Advertisement
Published: December 5th 2010
The Darrans 01
The Darran Mountains from Key SummitHi patient reader,
I'm now typing from the lakefront in Te Anau.
Apologies for what comes across as a rather cryptic entry last night.
I've been scribbling my thoughts on the whole Greenstone experience and here they come:
Day 1:
Early transport from Queenstown to Te Anau and then on to The Divide. Shared transport from Te Anau with a Kiwi girl and her French boyfriend who were on the way to camp all the way over the alpine passes of the Routeburn. He was already describing his steak at the end of the walk.
Was great to be back in he familiar environs of the Milford Road and arriving at the Divide shelter did make me feel like I was at he beginning of something. Have been worrying about how my shoulder (post clavical break back in May) would hold up to carrying a big pack and the pain did arrive but nothing unusual. What is weird is the numb, pins-and-needles type arm I got every hour or so. Dropped the pack behind a tree and scooted up to Key Summit, from whence awesome views of the Darran mountains. Marched on the Howden hut (on the Routeburn) and paused for lunch among the sand flies by the lake. A troupe of loud americans appeared all bellowing inanities at each other so I swiftly moved on. A couple of hours in and I was under the McKellar saddle - which had been my first challenged four years ago. Strangely wonderful to be back. Another hour and I was cooling my feet in lake McKellar, the fish jumping in the sunshine, snowy peakes rising all around me. I notched that feeling as another memory to be cherished on one's death bed - things to be alive for.
McKellar hut was fine - long drop acceptable and not too covered in sandflies (though the first one did get be on the side of my big toe before I killed it and I now have a disgusting pustule where she left something behind my body doesn't like).
Day 2: (warning - he gets serious in a bit)
I walked through the bush, paused to rest my pack on a sturdy log. I listened to the hypnotic sounds around me. The birds sang and chirped, the wind whistled through the trees, the river rumbled by, the trees creaked with life. A paradisal scene. A repeated thought sprung - how lucky I am to be here, to hear this, to see this.
My european eyes and ears tell me this place is paradisal and alive. They are wrong, very wrong. You see, this bush is silent now, these trees are empty.
There are Maori elders alive today who will tell you the bush went silent in the 1930s. When Cook first sailed past the shores of fiordland, a loud din of bird sounds carried out hundreds of feet across the water. The bush was packed with life and sounds of every kind. I see, hear, breathe in this place now and it feels alive to me. But what I hear, what I see is only the remaining few. This place, to my european eyes so alive is, to the knowledgeable eye, empty.
The Moa have gone and along with them so many more. The list of extinct species that used to live here, and only here, is shamefully long. There's no easy way of defending these species from us. There are species here such as the kakapo and the takahe whose plight is so desperate, the entire species have been moved to offshore islands in the hope they can survive and breed there. Away from man and his invasive friends. Man (save for the odd warden to us away) is not allowed on those islands - its the only way these beautiful birds have a chance - keep us away from them.
I see old photos of explorers, holiday-makers, skiers, hunters from the 30, smiling and frolicking in the bush. The images look sinister now.
Bear with me for a moment while I digress. I am not religious but there is a work of literature called the bible which has been the root of inspiration for billions (but then Harry Potter is currently claiming to be having that effect) and in it is a character who is famed for being compassionate, forgiving. Under much duress and at the hands of much cruelty, this character shows his compassion: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Now, if I think back to those explorers, surveyors, miners, etc from yesteryear, can I say the same? Not really, but perhaps we could offer them the Nicholas Parsons (benefit of the doubt) and say do have that defence - they knew not what they did...perhaps.
Now, what about me? What about you? Species extinction is happening now. As I type, the last instance of a species is passing away somewhere on this planet. Perhaps here, perhaps Madagascar, or Borneo, or Brasil, or Scotland. And what do I do? I sit here writing about it. What do you do? You sit there reading about it (assuming you haven't given up by now). What do we all do? We ignore it.
Can we ever be forgiven? No. We know what we do, we know what is happening. To sit idly by and watch species disappear forever is unforgivable.
The giant Moa walked where I sat, ranged these lands. It stood ten feet tall - a strange, outsized version of a Kiwi with a long neck but not quite as ridiculous a beak. It's not here now. It's not anywhere. It will never be anywhere again. It's gone. Forever. We did that - we killed every last one of them. Extinction. We're the only species ever to understand the meaning of that term, which means we're the only ones who can consciously do something about it. We're the first species to need a term for it.
We're doing this again and again right now. As of this year, we think another New Zealand gecko may be gone. That and a dozen more species that were here only a few years ago. I've written before of the mischievous characters that are the Kea - the world's only alpine parrot. Their numbers are diminishing now. Nobody is quite sure why (but see later), but we do know there's a lot more of us about up here where they live. That's worth noting. They live up here. In the southern alps of South Island, New Zealand. They don't live anywhere else. We're everywhere - we've got a whole planet to roam in. Keas cannot go anywhere else - this, this gorgeous alpine place, is all they have.
So now I find myself steeped in the familiar species guilt of being human. I can't help being human of course, and neither can you. The question is how can we make this errant species of us behave better?
The DOC here are trying their hardest. They maintain a perimeter of rat & stoat traps around areas known to be the last remaining habitat of endemic species like the Takahe. NZ has a new government now. Like many others, this new government has cost-cutting at the heart of its plans. It has already highlighted DOC as a costly area that needs trimming. We pay to use the huts up here, we contribute by being here but what we pay doesn't even cover the cost of the maintenance of the huts we stay in. So what happens when DOC loses its funding? Do we just let the stoats, rats, and possums have the last few eggs, the last few chicks of the last few breeding pairs of whichever species they choose?
I wrote the above on day two of the Greenstone tramp. The Greenstone valley is famed the world over for the purity of its waters, the quality of its fish. The people I shared the huts with were all there to fish (apart from Manu, the warden). They were catching trout - rainbow trout and brown trout. These are introduced fish, known here as "the possum of the rivers" due to the amount they eat. They eat so much that the native species are dying out, literally starving to extinction. The upper reaches of the valley are lush and heavily forested with native "beech" (the tree has nothing to do with actual beech trees, the european just couldn't be bothered to learn the Maori name or come up with a new one). The lower reaches of the valley are now sparsely forested and the land around the river is used for grazing sheep and cattle. Sheep poo, cattle poo, and the antibiotics we fill the animal stock with are seeping into the waterways. Humans camp near the river - their faecal matter pollutes the water. Manu (a Maori name meaning 'bird' or 'birds') - the warden who spends two weeks out of every three every spring, summer, and autumn up in these huts no longer drinks from the river - he doesn't trust what the humans and their livestock are doing to it. It's a miracle the water is still as clear as it appears but this will not last.
And now we discover, only yesterday, footage of a stoat killing a pair of young Kea in their nest. I am not making this up - the clip is on YouTube if you have the stomach to watch it...it is truly horrific. We also now have the first footage of a possum killing a Kea chick - not only are they eating all the vegetation, they've decided birds make a good meal too.
And I'm afraid it gets even worse. The major island haven (Kapiti island) to which many of these desperately endangered species have been moved is no longer stoat-free. The first stoat has been found. Where there is one, there will be more.
It's enough to make one despair - almost. I find it hard to comprehend how many things are conspiring against the efforts to save these creatures, these lands. We must find a way to remove these predators - and, in many cases, I include man in that.
End of Day 2 did bring a fantastically welcome dip in the river and then we did eat one of the river possums (a rainbow trout Phil the cardiologist caught) that night in the company of Hamish (the plastic surgeon) and his daughter.
Phil: "So what type of surgeon is your dad Brodie?"
Brodie: "Breasts".
Phil: "There you go Cathy" (Cathy is Phil's wife)
(it's been a long trek for those two...)
Day 3:
I walked out along the shores of the gorgeous river, the majesty of the scenery dulled only by the occasional presence of livestock which I couldn't help but scowl at.
A cold beer in Glenorchy with Cathy & Phil (Zimbabweans who now live in Sydney) and then met up with the Kiwi girl and steak-chasing Frenchman on the transport back to Queenstown.
Some good things to come from the tramp - I created a new character and have outlined a unusual type of reference book. Incredibly creative this brain thing of mine - I can't keep up with it at the mo. Whenever I give it time to itself (walking is best), it runs away with itself and creates all sorts of marvellous things 😊 Now if only I could harness some of that and get it to finish anything.
---
So things are changed now. My balance has shifted. The guilt has grown. I'll be heading up to Gertrude Saddle tomorrow I think which is just a day trip. After that, I think I'll spend a couple of days on the Hollyford track and hope I find much less in the way of human invasion there.
Hope everyone back in the UK is surviving the freeze safely.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.369s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 18; qc: 54; dbt: 0.0901s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Rob
non-member comment
Sad
Hi Tak. Your entry left me a little sad, which is no doubt what was intended. The problem is that anything that Humans do always has a consequence, and its the consequences that are not obvious that come back to bite us in the arse. It could be argued that there wasn’t a body of knowledge at the time who could predict the long term consequences of introducing stoats, for instance, nor can we say what the consequences of some of our actions today may be in the future. That doesn’t excuse it, but since many more of us can now circumnavigate the globe, compared to even 50 years ago, doesn’t it suggest even that our new behaviour is going to have an important impact on the planet in the future? Is there an answer? I doubt it, since humans can’t help themselves. Our natural instinct is to enquire, think a bit, and then poke about with experiments to help us understand more about the world in which we live. Perhaps war does have a positive effect after all. At least they keeps the Human race occupied, and of course the numbers down.