; New Zealand is on the junction of two tectonic plates, and in the centre of the North Island there are lots boiling pools, thermal resorts and so on. Ketetahi Springs, though, was free of tourists, which made it somewhat unique.

In the Shadow of Ruapehu

On day 2 we picked up another tramper – Monika from Munich – and stomped our way through the moonscape to the eastern side of the park, eventually passing through Oturere Hut and on to Waihohonu Hut.

On the way the views of Ruapehu were impressive, to say the least, and when we reached our destination, we dropped our packs and wandered off to the Ohinepango Springs, where gallons of water pours out of the rock every second, creating a pretty little river in the wilderness. The girls swam, but in a typical show of male cowardice I stayed on dry land, seeing as my hand had gone numb with cold when I’d filled up my water bottles from the spring. And that night the silhouette of Ruapehu beside a perfectly clear sunset was a real sight to behold...

Day 3 saw us walking back to Whakapapa, passing the gushing Taranaki Falls and arriving back at Whakapapa after a reasonably long but relatively easy trudge; the carrot for the donkey on those last long kilometres was the thought of a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke that I had stashed in the depths of Zed. I gave Delia a lift to National Park, the nearest village to the park after Whakapapa, and after giving a lift to two hitchers to the Ketetahi road end, I drove to Taupo, where I dropped Monika off at a hostel and found myself a place to camp.

That night I redeemed two vouchers I’d got from the petrol station for two McDonald’s cheeseburgers, and got a further NZ$2 fish and chips that I ate on the lake shore. After pasta for the last three days, it was probably the best junk food I’d ever had, ranking up there with the Big Macs I’d crammed into my face in Christchurch. Sometimes it’s good to be bad, especially when you feel you’ve earned it...

[1] Oh yes I would, at Gunung Rinjani in Indonesia.

Taupo

Written: 17 February 1997

I’d briefly stopped at Taupo on the very first day of my road trip, but it was raining so hard that I simply hid in the car, wondering just what I’d got myself into. Luckily my second visit proved a much more interesting one, especially as it was the first real experience I’d had of hardcore tourism since I’d last been in the North Island; the South Island is relatively untouched by tourism, apart from the Queenstown area, but not so the North Island. The caravan park I was in was crammed full of backpackers and tourists, and it brought back the sinking feeling that I’d felt when I finally hit the busy Stuart Highway after six months exploring remote Western Australia. As I tried to fall asleep in my tent, the sound of Saturday night drinking and banging music made me realise just how far I am from the type of travelling that the Kiwi Experience brings to town.

I must digress here, because the Kiwi Experience (and its cousin the Oz Experience) is my idea of a living hell, and one of the reasons I got on so well with Delia in Tongariro was that her opinions on the Kiwi Experience tallied with mine. The Experience is a bus ticket you can buy, and you can jump on and off the bus as many times as you like, as long as you follow the route on the ticket. The buses have commentary and follow the main tourist routes, but the problem is the people; the Kiwi Experience is full of young drinkers, sex-obsessed teenagers and people whose idea of a good time is getting pissed every night and sleeping it off on the bus. No thanks; I’ve managed to stay away from this kind of crowd by avoiding backpacker hostels like the plague, and if there’s one excellent justification for me spending large amounts of cash on the likes of Zed and Oz, it’s so I can avoid the 18-30 mentality of the Experiences. There, that’s my spleen vented, even if it does make me sound like a bitter old git.

Getting up well before my hungover neighbours, I decided to explore the thermal areas of the central region, before heading east to Napier for some more school visits. My main destination for the day was Orakei Korako, arguably the most impressive thermal area of them all, and I think for once that the hype is justified. The gushing geysers, boiling mud pools, beautiful caves and amazing multi-coloured lakes are a wonder to behold, and photographs just can’t do justice to the stench, the atmosphere and the noises of nature at its most hell-like. After Orakei Korako I popped in to the Craters of the Moon conservation area just north of Taupo, home to yet more impressive boiling mud craters, and after breathing in enough fumes to kill a cat, I drove east to the fresh coastal air of Napier.

Mahia Beach

Written: 18 February 1997

The east coast of the North Island is dry and hot, just like the east coast of the South Island, and for the same climactic reasons. As I drove through Napier and along the curved coastline of Hawke’s Bay, the sun blasted down without letting up for one minute; this made the drive along the incredibly winding coast road very pleasant, though it was pretty hard to look at any of the scenery with all the right-angle bends every few metres and some serious drop-offs on either side of the road.

In fact, pretty much all I can remember about driving north from Napier to Mahia was the hot sun and the excellent company of a couple of hitchhikers whom I took to Wairoa, where we hung around by the river and had lunch while they gleefully told me about all the natural marijuana that grows round this part of the world.

My original plan had been to drive all around the East Cape, the landmass that juts east out of the North Island, but seeing the nature of the road and how long it was taking me to get anywhere, I decided to hang around on the beach instead. The two hitchers recommended Mahia Beach, which sits on a little peninsula that juts out of the northern end of Hawke’s Bay, and knowing that local knowledge is better than any number of guidebooks, I followed the bay round until I reached Mahia. The hitchers were right; Mahia Beach is a little paradise.

It’s also one of the few places on the east coast where you get a sunset across the sea; because the peninsula juts south into Hawke’s Bay and Mahia Beach is on the western side of the peninsula, the sun sets into the bay. As I sat on the beach staring at the strange cloud formations that make New Zealand’s sky so unique, I felt completely at ease, the sort of feeling that you can only get when everything is going right. I might not have explored the East Cape, but it all turned out well anyway.

Coromandel

Written: 23 February 1997

My next scheduled work visit was with the Acorn dealer in Thames, so I reluctantly left the beach behind and headed west, back towards civilisation. Gwynne and his wife Alice live with their son Tobin in a beautiful house in tiny Thames, a little town tucked away at the southern end of the Coromandel Peninsula. If my previous dealer experiences had been great, this visit was simply wonderful. Alice’s dad owns a yacht – one he built himself from scratch, no less – and we spent the weekend out in the Hauraki Gulf, exploring, swimming and fishing.

The Hauraki Gulf is between Auckland and Coromandel, and is home to Rangitoto, Motutapu and all the other islands I came across in my time in Auckland; indeed, although we were far enough away from Auckland for it not to be visible, it almost felt like I was close to home, an unexpected feeling seeing as I only spent six weeks in Auckland. The eastern coast of the Hauraki Gulf consists of the north-south Coromandel Peninsula, and off the coast of the peninsula are lots of pretty little islands, totally untouched for the most part.

The sailing was fun enough on its own, but add in the beautiful bays where we dropped anchor and went swimming, the bush on Green Island that we hacked our way through to reach a huge breeding colony of gannets – arguably the smelliest experience of my life so far – and the snorkelling around the rocks, and it suddenly felt like a tropical holiday, the sort that people class as a once-in-a-lifetime event.

On the Saturday afternoon we fished, and unlike my usual experience with rod and line, it seemed I couldn’t fail; as soon as my line went in I’d hook another snapper, and before long we had enough fish to complement the chicken we’d got for dinner. On the way to the sheltered island harbour where we were planning to spend the night, a school of dolphins joined the boat and swam in our wake, veering off like fighter jets before swimming back up to the front of the boat without seeming to move a muscle. Not since Monkey Mia have I seen dolphins this close, and you could have sworn they turned on their sides to purposely look up at us as we hung over the stern.

The snapper were quite superb. I haven’t tasted fish this fresh since my kayaking trip to Rangitoto, and the captain’s batter was the product of an experienced chef. As we settled down for the night, the full moon came out, the already calm sea flattened out totally, and I slept the sleep of the happily knackered. Fresh air in the bush is one thing, but a fresh sea breeze really brings on the sleep. I didn’t even notice the chattering of the sea shrimp as the they banged into the boat in their hundreds, or the clanking of the steel hawsers against the mast; it was the best sleep I’ve had in ages.

Sea Morning

Waking up on a yacht in a remote natural harbour is quite an experience. As your eyes open, you notice a slight swaying, and it took me some time to work out where on earth I was, even though I’ve spent practically every night in a different place on my travels. Then the smell of the sea wafts into the cabin, the sounds of merry breakfasting carry gently across the boat, and the next thing you know it’s time to eat, shake the sleepy dust out of your eyes and get moving. Having the sea air breeze through your hair as the boat catches the wind is surely one the best ways to wake up in the morning; it even beats coffee.

Before long we’d dropped anchor off a reasonably sized island just off the coast, and Gwynne and I climbed up the island’s biggest hill for a gorgeous view along the coast. However, the weather had turned from beautiful to humid and the sky was pregnant with potential, so after fishing for sprats on the beach with a net – with no success, defeating our plans to fish for big game – we finished off our existing bait, again catching nothing, and headed back to Coromandel, a cosmopolitan seaside village that has more to do with expensive boats than serious fishing, but which still manages to ooze charm.

Coromandel is a perfect spot for lunch, and we were lucky, because as soon as we’d finished eating, the heavens opened. I’ve been through plenty of storms where the rain falls down in vertical shards, but this storm had attitude. Thames isn’t a terribly wet area, and normally has pretty good weather, but the build-up of humidity had been particularly unpleasant, and I thought the storm would wash away the atmosphere. I was wrong.

Earlier in the month, when I was enjoying the most delightful weather in Fiordland (an unusual piece of luck given Fiordland’s huge rainfall) the Coromandel area was being battered by a cyclone. In my distant position I hadn’t realised how serious the storm had been, but the combination of torrential rain, heavy winds and very high tide had conspired to wash out most of the road from Thames to Coromandel, and seeing the Coromandel rain sloshing down from the sky and right into my leaky car brought home the eternal truth about New Zealand weather; when it decides to be moody, it makes PMS look like a mild headache.

Still, it’s a small price to pay for such wonderful company in such a wonderful place...

Whangarei

Written: 2 March 1997

I visited Whangarei for the second time, just as I was about to finish off my trip round New Zealand. From Thames I shot straight through Auckland to Whangarei, coming across my first real rush hour for months. Whangarei was hot and humid, but seeing Peter and his family again was worth the effort. I discovered that mixing Kahlua and milk is delicious (and is called a ‘brown cow’ by middle-aged Kiwis, though their children just look at them in despair when they tell you that), and after visiting schools with Peter all day, I was invited to a meeting of the Whangarei North Rotary Club. Now that was an interesting experience.

I’ve never really understood Rotary, simply because I’ve never actually thought about it; I suppose I just assumed that Rotary was another of these funny little clubs with quaint customs and a no-women policy. Of course, I was wrong on some counts – women can be Rotarians, as long as the members don’t black-ball them, and the only wacky clothing I could see was the chairman’s chain of office – but there was still plenty of formality and a slight whiff of committee meeting about parts of the evening.

All the more credit, then, to Peter and his Rotary friends, who were nothing if not interesting, friendly, and above all, laid-back. I suppose enjoying a Rotary meeting means that not only have you turned into your parents, you’re doing a better job at being middle-aged than they are, but there’s not many Pommy tourists who can say they’ve not only been involved in a Rotary club flutter down Christchurch casino and won, but they’ve also been to a meeting as an official guest. That’s one more interesting and pleasant social experience to chalk up on the blackboard of life...

Northland

Written: 1 March 1997

From Whangarei I drove north to Matauri Bay, home to an extremely picturesque primary school, and the best views from a principal’s office in the country, and possibly the world. It’s also the resting place of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior; after being blown up in Auckland by the French in 1995, the ship was laid to rest off Matauri Bay, which is a fitting resting place for a ship dedicated to saving the planet. The interview with the school principal went very well, and I had the honour of having a full haka performed for me by the school children; a haka is what the All Blacks perform before playing rugby, and the version I witnessed went on for about five minutes. Hakas are performed for honoured guests and very important people, and it gave me quite a buzz to see this classroom of Maori kids getting really into it. Soon after I was back on the road, with the sun still shining, and I drove to the small town of Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands and pitched camp, ready to visit the local Acorn dealer in the morning.

That was where I saw the advert. The woman from the caravan park waved it in front of my face like a page from Paradise Lost, and moaned about how nice it would be to take a year off and go travelling, and how hot it was, and it was probably a dirty old man anyway looking for some young girls, and that’ll be NZ$8 for the campsite please. I went back later and had a look at the advert, and there it was: a good idea. ‘Boat looking for crew to cruise to Tahiti, and then around the Pacific islands for a year. Only NZ$15 a day, including food. Ring Rob...’ So I did. The next day I went to Paihia to see the boat and meet Rob, and he said he would make a decision in a few weeks, and I should keep in touch. And that was that... for the moment anyway.

Meanwhile, I had more exploring to do, and by late afternoon I had driven up the tip of Northland, heading for Cape Reinga, the northernmost part of the North Island. Just in case I thought I was going to get away with visiting one of New Zealand’s extremities in fine weather, it started to chuck it down, and when I got to the campsite, I pitched the tent and sat in the car, typing up my articles while the rain pounded down.

I sometimes wonder why I bother to go to places when it’s raining. The next day the fog had come to join the party, and when I drove the 3km to the cape itself, I couldn’t see the famed meeting point of the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea, I couldn’t see the lighthouse until I bumped into it, and the signpost that declared how far London, Tokyo, Bluff and all the other metropolises of the world were from Cape Reinga, simply pointed into grey mist. But I can now say that I’ve been to the north of the North Island and the south of the South Island, and that’s why I do these things. The map on which I’ve been drawing my route in thick black felt tip wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the tip, so drenched as I was, I still felt pretty pleased with myself.

Submarine Car

Written: 1 March 1997

By now I was thoroughly pleased that I was coming to the end of my road trip round New Zealand; it had been a total success. That is, I felt pleased until I reached a river some 22km north of Whangarei. In a move that didn’t prove too popular with the local traffic, the river had decided that the best place to flow was right over the main highway, and I came across a huge queue, waiting to cross this flowing torrent with some help from the local farmers. I got a little nervous and remembered the last time I’d had to brave it and cross deep water; it was at a creek in Australia, somewhere in the Kimberley, where I’d just had to go for it with nobody around to help. If water gets into a petrol engine, it’ll stall it, and the water level on the Whangarei highway was well above my headlights, but the best way to get into the sea is to jump, so I jumped.

Before I go on, I should perhaps mention something I did to the car just after I bought him. Zed, bless him, was a bit old, and his seals weren’t quite what they used to be, so when it rained, the foot wells tended to get a bit waterlogged. Now I’d got a few things soaked in the storm that had hit Lake Taupo when I first left Auckland, so I’d investigated and found these rubber plugs that I could take out, opening up a hole in each foot well so the water could drain out. After all, water doesn’t go uphill, does it, so it couldn’t get into the car, could it?

Of course, Zed had no problem with the crossing. Sailing across the river, behind a tractor that was breaking the bow wave for me, he managed the crossing without faltering. There was, however, a rising tide within the car, and as I kept accelerating gently, muddy river water poured into the foot wells, oozing over my ankles and threatening to soak all my possessions. Luckily I’d worn my old tramping boots so I was able to keep a reasonable grip on the pedals, and before long we’d reached the other side and the holes in the car started doing what they were supposed to do: draining, not filling.

When I arrived in Whangarei I noticed a tidemark along the side where the river had washed away four months of accumulated dirt. It guilt-tripped me into cleaning the old bugger, the first time I’d done it manually. Underneath it all, Zed was still a surprisingly white colour... which was handy, as I now had to sell him.

Kiwi Trivia

Written: 2 March 1997

Here are some interesting oddities that I noted about New Zealand, written during my six month trip around this wonderful country...

Nice Names

This is ridiculous. I’ve just been glancing through my AA map of New Zealand, and up on the east coast of the North Island, not a million miles south of Hastings, is a mountain. It’s not a very big mountain at only 305m (Mt Cook is 3754m, by comparison), but what it lacks in height it more than makes up in its name. And what’s the name of this mountain? It is, of course, the easy-to-remember:

Mt Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu

It almost deserves a visit just for a photo of the signposts. I bet the map makers are pleased it’s on the east coast, so its name can stretch out into the Pacific...

Add in the pronunciation of place names in New Zealand, and it can make navigation quite a challenge. In the Maori language, ‘wh’ is pronounced ‘f’, and all vowels are long, so Whangarei is pronounced ‘Farn-gar-ray’, to rhyme with ‘way’. At least, that’s the theory. Even people in Whangarei pronounce it differently depending on the phases of the moon; I heard ‘Wangaray’, ‘Wan-garry’, ‘Fan-garry’, ‘Fongorray’... you name it, nobody seems to know where the hell they live. However any European-named places that contain ‘wh’ are pronounced in the European manner, and the Whanganui River spoils the party by being a Maori name that’s pronounced ‘Won-gan-ooey’.

Prepare to be confused...

Drinking Laws

Another interesting aspect of New Zealand is the law on drinking. The legal drinking age is 20, but if you’re married and you’re in the pub with your spouse, you can drink at 18; in other words, if you don’t have your spouse with you, you have to be 20 to drink, but if you’re with them you can drink at 18. Don’t ask me why, but I’m surprised the country isn’t full of kids getting married simply so they can get slaughtered at the same time as most other country’s kids can. Or perhaps it is, and I’m already too old to spot them...

Driving

You always notice lots of odd little things when driving round a foreign country, and here’s what I discovered when exploring of New Zealand’s road system:

- The age for driving in this country is 15 – yes, 15 – which might help to explain why some Kiwi drivers are lethal. I’d have been a terrible driver at 15, too.

- Welcome to New Zealand, home of the left-turn rule. Driving here is pretty easy if you’re used to driving on the left as I am, except for this one seriously strange law. If you’re driving along and want to turn left into a side street, you have to give way to anybody turning into the road from your right. This makes crossroads somewhat exciting, and as the rule was only introduced relatively recently – in the seventies, I think – and it seems that there are plenty of drivers out there who don’t understand the rule themselves. It all makes for a bit of a gamble; if you’re turning right and it’s your right of way, are you going to exercise it if the vehicle turning left from the opposite direction is a huge truck? I think not...

- Kiwi drivers are some of the, um, most adventurous drivers in the western world. They overtake on blind corners, they regard indicators as optional extras, and, possibly worst of all, they all seem to think of themselves as the worst drivers in the world, while at the same time thinking that London drivers are courteous and safe. It’s very weird...

- Perhaps one of the reasons that Kiwi drivers are so bad is that there are roadworks just about everywhere. The marketing brains have got involved in the act, too, and the signs preceding the piles of monster trucks and bitumen machines proclaim things like ‘Pavement rehabilitation’ instead of ‘Fixing a buggered road’, making it all sound terribly pleasant. The fact that Kiwi workmen leave loads of gravel on the road when they reseal it, which shoots up into your windscreen and scratches your paintwork, is by the by. Another interesting difference with Kiwi roadworks is the large number of women on the team; there’s normally at least one per set of roadworks, which you wouldn’t see in the UK, and to the single-too-long traveller, it’s a pleasant sight. My pet theory? Kiwis have too many distractions on the road, especially in dangerous areas like roadworks. This produces crashes...

- ...which produce crosses. Whenever someone dies on the road, the local council erects a small white cross at the crash site, one for every fatality. They also do this in Australia, the idea being that you see the crosses and it reminds you of your own mortality, and you drive more carefully. In my experience, people tend to think, ‘Wow! A wipe-out crash! I bet I don’t slide if I take this corner at break-neck speed...’

Lead Syringes

One interesting aspect of driving round New Zealand is that you can’t buy leaded petrol anywhere in the country; this worried me to start with, because the car I bought didn’t run on unleaded. It’s no problem, though; instead you buy lead additive from the garage too, which comes in a little syringe for NZ$1 (that’s one syringe per 20 litres of petrol). These syringes are commonly known as ‘squirts’, so you should ask the man to fill it up with premium, and ‘add a couple of squirts’ – as most petrol stations have attendants, it’s all taken care of. So it seems that in New Zealand you can have little squirts in the driving seat as well as the petrol tank; OK, I’ll get me coat.

North vs South

Compared to the South Island, the North Island looks a bit like a plucked chicken. Where the South Island has acres of untouched wilderness where the trees are random, ancient and indigenous and the bush bastards flourish, the North Island’s forests are planted in lines, they’re mostly made up of pine trees, and they’re farmed. The hills that have recently been logged and are now covered in stunted baby trees look a lot like plucked chickens, with rows and rows of orderly blobs where there should be chaos. That’s just one reason the North Island feels more developed; as one of the guys at my Auckland hostel said, wherever you are in the South Island, you feel isolated, and he was right. In the North Island, you feel almost cosmopolitan in comparison, even in the bush.

The same is true in the wilderness. National Parks like Tongariro and Egmont feel much more developed than the likes of Fiordland, mainly because there are more tourists, more tracks, and fewer totally unexplored regions. Tongariro is the oldest National Park in New Zealand, and as a result it feels a little bit exploited; at the other end, Fiordland is too inhospitable to be westernised, with its weather, sandflies and ruggedness. I know which one I’d prefer to travel in... but then again, I also know which one I’d rather live in. It’s horses for courses, I suppose.

Learning to Dive

Written: 27 March 1997

After my visit to Rob and his yacht Zeke in Northland, I thought no more of it until Rob got in touch to say that he’d be delighted to have me on board for his trip across the Pacific. It took a while for it to sink in, but soon enough I was back in the Bay of Islands and staying on Zeke, who was still holed up in Paihia harbour.

Perhaps the biggest sign that I’d mentally committed to crossing the Pacific in a 36 ft sloop was that I took advantage of a delay in our departure to enrol on a diving course at the local dive shop. My first visit to the shop was slightly worrying, as I stared at rows and rows of strange underwater clothing hanging from the racks, daring me to browse as if I knew what the hell they were. Luck was on my side, though, as we had a girl staying on board Zeke – Susie from Liverpool, who was trying to get enough money together to come on the trip, but without success – and she had qualified in Australia as a Dive Master. Before long I’d booked four days of diving tuition, the end result hopefully being a PADI Open Water certification.

But first I had to overcome another of my water-related phobias. It’s a fact that man can’t breathe underwater – at least, this one can’t, and every time I’d tried to snorkel, I’d manage no more than two breaths with my face in the drink before the reflexes kicked me back up into the atmosphere, coughing and panicking. It’s not logical to inhale underwater, and I couldn’t seem to get around my mental block.

As I sank into the swimming pool with my instructor Glen and nobody else around – it being the off-season, I was lucky enough to have one-on-one tuition – the phobia came back to me. Don’t breathe. It’s silly. Gas, gas, quick boys, and shit there’s chlorine in my gullet, the chest is tightening, this isn’t logical, get up, get up! But the regulator – the mouthpiece from a scuba tank – isn’t a snorkel, and intellectually I knew that water can’t get into it unless you take it out of your mouth, so where logic was giving me breathing problems with a snorkel, logic also saved the day with scuba. Breathe, you bastard, and prove to yourself that this phobia’s just that, and that it’s going the same way as all those phobias about moths and dark caves...

And then it happened: one breath. A slight gag, and the sight of Glen’s encouragement reduced the chest tightening, and then there was another breath. And then a third before the panic surfaced, but standing up in the four-feet water brought relief, and then it was back down for some more breaths. Ten minutes later, and we’re still down, and it strikes me that I’m breathing underwater. Astounding!

After the pool sessions for the first two days, my first ever dive in the sea was at the Poor Knights Islands, a marine reserve that is home to New Zealand’s finest diving, bar none: it’s quite an introduction to the sport, with bizarre fish everywhere, manta rays oscillating along the sea floor, and enough distractions to keep my mind off the insanity of my situation. I had two dives at the Knights and, on the final day, two dives at the Hen and Chicken Islands, where Glen caught six crayfish (two each, as I had a diving buddy called Lisa from Whangarei). That night I ripped into crayfish claw, reflecting that I’d managed to get round another phobia and could now breathe underwater.

So I’m now a qualified diver and I’m about to set off on a voyage into the unknown (well, the south Pacific, anyway). Who would have thought it?

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Auckland

Whangarei

Rangitoto

Finding Wheels

Wellington

Low Patch

Down the Casino

Christchurch

Dunedin

Southern Scenic Route (East)

Christchurch

Peel Forest

Twizel

Mt Cook

A Glacial Christmas

Queenstown

Kepler Track

Lake Ponderings

Hollyford-Pyke Route

Bush Bastards

Milford

Southern Scenic Route (West)

Queenstown

Routeburn-Greenstone Track

West Coast (South Island)

Arthur’s Pass

Christchurch

Nelson

Catchpool Valley

Taranaki

Tongariro

Taupo

Mahia Beach

Coromandel

Whangarei

Northland

Submarine Car

Kiwi Trivia

Learning to Dive

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Auckland

Whangarei

Rangitoto

Finding Wheels

Wellington

Low Patch

Down the Casino

Christchurch

Dunedin

Southern Scenic Route (East)

Christchurch

Peel Forest

Twizel

Mt Cook

A Glacial Christmas

Queenstown

Kepler Track

Lake Ponderings

Hollyford-Pyke Route

Bush Bastards

Milford

Southern Scenic Route (West)

Queenstown

Routeburn-Greenstone Track

West Coast (South Island)

Arthur’s Pass

Christchurch

Nelson

Catchpool Valley

Taranaki

Tongariro

Taupo

Mahia Beach

Coromandel

Whangarei

Northland

Submarine Car

Kiwi Trivia

Learning to Dive

Further Reading