New Zealand's Left Coast

Last weekend was a typical Bob-and-Karen adventure—a good idea, but implementation was less than perfect.

To get from coast to coast, we had to drive up and over the Southern Alps. We took the Arthur’s Pass road, which we had seen in the first weeks of our trip. The fields we passed were no longer green, but brown and weedy. And the multitudes of sheep and lambs we had seen frolicking in November had been moved elsewhere.

Arthur’s Pass is a small village with a motel, a backpackers and two restaurants. To a Kiwi, this is a tourist town. (A backpacker hotel is a hostel-like place which has budget accommodations in dorms ($20-25 per bed) or double rooms ($50-60 per room)). The road down to the Tasman Sea is incredibly steep, reaching 16% in the Otira Gorge. This particular stretch of road also includes a tunnel so the rock slides go over the road rather than onto the cars, and a chute over the road for a waterfall. It was here that we last saw the sun.

Lunch was at the Otira Hotel and Bar. We ate alone in the dining room with its 1960s plastic furniture, 12 foot ceilings and huge fireplace. The bar was pretty busy for 1130 am on a Saturday. We have discovered that the lunch hour doesn’t really start here until 12:30, which might explain the empty dining room, but I don’t know how to explain the bar.

In the States, I would never have stopped at a place that looked like the Otira Hotel, not trusting the clientele, the management or the food. Here, however, this is just a regular café, bar and hotel in a small, rural town on a major highway (more on this later). We had to go searching for the proprietor to order our lunch, but the sandwiches were great.

It is hard to tell the major rural highways here from the regular 2 lane paved roads. This is likely because the major highways ARE regular 2 lane paved roads. State Highway 1, which is the main north-south route through the country, is actually twistier, more scenic and has fewer guard rails than your average 2 lane back road in North Carolina. The major east-west route from Christchurch to Greymouth, and one of only four highways that cross the Southern Alps, is twisty, scenic, dangerous AND mountainous.

Adding to the adventure is the use of one-lane bridges. If you are on the give-way direction, you drive up to the bridge at full speed (100 km/hr), ostensibly to see if anyone is coming from the right-of-way direction, but really to try and beat the right-of-way cars in a game of chicken. Sometimes it works, too. And sometimes you can’t see the other end of the bridge no matter how slow you go, so you just charge out there and use the passing bay if you meet someone.

As we drove into Greymouth, we couldn’t help looking for the now infamous memorial pillars. They were lying, broken, on a small patch of grass at a corner, surrounded by flowers and signs that read “we will never forget” and “lest we forget”. Early on Sunday morning, two weeks ago, the landowner had removed the pillars from an old school site they were planning to turn into a shopping center. Apparently the pillars were going to be up for historic preservation status, so the developer did a preemptive move. Unfortunately, the pillars are important to the community, and are the start of the each year’s ANZAC day parade. Even worse, the pillars mostly represent the Pakeha (white) community’s participation in the Great War, while the land is owned by a Maori (native) corporation.

For the Maori, being able to develop this land, a right they were denied for over 100 years, was significant. For the Pakeha, World War I and the ANZAC forces in particular, are still traumatic memories. From Wikipedia “Forty-two percent of men of military age served in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. 16,697 New Zealanders were killed and 41,317 were wounded during the war - a 58 percent casualty rate." Most towns have markers to the dead, which constituted nearly 1/3 of the male population at the time.

Anyway, the Pakeha mayor staged a dawn raid of his own (with the Maori corporation’s knowledge) to get the pillars back and now they are awaiting a new home.

After the pillars, I wanted to see the pancake rocks and blow holes at Punakaiki; walk through some of the rainforest, and if time allowed, visit the seal colony at Cape Foulwind, so named not because the seals stink, although they do, but because the winds were in the wrong direction for Captain Cook to sail away. Bob and Abby were just along for the ride.

We headed north on the coast highway along the Tasman Sea, passing limestone cliffs and tree ferns other exotic rainforesty-looking vegetation, but missed the blow hole excitement by being about 45 minutes late for high tide. When the tide is coming in, it pushes sea water into the holes in the bottom of the coastal rocks which then explodes out of the holes in the top of the rocks, creating a geyser of sorts. Interestingly, they call pancakes ‘pikelets’ here, so I don’t know why these aren’t the pikelet rocks.

It was raining as we started up our hike through the ferns, flax and cabbage trees. Following the guidebook, we started up the Pororari River into the Paparoa National Park from Punakaiki. These Maori names are so long, so similar, still so meaningless to us, and have so many syllables that we have taken to using ‘whatever’ as the third (and later) syllables, as in Papa-whatever, and Poro-whatever and Poona-whatever.

The guidebook said we should be walking through nikau palm forest for about 15 minutes when we would emerge from the forest to a pleasant beach, which was a good turning-around point for those with limited time.

After an hour we turned around, never finding the beach. While it is true that Kiwis often classify a scramble STRAIGHT up a hill as ‘easy’, we are usually traveling faster than the suggested hiking time. And about 45 minutes into our return trip, we came across a bench. Hmmmm…Could I have misread ‘bench’ as ‘beach”?

We decided that Cape Foulwind in the rain didn’t appeal to us. Further, it would break our string of “P” places.

Home for the night was to be a Standard Cabin at the Seaside Holiday Park. The park was indeed at the seaside, and the cabin was indeed your standard 8X8 room with 2 bunks, 2straight back chairs and one overhead fluorescent light fixture. There was a toilet and shower at the end of the building, and a communal kitchen one building over. There were no windows except the window in the door. Although I don’t know this from personal experience, it sure felt like a prison cell.

I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t stay there. In 3 ½ hours we could be home in our own beds, and we’d seen all we (OK, I) wanted to see of the west coast. It was easy to talk Abby and Bob into this plan. Even with the dismal weather, it was a beautiful place. Perhaps we will return when the weather forecast is sunny, and plan on staying just for the day.