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Published: January 5th 2011
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The Clyde Dam
The dam that drowned Cromwell I checked out of my Premium Room With Lake View (at $149 NZ, the most expensive room I expect to be staying in on my trip) and thankfully bade farewell to the Internetless YHA Queenstown. Promptly at 11:45, the bus hired by Track and Trail Taieri showed up to take me to Pukerangi to meet the train.
It was a Connexions bus, and it was responsible for getting a lot of people to a lot of different places in Central Otago. By the time we stopped at the airport, it was nearly full. I had had a double seat to myself up until that point, but when I saw two people about to get on, I knew I had to move, so I went up to the only two seats left, both singletons next to the driver and hard to get to. You had to scramble over a sort of hump, perhaps the forward wheelbase.
I got into the nearer of these two, and the driver suggested that I come up to the front one, which offered more legroom. I did. My reward for moving was that the driver talked to me throughout the journey, telling me stories
about almost everything we passed. Some of them I had heard already from the Intercity driver, but others I hadn't.
The bus dropped me and two other people -- all of us bound for the Taieri Narrow-Gauge Railway -- at Cromwell. I was glad to see it again, even if only for a minute or two. Our new bus was already waiting for us, and our luggage was loaded on board.
The new bus was three times the size of the old one, but someone had misjudged as we were the only passengers. Our bus followed the course of the old rail line, which is now a Rails-to-Trails project;
part of it having been submerged anyhow by the Clyde Dam project that drowned Cromwell.
We stopped for a photo op at the Clyde Dam itself, and then for a rest stop in Ranfurly. It was a long journey, nearly five hours by bus. The last six miles of it was on a one-lane road, half gravel, half poorly asphalted.
The train was over an hour late. Our driver explained that there had been not one but two cruise ships in town that day, and that the
Model Jail at Ranfurly
Really a model. It's playhouse-sized. cruise ships' excursions always took priority over the land trip as those passengers were on to-the-minute timetables.
Train seating was in groups of four; with the four seats surrounding a table. The three of us who had come from Queenstown shared a table. I had started to get to know the two others on the bus, but on the train we really started talking to each other. They were Japanese, Ikumi and her daughter Mei, and they wanted to practice their English.
Mei spoke English fairly well, at least as well as I speak Latin. She had to look words up in her dictionary at times, and she sometimes lapsed into Japanese word order, but her pronunciation was excellent. Her mother was less fluent, but friendly. They were from Tokyo. We drew maps; I showed them where West Virginia was and they showed me where Tokyo was.
My own Japanese of course deserted me completely; the only words I could think of, unprompted, were random things like "konnichiwa" and "sempai" and "gambatte" and "arigato." This was particularly unfortunate since their English comprehension wasn't too good, and at one point the bus driver asked me whether by any
chance I spoke Japanese. He had just tried to tell us that the train sometimes went to Middlemarch, farther up the line, and they had misunderstood and thought we were going to Middlemarch. They had called their travel agent in alarm and told him that they had gotten onto the wrong bus, and the agent had called the driver to ask him to reassure them. After that the driver did not dare to say anything else about the route that was not strictly necessary.
He told me some of the commentary he would have given, as we sat and waited for the train together.
We had passed the site of one of New Zealand's two great train disasters, at Hyde. A train had missed the track there back in the 1940's.
Anyhow, with pictures and English, we established that I was disabled and did not work for pay but volunteered as a Latin teacher, and that my wonderful husband Jim worked as a computer technician. Ikumi was a kindergarten teacher, and Mei was studying occupational therapy.
After we got off the train, our driver (the same one; he'd come with us on the train) led the three
of us to another bus and loaded our luggage onto it. He had trouble finding the keys to the bus, and to my questions he replied that not only was this not the usual bus that was there, but he was not its usual driver. The man who would normally have driven it had been diagnosed quite unexpectedly with terminal lung cancer on Christmas Day, and he had called up his boss and said, "I quit." So this driver had come back from holiday to fill in.
The keys finally turned up, hidden under some paperwork, and we soon got to the Kiwi's Nest. We stopped outside the Kiwi's Nest -- and that's where we stayed for the next twenty minutes. The bus door simply would not open. The driver tried everything, from delicate adjustments to something in a wall panel to a good hard boot to the door's middle. He called the Kiwi's Nest front desk and asked them to come out and try to open the door from the outside, and they had no luck either.
Finally he called his dispatcher, and the dispatcher called a mechanic. Just as the mechanic got there, the Kiwi's Nest people came out to see why I hadn't come in, and one of them had the idea of pushing the CLOSE button on the outside of the door, rather than the OPEN button. Sure enough, it was jammed on. The door popped open just as the mechanic was getting out of his car to come over.
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