South to Hokitika for a Birthday Dinner

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One of our travelling party is having her birthday today. Whoops that gave it all away!

It seems a bit unusual to be travelling on your birthday as it is normally time to sit back, kick your shoes off and be waited on rather than being the chief pilot of the rented Toyota Corolla with a few hundred kilometres of highway and scenery ahead.

One fortunate feature of being independent travellers is that you can choose the time to get up, have breakfast and get on the road rather than being in a group party and have your suitcases out at the prescribed time.

After a short discussion, about our travels so far and where we w ere going, with our hosts at the Air BnB we got the car pointing south and headed for a petrol top up at NPD.

Now the petrol top up each day (in need if we have travelled the previous day) is a deal struck between the main driver and the man with the wallet and credit card at the ready. The deal is that the car petrol tank doesn’t start the day under a minimum of half full.

NPD,a principally South Island petrol retailer, have a great deal for Super Gold Card holders with 15c per litre off on every fill so we hope they have a location in all the places we are likely to need them.

Population spread is going south in Nelson and it was Brightwater before we got into more rural scenery including a number of hop farms alongside the highway. All the work for the last season looked to be over with the hops picked and the structures bare ready for the next season.

We passed Lord Ernest Rutherford’s birth place at Spring Grove just south of Brightwater where today there is not a lot to see of where this great New Zealander grew up as the house he was born in was demolished in the 1920’s.Oddly enough when his birth was registered his name was misspelt ‘Earnest’ and that may have had something to do with this son of an immigrant Scottish farmer as he went on to study at Nelson College before winning a scholarship to Canterbury University and then in 1895 was awarded a Research Fellowship to study at the University of Cambridge. His work in science and physics resulted in him being recognised on the NZ Dollar 100 note.

Wakefield was the next settlement on Highway 6 and we were on the lookout for the best bakery in the province but by the time we reached the open road sign at the south of the town we realised we had somehow missed the bakery’s location.

We needed something for lunch so turned around and headed back into the town and spotted the bakery which we decided was best visible if you are approaching from the south.

The bakery had a long queue which indicated its popularity and we purchased our lunch for consuming somewhere down the road to Hokitika.

One other feature in Wakefield on the main road is a dairy with a prominent sign stating it was the last dairy for 100km, adding, on the main road. This reminded us that we had done the right thing in buying lunch already as the highway ahead, for 100km anyway, is a bit desolate of shops.

Up and over a couple of road saddles and we were making good progress down towards Kawatiri Junction where we planned to do a short walk to the rail tunnel built in 1923 as part of the now defunct Nelson to Gowanbridge rail line. The rail line was started in Nelson in 1873 and was built in stages until money ran out in the depression of the 1930’s and eventually the line was ripped up in the mid 1950’s and the dream of the people of Nelson to be part of the full rail system in the South Island was abandoned.

There was an abundance of information on the rail line at what is left of the Kawatiri station and reading this gave us a sense of what it was like for the hardy workers who worked in this remote location under trying conditions.

The short walk along the alignment of the rail line to the bridge approach into the tunnel built in 1923 was easy as was the stroll through the short 185 metre tunnel and then back via a trail on the outside of the tunnel through the forest.

The next location on today’s drive we were on the lookout for was the site of the 1968 Inangahua Earthquake slip. We passed this location back in October 2020 when on a Top of the South Island trip but never actually found the signpost.

Both of us recall the earthquake although we lived in Wellington a couple of hundred kilometres away but remember the 7.1 as probably the most violent shake we have lived through in these shaky islands.

Again we were almost thwarted but spotted the sign just in time before we were past and around a corner.

Time has taken care of the scar on the hillside above the Upper Buller River and the native bush has regrown over it to cover it up.

At Inangahua Junction, where the earthquake centre was, we turned left onto Highway 69 driving through dairy country in a relatively wide fertile valley between the Paparoa Range to the west and the Brunner Range to the west to reach Reefton, the first town in NZ to have electricity from a hydro electric power station in 1888.

The clear weather we started out with in Nelson had given away to passing showers and we decided that because we had explored Reefton on a past trip and we wanted to stay dry we would motor on.

Another 30km on at Ikamatua and we made the decision to motor down the western side of the Grey River giving us the chance to have a quick look at the ‘Formerly ‘Blackball Hilton Hotel built in 1910.And as we had hoped the hotel hadn’t changed since our last visit (can’t recall just how many years ago that was) and in fact might have had a bit of a spruce up with a fresh coat of paint.

In the 1990’s the hotel ran into trouble with the owners of the worldwide Hilton brand who clearly didn’t want an aged pub in the backwater of Blackball to carry the name Hilton and threatened legal action. This was overcome by placing the word ‘Formerly’ in the pubs name and the threat went away. Interestingly the pub is located opposite Hilton Street which had been named for one of the directors of the Blackball Coal Company who were major employers. The town was also credited as the place where unionism was born in NZ.

A further short distance on and we crossed the Grey River near its outlet to the Tasman Sea at the coast’s largest town of Greymouth and not long soon after having completed the journey with the beach on our right we reached Hokitika and our stay for the night.

Our comfortable room on the first floor faced out to the beach and Tasman Sea and it was restful after the drive to be sitting in comfy chairs watching the sea pound in just across the road as well as taking in a stunning sunset.

Now our last decision for the day was where to have the celebratory birthday dinner, hotel restaurant or a restaurant in the town of which there seemed to be numerous options.

We opted for Stumpers which was virtually across the road and although we did have to wait for 10 minutes or so for a table to become free in the well supported restaurant the short wait was worthwhile for the tasty lamb rack that the birthday girl chose while I had the chicken schnitzel which also had tasty flavour. All this topped off with a couple of small bottles of Lindauer Brut and we were ready to call it a day.

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