by Bruce Ansley
The old coal mining town of Seddonville, near the Mohikinui River mouth, was torn by the controversy. Of the sixty or so good souls who lived there, some foresaw a return to prosperity, some wanted peace and quiet, and some didn’t care much one way or the other. The project went to the Environment Court but Meridian abandoned it, citing high costs and environmental concerns.
Now the eighty-five-kilometre track is one of the country’s best-known and loved, and Lyell is mining the new gold, adventure tourism. A camping ground, toilets, huts and shelters have sprung up as quickly as the old mining village once did.
By now I’ve been on the road for twenty-four hours. The caffeine has finished twanging my strings. I put the seat back and doze among the ghosts.
To be awakened by a bellbird. A little later I’m in Inangahua Junction, named for a phantom: the junction between the Stillwater to Westport railway line, which still runs, and the Nelson railway line, which was never finished.
The town gave its name to the 1968 earthquake which killed five people and forced the hundred or so souls who lived there to leave en masse. Some residents were said to be better off than they’d ever been with the relief supplies coming into the town. Many never returned.
Today the hall storing the earthquake’s history is closed and the café is for sale, along with the church hall. A fine old blue Ford sits outside with a mysterious sign announcing that it was built by spanners not chopsticks. Further down the Coast it has just been announced that a cake decorator has won a contract to build a $7 million sewage plant. The Coast has a life of its own.
Now I sit among little houses half-hidden in the bush deciding whether to go west through the Buller Gorge or south to Greymouth. The easy drive to Greymouth wins, but the West Coast’s capital has fallen on hard times. Only six hotels remain of the forty-seven once there.
As a child I stayed at Revington’s Hotel in Greymouth when it was among the flashest in the land, a fine building in a city full of fine buildings. The Queen and Prince Phillip slept there, in 1954, in a suite since declared a holy place. They came from Hokitika by a road so rough even by the West Coast standards of the time that the authorities decided something had to be done. But oh dear, the expense of tarsealing! The local council couldn’t afford it.
They came up with a truly Coast solution. The royal couple were travelling only one way. So they sealed just that side of the road, the seaward side. Perhaps the theory was that the royal couple would be so transfixed by the view they wouldn’t notice anything amiss. In any event, they proceeded smoothly into Greymouth and for many years after Coasters called that part of the road ‘Lizzie’s side’.
Now both lanes of the road are in fine condition but Revington’s is empty and derelict, for Greymouth has fallen on hard times. The grand old pub was so run-down the town’s mayor, Tony Kokshoorn, personally paid for its frontage to be tarted up.
Mines have shut, native forests are no longer being milled, floods have soaked the place and the main alpine fault line passes not far away, demanding new earthquake standards for buildings which their owners simply cannot afford. They’re walking away. Greymouth looks as if it could become one of the Coast’s ghost towns. Tourists are the new boom industry on the Coast, and they’re quitting the gloomy old town in favour of the brighter Hokitika down the road. It’s very sad. Standing on the abandoned Mawhera Quay, once so busy, I get an end-of-the-world feeling. Perhaps it’s exhaustion. I have to stop. I join the tourists, head for Hokitika and check into a backpackers.
I’ve never stayed in a backpackers before. I get a double bed in a room just big enough for it but nothing else. There’s me and the bed. And Ches ’n’ Dale, the cheese characters painted on the wall. I have nothing else to do but stare at them. After an hour or two I see there’s something more than selling cheese going on here. Dale — or is it Ches? — is a fine, upright figure of open, cheerful demeanour, a man in gumboots and singlet who works hard. Ches — or is it Dale? — wears city boots and a dressy shirt. He’s a townie, and he looks up to the honest cocky with an admiring, even fawning grin. Farmers carry the cities on their backs. They’re the salt of the earth, and should you think that too much salt does the earth no good, you’re certainly a townie and probably a greenie to boot. Dale keeps his own boots fair square on the ground.
I go for a shower in the shared bathroom, which seems to unsettle the young women backpackers a bit. So I forgo the TV room for a beer in the Railway Hotel and lamb shanks down the road. They’re of such girth I hope never to meet one of those lambs in the wild.
Next morning I pass the Lake Mahinapua pub, once famous as the set for a Mainland cheese commercial (‘I’ve never seen them so excited’). I stayed there once, drinking in a bar full of hats. Next morning Les Lisle, the seventy-year-old owner, took me for the hardest run I ever had, along a steep beach of soft sand and shingle, and made up for it with a breakfast of whitebait fritters the size of trailer wheels. He had a very long beard, didn’t drink, and he died in 2013 at the age of eighty-eight, only twenty years or so younger than his pub.
Anyone with anything to look at, or do, or ride in or on, has set up an adventure tourism business on the West Coast. A stream becomes the greatest kayaking adventure of your life. An old shed is transformed into a traditional café. A swamp becomes a floating gold challenge, old goldfields a chance to strike it rich. The rimu forests which Coasters once wanted so much to fell are now national treasures.
We tunnel into the tall, still forests of South Westland and through the old timber town of Hari Hari, where an effigy of Guy Menzies, a fag hanging out of his mouth, is being photographed busily by a busload of Asian tourists. Some of them wear pollution masks. They’re breathing some of the world’s purest air but best take no chances.
Menzies left Sydney in January 1931 intent on making the first solo flight across the Tasman, heading for Blenheim. He ended up circling flat green pasture near Hari Hari. He landed. The pasture turned out to be a swamp. The plane flipped but behold, here’s a replica of the plane surrounded by people taking selfies.
Even the alpine fault has been pressed into service at Whataroa, which previously had to rely on the kotuku, the white heron, whose only New Zealand breeding place is right here.
Do I imagine a faint air of resignation in Franz Josef? A million tourists a year pass through this place. So does the alpine fault: you might be taking your life in your hands when you stop for petrol. I never imagined buying a soy latte could be so fraught.
Between Franz Josef and Fox the road has been hewn from the mountains, which then do their best to strike back. The famous pair of towns have had no need to do very much at all: they’ve always been tourist resorts because of their glaciers. But those glaciers are now calving faster than a Canterbury cow and the urgent question is, when will South Westland come out of the warm? Will there be no end to the golden weather?
I am stuck behind a tourist bus all the way to Fox Glacier. The car shakes contentedly, like a dog preparing for a nap. But the one-way bridges here are wonderful, especially the suspension bridges over the big rivers. Long may plans for tourist highways gather dust on some minister’s desk.
At Fox it begins to rain again, that thick, heavy, unrelenting West Coast rain measured here not so much in millimetres as in metres. I fancy I hear the car glugging.
We drive southwards, through Jacobs River. A tiny school, a church with no steeple, a few houses. No reproachful cows.
The last time I was here I’d come over the Haast Pass in the early hours after waiting until after midnight for a slip to be cleared. It was very dark in South Westland, black as the insides of a black cow, two of which happened to be standing in the middle of the road, invisible in the black night. I tried to steer (that is not a pun) between them. There came a huge thump. The front of the diesel 4WD I was driving was stove in. God knows what happened to the cows. I went back, expecting corpses, but they were still standing. Their eyes glittered in the faint glow of my remain
ing headlight.
I tried to call the police, really I did. Left a message. Police headquarters in some urban centre far from the Coast answered, and a female voice told me that stock on a major highway were a menace. I said I knew that. I had the dents to prove it. She said, in the firm tones of someone trying to communicate with an idiot, that I should track down the owner. I said this was black country, with no houses, no lights, no driveways and no visible sign of life except two reproachful cows. She said something would have to be done. I wished her luck.
Now I keep a wary eye out for crippled cows with vengeance on what is left of their minds.
I’ve always felt an affinity for Bruce Bay, for obvious reasons. But I don’t like its chances. Rising sea levels are making the Tasman ever more testy and the West Coast is feeling it. Already only a lot of rock stands between the road here and oblivion.
At Knight Point a clutch of tourists huddle under umbrellas and peer into the grey. Somewhere inside it, they’ve been told, is a view.
Just over the Waita River bridge I see a sign. ‘Whitebait patties’, it says. I remember Les Lisle’s beauties. The car shakes into a tight turn.
A little road leads into a settlement I never knew existed. It is one of those West Coast whitebaiting places, a bach town whose hopes rise and fall on the numbers of tiny fish in the river. Right at the end of the road is a house, more substantial than most of the others, with an outside shed and barbecue. I stop. A woman comes out. I ask for a pattie. She ladles a scoop of whitebait mixture onto a hot plate. Several more people arrive. She says she’s a school counsellor, down here helping her brother. She likes making whitebait patties, she says. Her customers are usually on holiday. They are happy people who don’t need counselling but, she adds politely, if I had any worries she’d be pleased to listen.
The whitebait sizzles on the grill.
‘What was the biggest catch here?’ someone asks. Once, she says, the run was so big everyone jumped into the river with gumboots, singlets, anything that might hold the ’bait. But now there’s hardly anything. The season has been bad, again.
She brightens. A few baches have changed hands and last night was initiation night. The newcomers were given a choice. Either they could run through the local visitor lodge naked, or they could jump into the river and catch a trout. They were a modest bunch. All of them opted for the river. How many trout? Quite a few, she reckons. As for the patties: they are large and light, perfect.
Ahead lies the Haast Pass. Oh dear. Its history hangs over it like the clouds before me today, threatening. On the day the road was opened, little over half a century before on 6 November 1965, Prime Minister Keith Holyoake cut the ribbon and ran for cover. The rain poured down so heavily the road was closed by slips a few hours later. That’s its history, really.
The previous time I went over it a large sign at Hawea announced that it was closed by slips. A barrier at Makarora stopped traffic. The woman behind the bar at Makarora predicted it would reopen around midnight. I drove around the barrier and went up to the top of the Pass, knowing the slips were on the Coast side. Half a dozen cars were already there. I parked and slept until I heard a car pass from the Coast direction. The Pass had to be open.
The road’s grim history made that night even darker. The Canadian couple trapped in their motor caravan by slips on the road then swept into the wild Haast River by another slip: only one body was ever found. The many crashes. Most of all, the constant slips, especially around the Diana Falls area. Slips there had closed the road to night-time traffic for fourteen months. It had been reopened to twenty-four-hour, two-lane traffic not long before.
They’d just cleared one slip that night. Road cones marked the spot without any clear indication of a way through. On one side of the road I risked rock falls, on the other a sheer drop to the wild river below. I picked my way through the middle. Half my brain told me to go for it, to get the hell out of there. The other argued that if it was dangerous they wouldn’t have reopened the road. Would they? And why weren’t any other cars on the road? That fear of demons in the dark which overlaid everything pictured the billions of tonnes of rock in the blackness above, held back only by Kiwi ingenuity. No one believed it was a permanent fix. Would it hold for just a little longer?
In fact, a few days later the Greymouth Star told its readers that the Pass was closed, again. It reported that house-sized boulders were blocking the road, ‘adding to the nervousness among South Westland business owners.’
Nothing could add to my own nervousness that night. For the first time I didn’t shudder crossing the bridge marking New Zealand’s most famous unsolved murder, of Jennifer Mary Beard, whose body had been found beneath it. In fact, I was joyous, because it meant I was out of danger, pretty much (who could have predicted the two black cows?).
But today the cloud clears suddenly. The rain has stopped. The sun is shining. Who can believe awful stories on a sunny day? I scoot upwards. Tourists are stopping for photographs. At the Diana Falls, that complicated lacework of steel and rocks looks like a vertical garden, green growth poking through and waving gently in the sun. I nip smartly over the top. I’m not going to tempt fate.
The deep green forest gives way to that distinctive Otago country, brown turning gold, snow on the peaks, the wind blowing whitecaps across the lake. I cross the low saddle to Lake Hawea into country that is sharper, steeper — although somehow gentler. Perhaps it’s the Haast receding and the rounded ranges of Central Otago appearing to the south. Ahead lies Wanaka, fat and happy in the sun. The sign at its entrance announces, ‘Puzzling World’. It advertises a business, not the town, but I’m not arguing.
I’ve been on the road forty-eight hours but I’m not counting either. The car gurgles. This was always going to be a wild journey, but it became a strange one too.
And is there a grander journey anywhere? No use asking me. I’m irretrievably biased. Of course there isn’t.
11
Passing muster
The Valley is a commonplace name for a place of uncommon beauty. It is a route between the Rangitata River and Lake Tekapo, an ancient track probably known to Maori and certainly to generations of high-country musterers.
The Valley lies between the Two Thumb Range, named for mountainous digits which thrust at the sky, and the Sinclair Range, marking the boundary of the mighty Mesopotamia Station. It is a deep and mysterious place, almost unknown to the outside world until it became part of the national pathway, Te Araroa.
The Valley runs parallel to the Rangitata River in the Upper Rangitata Valley, the ‘desolate pathway of destruction’ described by its most famous early resident, Samuel Butler. In this country the tough company who followed later often clutched their crucifixes. Chas Dunstan, who drove an eight-horse wagon across the Rangitata and into the Ashburton Gorge, once the main route in and out, reached for Ecclesiastes: ‘Pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.’ He wrote:
To gaze on the headwaters of the Rangitata and the vast panorama of hills up the great divide . . . one was reminded of [from Elizabeth Barrett Browning] . . . ‘Truly earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God but only those who see take off their shoes.’
Butler was searching for land which he could claim for a pittance, develop for sheep and double his capital in as short a time as possible. He found it here in the Upper Rangitata, claimed it for himself, named it Mesopotamia (the Greek word for country between two rivers), built it up to some 24,000 hectares and four years later sold it for twice the sum he paid. He was not much respected as a sheep farmer, but as a writer he was superb. His best-known work is Erewhon, a utopian novel whose setting is based on Mesopotamia and the mountain passes he could see from the station.
He first saw this place when he turned into the river valley, now the Upper Rangitata, from the opposite side of the Rangitata River and found his way up a tributary, Forest Creek, which was to become the boundary of his new station. It was autumn. His blanke
ts were icy, his tea leaves frozen. He climbed along Forest Creek, which is not so much a creek as a wild river hemmed by mountains, until he reached the top of the range, and he was overwhelmed by the country he was in:
Suddenly, as my eyes got on a level with the top, so that I could see over, I was struck almost breathless by the wonderful mountain that burst on my sight. The effect was startling. It rose towering in a massy parallelogram, disclosed from top to bottom in the cloudless sky, far above all the others.
The mountain he saw that day was Mount Cook. He probably saw it from a saddle which later became known as the Bullock Bow. It’s a pass which leads down into the Bush Stream Valley, known simply as ‘The Valley’. Butler was probably the first European to see that, too.
The Valley became part of Mesopotamia Station. It stayed within its boundaries until the introduction of the government process known as ‘tenure review’, which led to high-country pastoral leaseholders getting freehold title for part of their stations in exchange for handing over the rest of the property to the conservation estate. On Mesopotamia the vast, wonderful tract of the Valley became public property.
It is still lonely enough. The grandeur of the place diminishes everyone who goes into it.
Even now it is part of Te Araroa not all that many do go into it. It is a long and difficult walk. The logistics are tricky. Tramping from the Rangitata to upper Lake Tekapo can take five or six days and the walk goes from one remote place to another. How is it to be organised? At one end the track runs from the Upper Rangitata Valley. From the other, the track begins, or ends, from a point well up Lake Tekapo from the township. There’s no public transport either way.
