west coast gothic

This is an article I wrote ages ago, an entry in a travel writing contest; it wasn't a winner, but was a finalist. Something to pass the time, eh? Until I return properly to the World of Blogging.



West Coast Gothic

From the burnished head of Lake Wanaka a funnel of shiny rock delivers you, so long as your brakes hold out, over the saddle and down to Haast’s gate. For those who might not make it, whose brakes billow blue smoke at every push of the pedal, there are signs to reassure you as you career madly downhill hoping, at least, to round the next bend intact: “emergency run off 1 km away”, “emergency run off 500m away”. We have seen run-offs before in other places - deep pits of upward gravel you can run at and safely stop. Not so the one on the Haast Pass. Instead of an expanse of car-stopping gravel, beleagured non-brakers are faced with a smooth shiny upward road up which to hurtle within an inch of their lives. When they come to a stop - and they will, somewhere up there - what choice will their vehicle have but to slide back down again at gathering speed? And over the bank opposite? We nod to each other knowingly, my partner and I.
“Welcome to the Coast.”


Everywhere around us is cascading water. Water rushing down towering granite pinnacles, running through rock-strewn rivers, sieving out of lowering cloud. At the bridge known as Haast Gate, it comes together - the ascending rock, the descending water, the lowering sky. Dry, brittle Otago, just behind us, is far far away.


Farms are few and far between on the Coast. According to the Popes, Diana and Jeremy, of Mobil Guide to New Zealand fame, it’s the fault of the peaty soil. One farmer, however, doesn’t find the uphill life that is the lot of the West Coast farmer to be the fault of his soil. Somewhere in his ponderings he has decided responsibility lies in the hands of invading urban tourists. Why else would he have swung his landrover into his driveway straight across us, sending us swerving toward a ditch? It was no accident. The farmer, this hardy opponent of peat-bittered earth, eyeballs us with a black dog frown of hatred. Just before he wields his steering wheel.
If you’ve never taken this path into the West Coast before, it’s some introduction.


I’m not very good with the distances in maps. I sentence my partner to daily eight hour drives due to my ineptitude. We’ll go to Franz Josef, I say, it’s just along this road a bit. We’ve already come from Omarama through the glossy Lindis Pass, bumping over frizzled hillocks to Wanaka and Hawea. Not much further, I keep saying.
On the way to Franz Josef, he pulls hopefully into small lumpy camping grounds the size of rest areas. They mostly have honesty boxes and thoughtful facilities – such as separated tent sites to keep us all apart. Today the concave tent bases are repositories of muddy water. It’s not only coming down from above, it’s also coming up from below, due to the high water table and the proximity of nearby lakes. We back out slowly.


On fine days the literature says, you can see the mountains and trees reflected in the lakes. We can only see rain reflected in the lakes, while the mountains are huge brown spurs waist high in silver grey.


It’s dark when we reach Franz Josef village. It’s not a traditional West Coast settlement, it’s more the internationally-interchangeable sort of tussock town that outdoor sports adherents plant everywhere they go. Here it’s the Coasters who are the tourists.


We find a cabin 2km from the village. An Irish-theme bar is all that’s open when we emerge into the night. It’s full of international nomads. We jostle for a seat among the horse brasses, the antique farm machinery, the Germans and Canadians, out of place by dint of our New Zealandness. The rain falls in sheets. A glass of beer each costs nearly the same as our cabin, and we’d thought that expensive. The kitchen is shutting when we arrive so we order a plate of nachos quickly, before the pleasure of eating food with our alcohol gets replaced with the pleasure of drinking alcohol with our alcohol.


Franz Josef glacier peeks shyly around a bend in its valley. The twinkling of hoar frost on rock, the slight ridges of ice that peek from beneath cloud like a dog’s nose under a blanket, suggest to us the tears of Roimata are in a drying up phase - but in fact they’re not. The glacier is currently advancing at 3 metres a day (we read). I calculate that our half hour visit should have seen a grudging 6cm advance. We’d expected an inexorable wall of ice, but you have to pay a hundred bucks to fly up and find that. There are signs warning us to watch out for flash floods when huge ice boulders crash into the thin trickle of a river. Nothing crashes. Nothing moves. The liveliness of the village sits incongruously with the scrawny sight that spawned it.
We should have stopped at Fox Glacier. Fox would have been better.


On day two we fare better at the hands of West Coast farmers. Tourist buses are now our main worry. They ply a route between Punakaiki’s pancake rocks (further north) and the glacier country, with few stops on the way. They’re great towering behemoths where the driver is a dwarfish figure sitting so high in the air he (or she) would not even notice if it collected a little car on its front. We drive with caution. Somewhere between Franz Josef and the Okarito turnoff a giant sandfly launches itself from the side of a building. In the carpark sits a giant tourist bus; its passengers mill unhappily about, looking at the building with incomprehension. We drive into the carpark and weave slowly around this strange sight. Nobody sees us; they are like Odyssean shades newly arrived across the Styx. ‘Possum pies’ the sign outside proclaims. Like them, we decide not to go in. But, unlike them, we can choose to keep driving.


Somewhere along the road, I start to share my partner’s obsession with finding nice camping spots. If you need to have a theme for your trip, why not this? Our camping spot needs are meagre – it must be cheap, it must have running water, it must have an interesting feature of some kind, and it must be near a pub. The camping grounds we had visited yesterday were nice enough, but not nice enough.

Detouring to Okarito, we find a camping ground of glorious proportions. Entry is by donation, canoeing and boating are to be had on the lagoon, and the toilets are as toilets should be. We see ourselves paddling about out there (if it ever stops raining) nudging into all the little wayside marshes looking for elusive kotuku. The sign proclaiming that “all unknown cats will be shot” suggests Tibby would probably be staying home. Driving back to the main road, we marvel at the strapping DOC workers wading into the bush, carrying aerials aloft. The lengths to which those good people go to ensure the local community gets good tv reception! (In truth, they’re seeking out kiwi.). And then, at a place called Mahinapua, we strike the camping ground of our dreams.


To the left of the main road stands a hotel. Not a touristy have-one-drink-and-leave kind but the welcoming stay-all-day-if-you-want kind. It’s a two storeyed edifice with fading paintwork and a big public bar. To the right, an avenue of arching trees beckons us down a dappled gravel road from which we emerge into an open grassy area by the side of a lake. Not only is Lake Mahinapua particularly beautiful, with a surface on which - even in the rain- you can make out the reflections of the surrounding mountains, not only does it have camping by donation, but at the lake side sits the remnants of a steam boat feature and, lifting haughty legs among the lakeside reeds, an actual kotuku dips its beak. We drop our other requirements immediately.
“We won’t stay here now” we tell each other “we will come back. In summer. When it’s not raining.”
And we drive on.