New Zealand Vacation

Friday, January 26:
Wellington - Greymouth

We arose to the alarm at 4:49 AM. Hey, what gives? I thought we were on vacation! But no, we had a 6:15 ferry to catch for the South Island. Of course, the ferry was delayed. (One local confided in me that if the passenger volume didn’t warrant an on-time departure, they feigned some sort of weather or mechanical delay.) But at 8-ish, we boarded the Lynx for Picton.

The Lynx is impressive. This is a big boat. Seats, I dunno, maybe 500 passengers and a bunch of cars. I never got on the auto deck to see exactly how many. It’s a twin-hull design and quite fast. The Cook Strait between the two islands had some chop to it, and the boat bounced around some. You couldn’t walk without holding on, and a number of passengers parted with their breakfast. It struck me how differently the boat and the airplane dealt with rough weather. The plane flexes; you can watch the wings bending and flapping as gusts strike them, taking a lot of the shock off the cabin. The boat was like a solid block, and all the bouncing given it by the waves was imparted to the passengers.

The Lynx was also responsible for what may have been the worst cup of coffee I have ever tried to drink. That’s one thing this country could stand to learn: how to make coffee. They gussy it up with various steamed milk and other accoutrements, give it unfamiliar adjectives (“Flat white” means coffee with cream.) But if the stuff I drank came out of a horse, I’d recommend calling a vet.

I took a seat in the forward part of the cabin among a gaggle of college kids in sleeping bags on floor. They were in the midst of a hiking tour all over New Zealand. They were the first of many outdoorsy athletic types I encountered throughout the trip. The place is lousy with hikers and bikers and scuba divers and rugby players and bungee jumpers and the like. I saw bicycles laden with panniers and carriers towing trailers up mountain roads that had me down to second gear in the car.

It’s sort of remarkable that at one end of the ferry run is Wellington, a bustling urbane capital city, and on the other is Picton, which consists of the ferry slip, a couple of hostels, a café, a gas station, and a road out of town. We trundled our baggage down the block to the Picton Lodge, where our car was waiting for us. I had been given the name of Davy Stuart, a luthier in Christchurch, by the singer James Keelaghan. When James mentioned he had performed in New Zealand, I asked him for any contacts that could point me to folk music in the country. Davy, in the first of many helpful services to us, had arranged for this car.

Perhaps we should have been on our guard when we saw the name of the rental agency: Shoestring Rentals (or as I liked to call it, “No Mama, No Papa Auto Rentals”). An early ‘90’s Mitsubishi Gallante with 400,000 kilometers (240, 000 miles) on the clock. “No, don’t worry about that dent in the rear panel, and you have to push the glass into its track as you roll up the window, and make sure you check the oil when you gas up; it leaks a bit.” Jenny named it Rosinante after Don Quixote’s aging but faithful mount. Truth be told, it got us 1600 miles around the country without leaving us stranded...almost. But more on those adventures later.

The weather was mixed clouds and sun, with temperatures around 20°. (That’s °C. Low to mid ‘60’s in real degrees.) Quite unlike my usual meticulously planned modus operandi, we got in the car and said, “Well, where shall we head?” We decided that we would make a large counterclockwise circuit around the South Island, hitting the town of Geraldine on the evening of Saturday, February 3rd to be at the Waihi Bush Folk Festival on the following day. Off we went, driving on the wrong side of the road, sitting on the wrong side of the car, shifting with the wrong hand, and I never did used to the damn wiper and lights stalks being on the wrong side of the steering column.

Nine hundred miles later, we encountered our first traffic light. The roads are all lovely well-maintained empty two-lanes sweeping through diverse countryside. We usually traveled at about 100 (KPH..That’s about 65 in real speed) except for the occasional abrupt slowdown for 2nd-gear switchbacks and the occasional 1-lane bridge. (In one or two instances, both lanes of traffic also shared the same right-of-way with the railway tracks.) You can’t get lost here. There are no turns to miss. The road bores or snakes through 30 to 50 miles of wilderness between little isolated towns. We would occasionally encounter bicyclists on fancy long-distance rigs hung with panniers and carriers and sometimes even towing trailers on these impossibly steep mountain roads 30 miles from the nearest dwelling.

The ride was like driving across the US in microcosm. The terrain that would take you a day to traverse in the US would give way to an entirely different landscape after an hour's drive. We traveled through wine country up the Wairau River. The countryside then gave way to terrain reminiscent of Wyoming high plateau with broken and dry bluffs, and thence down the Bullard River gorge, which resembled the Delaware Water Gap but with higher peaks. Again it looked like something out of Riven or Northlanz. Here and elsewhere in NZ, the countryside had been logged to death, and then re-planted with a lumber crop. It gives the hillsides an odd patterned appearance. Stopped in the Owen River Tavern, a local restaurant, for lunch. There another cultural difference presented itself in how restaurants are run. One generally orders and picks up meals at a counter, rather than with table service. And even with table service, tipping is the exception, rather than the rule. Food is generally good, portions huge and cheap. There were a couple of magazines on the counter for the patrons to read while waiting, among them “Shearing” and “New Zealand Pig Hunter”. Always interesting to look at specialty publications.

Late in the afternoon, we emerged at the West Coast, and headed down the coastal highway reminiscent of California Route 1. High bluffs drop sheer to the Tasman Sea with craggy black boulders emerging from the water near the shore. Where the occasional river runs to the sea, the road snakes and switch-backs down to water level, crosses the stream with the inevitable 1-lane bridge, and climbs back to the top to continue its journey southward. The area gets a lot of rainfall, and the place is lush with hydrangeas, palms, ferns, and the like. We fetched up at Greymouth for the night. Checked in at the Seaside Lodge, one in the chain of Backpackers’ accommodations. Sort of institutional with uninsulated cinderblock walls and a bed. Bathroom and shower down by the end of the building. It was chilly, and visitors were expected to bring their own sleeping bags (which we hadn’t). Maybe next time we’ll go for less spartan digs.

There was a real pretty rainbow to the east away from the setting sun, though. We took a walk out to the beach: desolate, carpeted with dark sand and, smooth marbled rocks, and watched the sun set through dramatic clouds. This was not a neat beach of picture postcards, but one scattered with driftwood & flotsam, and populated by sandflies that left me with souvenirs that lasted a week.

These are pleasant people: big-boned cheerful self-confident. A lot of young active types into hiking and biking and mountain climbing and bungee jumping and other physical fitness activities. Sort of like Oregoneans with accents.