The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  Still, nearly everyone I met asked me, “What do you think of Na Zillun?”

  “It’s wonderful,” I said.

  They always shrugged and denied it. New Zealanders, smug and self-congratulatory about David Lange’s non-nuclear policy, seemed to me the hardest people in the world to compliment. There was something Calvinist in this refusal to accept praise, but it was so persistent it was almost as though in their stubborn humility they were fishing for compliments.

  If you spoke about their well-maintained cities they said they were actually very disorderly. Tell them their mountains are high and snowy and they retorted that yours were higher and snowier. “New Zealanders are fitness fanatics,” I said to a man. “That’s a myth,” he said. “We’re very unhealthy as a nation. We’re poofs.” If I said New Zealand seemed prosperous they claimed it was dying on its feet. Mention the multiracial aspect of the North Island and they said, “We hev ithnic unrist. There’ll be a blow-up any munnit.”

  “But it’s much better than Australia, I hear.”

  “Bitter by a long chalk. Your Aussie’s an enemal.”

  Secretly, I said to myself: Everyone’s wearing old ill-fitting clothes and sensible shoes. They carried string bags. They shopped in places with names like Clark’s General Drapers and Edwin Mouldey Ironmongery. It was the indoor suburban culture of the seaside suburbs of 1950s England, Bexhill-on-the-Pacific, with strangely colored plates (Souvenir of Cheddar Gorge) on the mantelpiece and plump armchairs and an electric fire where there used to be a hearth. The older people were dull and decent, the younger ones trying hopelessly to be stylish, and the students – Kiwis to the tips of their pinfeathers – aggressively scruffy and gauche. Here and there you saw a Maori, often working a cash-register. They were supposed to be clubby and faintly menacing, but they were all smiles and inhabited big solid bodies; they were the only people in New Zealand who looked right at home.

  I went to Dunedin, which was cold and frugal, with its shabby streets and mock-Gothic university, and talked to the students.

  “They’re very shy,” I was told.

  Really? They seemed to me ignorant, assertive and dirty. It felt like the end of the world, and when I looked at a map this seemed true: we were only about twenty degrees north of the Antarctic Circle – leave the southern tip of New Zealand and the next upright mammal you are likely to see is an emperor penguin.

  Back in Christchurch, I sat in my hotel room, staring at my feet. I watched a New Zealand version of This Is Your Life, paying tribute to a middle-aged Maori singer, and when the man wept openly at seeing his family traipse into the studio, I became so depressed I drank most of the minibar. The hotel was in the tudor style, with fake beams and mullioned windows. I was consoled by my luggage, the boat I had carried with me but not yet paddled.

  What was the Pacific Ocean like? I rented a bicycle and rode it about five miles to Sumner Bay, where surfers were lazing like seals and the cold blackish breakers were much too big for me to penetrate them with my boat. There was another harbor – Lyttelton, over the hill. I cycled a steep circling road and after an hour came to another surfy harbor, but it wasn’t Lyttelton – it was Taylor’s Mistake.

  In 1863 Captain Taylor thought this was Lyttelton after a round-the-world voyage, and ran aground, losing his ship. It was my mistake too. I cycled back up the Port Hills and over another range of hills to Lyttelton Harbor, which was lovely and long, a safe anchorage, with Chinese shops and pretty houses. There was a short-cut back to Christchurch, a tunnel under the hills, but bicycles weren’t allowed in it. Procrastinating in the town, I passed a bloody sanitary towel, where someone had thrown it on the street, and I thought: Because of that disgusting thing I will never come here again.

  Pushing and pedalling I made it back over the hills to Christchurch, tired after my forty-mile cycle ride and frustrated by not having found anywhere in the nearby Pacific to paddle my boat.

  I called my wife and told her what an awful time I was having. We both cried. She was miserable, she said. I said, So was I!

  “But it̻s better that we stay apart,” she said.

  Then she begged me to stop calling her.

  She said I was like a torturer, calling her out of the blue and making her feel like a prisoner being given a cup of tea by a quixotic jailer. But all I could think of was myself tearfully pedalling the wonky bicycle, all alone, in the wind, up the steep hills at the edge of Christchurch.

  And I probably had cancer. In the seedy tudor-style hotel I looked up from The Sexual Life of Savages and saw that the people in the next room had gone, and left the door ajar, and a new set of people were sitting in the same chairs and laughing, having displaced them. Life was like that! The tide came in and went out. People died and others took their place, not even knowing the others’ names. They sat in your chairs, they slept in your bed. And you were probably lost somewhere in the Pacific – gone and forgotten. I wonder where this thing came from? someone said, scribbling at your beautiful desk.

  The next day, Sunday, still feeling morbid and stunned by the sunny emptiness and indifference and the almost indescribable boredom of sitting alone in front of a fan heater in Merivale, in a transported culture of houses named “Oakleigh” in suburbs called Ponsonby, that looked second-hand and small and seedy, ill-suited and mediocre – the most terrible aspect of which was that the New Zealanders themselves did not seem to know what was happening to them in their decline – there stole upon me the sort of misery that induces people in crummy hotel rooms to make sure the cap is on the toothpaste and the faucet is turned off, and then they kill themselves, trying not to make too much of a mess.

  Get me out of here, I thought. And I headed for the wilderness.

  2

  New Zealand: Sloshing through the South Island

  As long as there is wilderness there is hope. I went southwest from Christchurch to Queenstown, at the edge of the waterworld of Fiordland. Even today it is one of the world’s last real wildernesses. But a thousand years ago, before the arrival of any humans, it was like the world before the Fall.

  Then, there were no predators except falcons, hawks and eagles – no other meat-eaters. There were no browsing mammals, no land mammals at all, apart from two species of small bat. Everything grew and flourished, and the weather came up from the Roaring Forties, watering this corner of New Zealand with twenty-five feet of rain a year. It is still one of the wettest places in the world.

  It was once so safe here that the birds lost their sense of danger, and without enemies some stopped flying – among them, the flightless New Zealand goose and the Fiordland crested penguin, now extinct. Others evolved into enormous and complacent specimens, like the spoiled and overfed children I had seen in Auckland – the giant rail, more than a yard tall, or the feathered long-necked moa, a distant relative of the emu and the ostrich and Big Bird, which grew to be ten feet tall.

  In that old paradise the trees grew abundantly and the moss was two feet deep – a perfect seedbed for new trees. The creatures lived on roots and insects, and not on each other. The foliage grew without being cut or grazed. Fiordland, which had been created by glaciers, was the Peaceable Kingdom.

  After the Maori arrived, probably in the tenth century, from the Cook Islands in tropical Polynesia, with the dog (kuri) and the rat (kiore) they kept for food, they made forays into Fiordland from the north. They had a great love for decorative feathers, and in their quest for them, and for food, they hunted many birds to extinction. The Maori dogs and rats preyed on the ground-dwelling birds. For the first time since its emergence from the Ice Age, Fiordland’s natural balance was disturbed. The arrival of these predators produced the ecological equivalent of Original Sin.

  There were always treasure-seekers in Fiordland – Maoris looking for feather and greenstone, pakehes (whites) looking for gold – but such people were transients. Fiordland never had any permanent settlement, only camps and way stations and the temporary colonies of sealers and whalers at
the edge of the sea. People came and went. Fiordland remained uninhabited – a true primeval forest.

  But the humans who passed through left many of their animals behind. They introduced various species either for sport or food, or in the mistaken belief that one animal would stabilize another. The pattern is repeated all over the Pacific – there are wild goats gobbling up Tahiti, and wild horses chewing the Marquesas to shreds, wild pigs in the Solomons, and sneaky egg-eating mongooses, presented to the islands by missionaries, all over Hawaii. The rabbits and wild dogs in Australia did so much damage that a vermin-proof fence was put up across New South Wales that is longer than the Great Wall of China.

  The foreign animals brought a subtle chaos to Fiordland. When the rabbits went wild, the stoats and weasels were introduced to keep them in check, but instead they ate birds and bird eggs and the rabbits increased. Every other non-native creature was similarly destructive. The New Zealanders I met hated these foreign animals even more than the islanders, but they hated them for the same reasons – because of their indecent fertility and their breeding habits and their excessive greed, eating everything in sight.

  The greatest threat to vegetation was the red deer. Deer breed quickly and can go anywhere. Helicopters flying over almost inaccessible hanging valleys could spot three or four hundred deer in the steepest places. The Norway rats that came to New Zealand on ships have multiplied and reduced the native bird population. There are American elk in Fiordland, the only herd in the Southern Hemisphere.

  “They’re a nuisance,” Terry Pellet told me. He was the District Conservator of Fiordland. “There are so many exotic species that thrive here and harm the local flora and fauna – possums, chamois, and hares.”

  And the Germans, he said, were terrible about paying hut fees.

  What is native and what is alien is a Pacific conundrum. In New Zealand all strangers were suspect, whether they were animal or vegetable. You can shoot a red deer any day in Fiordland and it is always open season on elk. Foreign trees are regarded as unsightly weeds, whether they are Douglas fir, silver birch, or spruce, and no growing things are hated more than the rampant gorse and broom planted by sentimental and homesick Scots.

  Nearly all the people I met said they wanted to reclaim their hills and make them bald and bright again, ridding them of these alien plants and animals, to bring about the resurgence of the flightless birds, vegetarians and insectivores, and to preserve the long valleys of native conifers and beeches. There have been some pleasant surprises. One guileless, ground-dwelling bird, the plump beaky takahe, which the Maoris hunted, was thought to be extinct. In 1948 some takahes were found in a remote region of Fiordland. Although protected, the bird faces an uncertain future.

  Old habits of contentment, curiosity, and trust – the legacy of paradise – remain among the many bird species in Fiordland. Anyone taking a walk through the rain forests will be followed by the South Island robin, the fantail, the tomtit, and the tiny rifleman, New Zealand’s smallest bird. These birds seem absolutely without fear and will flutter and light a few feet away, pecking at insects the hiker has disturbed. The kea, or mountain parrot, is so confident it becomes an intruder, squawking its own name and poking into your knapsack.

  So, in magnificent Fiordland, far from the dreary frugality of Christchurch and its suburbs, the birds were unafraid and all the water was drinkable; the birdwatcher didn’t need binoculars and the hiker had no use for a canteen.

  I cheered up and decided to go for a one-week hike over the mountains and through the rain forest. I would paddle my kayak somewhere else.

  The best-known long-distance walk in Fiordland is the Milford Track, but it is now a victim of marketing success, and “the finest walk in the world” is simply tourist board hyperbole. It has become crowded and intensely regulated, and as a result rather hackneyed.

  The Routeburn Track was my choice, because – unlike the Milford, which is essentially a valley walk with one high climb – it rises to well above the scrub line and stays there, circling the heights, offering vistas of the whole northeast corner of Fiordland. I decided to combine the Routeburn with the Greenstone Valley Walk, so that I would have a whole week of it and so that I could enter and leave Fiordland the way people have done for centuries, on foot.

  There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind, and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a deadweight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest: Thoreau was right.

  Even my recently gloomy mood had lifted. I felt a lightness of spirit, and the feeling was so profound it had a physical dimension – I felt stronger and that eased my load. From the age of nine or ten, when I first began hiking, I have associated camping with personal freedom. My pleasure has intensified over the years as equipment has improved and become more manageable and efficient. When I was very young, camping equipment was just another name for “war surplus.” Everything was canvas. It was made for the Second World War and Korea. It was dusty, mildewed and very heavy. I struggled with my pup tent. My sleeping-bag was filled with cotton and kapok and weighed fifteen pounds. Now all the stuff is light and colorful and almost stylish.

  And hikers are no longer middle-aged Boy Scouts. A violinist, a factory worker, an aspiring actor, a photographer, a food writer, a student, and a grumpy little man with an East European accent made up our Routeburn hiking party. We were, I suppose, representative. Some dropped by the way-side; the photographer stayed on at one hut to take pictures, and the man who kept interrupting discussions with, “Hah! You sink so! You must be choking!” at last went home, and when we finished only three of us pushed on to the Greenstone. Isidore, the violinist, cursed the water and mud and apologized for being a slow walker, but he was better at other pursuits – he was concert-master of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and he had a knack for beating me at Scrabble during the long nights at the trackside shelters.

  We started walking up a muddy track at the north end of Lake Wakitipu in sight of deer and majestic stags.

  “I find it hard to view these creatures as pests,” I said. “Vermin is not the first thing that comes to mind when you see the monarch of the glen.”

  “Vermin!” Isidore said, mockingly. He had the northern Michigan habit of talking with his teeth clamped together. He soon stumblingly fell behind.

  He caught up at lunch, while we ate beside a stream (which we drank from). We were bitten by sand flies there and we set, off again. After a horizontal stretch across Routeburn Flats, among the tawny blowing tussocks, we climbed steeply on a track that took us through gnarled and ancient beeches to Routeburn Falls. This was a succession of cataracts which cascaded over black rocks on about six levels of bouldery terraces.

  From this level, it was possible to see clearly how the glaciers carved Fiordland, creating the characteristic U-shaped valleys, whose sheer walls gave them the illusion of even greater height. The dragging and abrasive glaciers smoothed the valleys’ walls, but here the ice had been about five thousand feet thick, and so the tops of the mountains were jagged and sharp where the glacier didn’t reach.

  That night we stayed in a hut. A hut on the Routeburn Track I discovered is essentially a small drafty shelter erected over a Scrabble board. At the Falls hut that night we talked as the rain began to patter on the roof.

  “How did the Maori withstand this cold?” Isidore asked, massaging life back into his sensitive violinist’s fingers.

  James Hayward, the aspiring actor, did not have the most accurate explanations, but they were always memorable.

  “The Maori kept warm by catching keas,” he said, referring to the mountain parrots. “They hollowed out the birds and strapped them to their feet and used them for slippers.”

  “I sink you are choking,” came a voice. “Hah!”

  Jame
s merely smiled.

  “You’re talking crap, Jim,” someone said. “They’ve found Maori sandals on the trails.”

  “You see a lot of interesting things on the trails,” James said. “I once saw a man on the Routeburn in a bowler hat, a pin-striped suit, a tightly rolled umbrella, and all his camping gear in a briefcase.”

  He had had to raise his voice, for the wind and the rain had increased. It kept up all night, falling fast and turning to sleet and making a great commotion, with constant smashing sounds, pushing at the side of the hut and slapping the windows.

  I played Scrabble with Pam, the student. She said that she beat most of her friends.

  “You won’t beat me,” I said. “Words are my business.”

  She was a big strong girl. She had the heaviest rucksack in the group.

  “If you beat me, I’ll carry your pack over the Harris Saddle tomorrow.”

  She beat me easily, but in the morning I felt sure that I would be spared the effort of carrying her pack. The rain was still driving down hard. Visibility was poor. Between swirling cloud and glissades of sleet, I could see that the storm had left deep new snow on the summit of Momus and other nearby mountains. From every mountainside, cataracts had erupted, milky-white, spurting down the steep rock faces.

  “Let’s go walkabout,” James said.

  The narrow footpath near the hut coursed with water and I had wet feet before I had gone ten yards. We tramped up the path in the snowy rain and wind, marveling at how the Routeburn Falls was now about twice the torrent it had been the day before. We climbed for an hour to a hilltop lake that lay in a rocky bowl, a body of water known here, and in Scotland, as a “tarn.” (“Burn” is also Scottish, for that matter, meaning “stream.”) The storm crashed into the tarn for a while, but even as we watched, it lessened and soon ceased altogether. Within fifteen minutes the sun came out and blazed powerfully – brighter than any sunlight I had ever seen.