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Published: February 23rd 2010
With the softest of warm breezes just touching my cheek and the glow of the late afternoon sun warming my back I could be the only person in the world. I cannot hear anything of man about me. There is a small outburst from some distant birds and the hum of insects is a constant all around. I sit silently absorbed by the view. There is a soft plop, schluk, plop behind me. Foot falls quietly approach. I do not need to turn for I recognise the sound - it is the footfall of a duck crossing the gravel road. New Zealand - a place where you can hear ducks walk!
Although less than a fortnight here my feelings are ambivalent. On the one hand I am totally in love with New Zealand - the beauty, the grandeur and the sheer natural splendour of the South Island ensure this. On the other hand I am alternatively enchanted and irritated by the people I have met and the towns we have visited.
Christchurch ...Christchurch is so English it is as if it is a set on stage for An English farce or Home and Garden magazine. It is an English
Christchurch Cathedral
What does this cathedral and my house have in common?
They were both built in 1881village coated with water sugar icing. I find it hard to view Christchurch as a real place. After 2 days it was getting a little on my nerves. Everything was so neat and tidy and pretty and perfect.
I have been asked how I could possibly describe Christchurch as “too pretty” and I can understand how it seems odd, but seriously after a bit you want to wear green and purple and dye your hair pink and walk barefoot dropping little bits of litter, smoking indoors and being a a tiny bit rude just because you can! And I do not think I am the only person to react like this either. Christchurch, in the time we have been in New Zealand - 12 days in all - has had 3 murders take place! That is a lot for a small city, don’t you think?
It was wet and cold when we arrived and we knew we didn’t have the clothes we needed to keep dry or even a little bit warm. And I couldn’t imagine approaching a local and asking if I could borrow some of their clothes. They would think I was odd and probably say
no - this meant we had to buy something but it was all so expensive. We resigned ourselves to being wet and cold.
On the way back to the hostel I spy a Camping and Caravan shop so we nipped in there. At first no one in sight at all, but I spotted some waterproofs on Sale upstairs and clambered up the wooden stairs. Before Tim could join me a bluff and outdoorsy woman dressed in baggy bottle green trousers and shapeless grey tracksuit top appeared and barked a greeting freezing him on the spot.
In the meantime I had found a salmon coloured waterproof in my size - very nice but I was uncertain if it would turn me orange. I really have to be careful with orange as this is what it does to me. I dashed downstairs, threw it over my shoulder and asked the woman if it turned me orange. She stared at me in horror and slightly backed away her eyes bulging somewhat - almost as if she had heard that women like me did exist but she had never met one before.
“What does it matter?” she said gruffly “As long
as it keeps you dry?”
“I expect it to keep me dry. It’s a waterproof - that’s a given. But I don’t want to be turned orange.”
She peered at me. “I don’t think it turns you orange” she eventually said. Suddenly her face lit up and she lumbered into the back of her shop returning with a hand mirror covered in a light film of dust. She gave it to me after having blown the dust away. We both peered intently at my mirrored image.
“I think its fine,” I announced. “I’ll take it.”
While Tim was buying a lime green waterproof I poked around the shop - it was full of camping gear and therefore stuff I had never seen before. I chatted happily to her about what I was seeing in her shop and how excited I was to be in New Zealand and that we were hiring a campervan so I would be doing this camping thing for the first time in my life and how exciting was that and her monosyllabic answers didn’t put me off in the least.
As Tim was paying her she suddenly turned to me and
Van Man
Our cheap little old van - was cheap because it is old. It is a Jucy Van!
If you want a cheap van this is the van but the man in the van is a one off! I got the deal of this man behind the wheel! burst out “Is there any colour I should never wear?” And then totally overcome she subsided into red silence.
I stared at her complexion for a bit and then answered “Yellow. Never wear yellow.”
I think we might have been friends if I had been staying in Christchurch for a bit longer.
Campervans are expensive in New Zealand and this can hamper you a little when travelling on a budget, but we found the best deal we could with Jucy Campervans. The vans are a little old - about 10 years old but they go. Tim insisted that this is what we get. I was a bit dubious when I viewed the red haired girl dressed in green that is painted on the sides - hmmm does this say serious camper I thought? But Tim and budget won in the end. Our van does go - it goes slowly. And with Tim driving it goes really, really slowly. I ask if I can drive sometimes.
“No.” Tim is firm in his refusal “She could not cope with a speed fiend behind the wheel.”
Before leaving the Jucy Rental offices I realise that we don’t have
a road atlas. The idea of spending money buying one appals but the sweet boy who has rented the van to us found one that previous people had left behind and gave it to us. We snailed our way south.
I am sitting outside the campervan on my camping chair viewing Lake Tekapo and although I have been looking at this lake from various angles for some hours now I am still completely astounded at the sapphire shades of the water. Having driven up from Timaru through some lovely country side watching the mountains come closer and start to enclose us we turned the corner of a grey and bronze mountain side to be visually assaulted by the lake ahead of us. Tim stopped the van and we leapt out, crossed the road and stared. I have never seen anything like it. It is truly beautiful. Cars and vans behind us stopped too and out of one car tumbled an excited red haired Australian woman. She took some photos and then bounded up to me followed by her quieter greying husband. She had to share her delight and I was happy to share it with her.
After a
really cold night trying hard to sleep amidst shivering and strange dreams woke up to a lovely day and set off for Mt Cook. Along the way we drove for some miles along Lake Pukaki. It is also that amazing blue which I have since discovered is because of floury sediment from the glacial water.
Which brings me to an absolute highlight in that we splashed out on a boat trip on Tasman Lake which has only formed in the last 27 years as a result of the Tasman Glacier retreating. Every year the lake grows as the glacier retreats and floating on the lake are icebergs - break aways from the glacier. The boat trip included taking us within about 500m of the face of the glacier - a rich brown face filled with sediment. Indeed if I hadn’t known it was a glacier I would have thought it to be a rock face. You cannot go closer because of the danger of icebergs suddenly erupting from the glacial shelf below the water. And in addition to this wonder we were told of the Dead Ice that runs a at least 100m into the mountain that the lake
Tasman Lake Iceberg
Icebergs break free of the Tasman Glacier and float in the newly formed Tasman Lake - only about 30 years old! nestles against and about 200m below the mountain - dead ice because although once it was part of the glacier it no longer is attached in any way. It is a frozen mass of ice buried within the mountain and you can hear it cracking and see rocks falling as it moves. I cannot tell you how wonderful this was to experience.
Every day so far in NZ has been so totally different. The landscape we drove and walked through today was barren - this is because as the glacier has retreated from the previous ice age it has dropped rocks and sediment in the earth it flattened. About 6m of rain falls a year and drains straight through this into the soil below creating underground streams and rivers some of which emerge later into the lakes.
Camping - now that is a strange set up isn’t it. I am determined to embrace the experience but it might be a “one off” thing. The van is small and pieces of jigsaw puzzle make the bed. If you don’t get the pieces together properly then the bed collapses. Actually it is Tim’s side of the bed that caves in.
I still find it funny every time that happens and it not my fault - I am putting the bits together just as he says to.
Then you have to try to put the bottom sheet on with a bed that is delicately put together and jammed against three sides of the van - so how do you tuck the sheet? In amongst this I have managed to hurt my right wrist so am a little handicapped. We manage as a team to work it out every night except the night that the Roaring 40’s decided to go for it full scale. The van was rocking to the extent I thought it might fall on its side and Tim was in the warm yellow glowing kitchen chatting happily away while I - I put together the jigsaw puzzle and fought the wind vigorously to firstly open out the sheet and then get it on the bed
all on my own. As I tucked one bit in the wind ripped out another bit. At one point I was lying flat on the bed grasping the sheet and vowing that oh yes I am going to win this oh yes indeed
At This Moment
There is no person in the world richer than I - this view, this peace, this beauty. I am so sod off wind.
You may be asking why I didn’t close the doors of the van - BECAUSE IF YOU CLOSE THE DOORS OF THE VAN YOU CANNOT MAKE THE BED. Tim returned from his happy chat to a totally exhausted but triumphant wife. Who yet again got the giggles when the top end of his side of the bed gradually subsided when he lay down to sleep.
I understand from a hardy New Zealander that I was chatting to that what we are doing isn’t “real” camping. Well what is it then? Every night we sleep in a CAMP site. I refuse to accept this isn’t the real deal.
I have a lot to say about showers too. Having now used a huge variety of campsite showers I believe I can put together the perfect design. I may make a new career out of this - I will call my business Showers Have IT. I just need a sponsor.
All change again! We drove through some really beautiful countryside - this may be a recurring theme here - and stopped at Maori rock drawings. Most of them have been removed - by
The glacier retreats
leaving evidence of its presence behind it. Europeans in the 19th and early 20th century. Such damage is heart breaking but a few faint drawings remain for us to peer at and although not totally understanding them we have a sense of history preserved in its rightful place.
From there we drive on until we come to the Elephand Rocks. They are in the Narnia film and are Aslan’s Base Camp. I recognise them by the surrounding landscape before we even see the sign. They are on private land but the farmer allows people to walk through the field to look. Now this is an interesting sensation. I am torn in interest and excitement between their inherent qualities for the landscape and features that within nature they are and for the fact that I recognise rocks and angles from the film. I can visualise the cast walking the area both within the film and as it is being set and paced out. What a strange sensation it is.
I wish I had brought my “O” level Geography teacher with me on this trip. I have so many questions about the landscape and the formations and no one to answer them. Some I work out dragging
my “O” level memories to the surface, some I put together from Tourist Infomation, but most of the time I remain frustrated at my lack of knowledge.
Driving along to Dunedin we saw a sign for the Moeraki Boulders which Tim had heard about so we turned off the highway and went to have a look. You have to walk a short way along the beach and from a distance they don’t look much at all. In fact we were a bit superior and scathing but hey mud on our faces! Up close - completely fascinating. They are almost perfect balls of stone, cracked and filled with another type of stone and even just looking at them you would swear they are hollow inside - which we discovered as we explored that they are! They are fabulous.
In Dunedin we had two rather interesting encounters.
We fell into conversation with a man by chance who opened with the usual question.
“So where are you from?”
That answer we give is most often “England” but sometimes if the mood takes us then we will explain that we are originally from Zimbabwe but have been living in
Time for tea, dear?
Part of the fun is stopping where you like for a cuppa! the UK for nearly 25 years which we did on this occasion. He was most interested and seemed to have some knowledge of our history.
“So,” he said “It was Rhodesia that you grew up in then?”
We nodded.
“Yis, I was very anti Rhodesia in my youth. I was very very left wing.”
“Most people were pretty anti us,” we said.
“But life has made me change. I remember the day I got angry and changed to be right wing. There was this refugee” (only he didn’t use that term and I am not going to repeat what he did in fact say as it shocked us both into blinking silently at him).
I actually thought I had misheard but he repeated the term later on without a qualm.
“There was this refugee and he was being housed and fed and mentored but he complained about the type of rice he was being given to eat. I was so angry as it was my money and my hard work that was giving him all that he needed to get going in this new society here in New Zealand, that at that moment
I changed.”
I could see he was angry and upset. But idealists seem expect gratitude. If you are going to care for people it has to be knowing that there are warts. Caring is hard work not warm feelings. But even so we weren’t out to comment but to hear his thought so we just listened.
“So that is why I have changed. I’m glad you’re from Zimbabwe though and not South Africa,” he said.
“Why is that?” I asked him
“I hate white South Africans. Ignorant bigoted racists.”
Pluck the beam out of your own eye sprang to mind but I held my tongue.
Later on that day we again fell into conversation with a man in a jewellery shop and in amongst talking told him that we had hired a campervan to tour New Zealand.
Now let me tell you about Otago and the Campervan - they hate us. There is a political platform based on ridding Otago of the CAMPERVAN. The local newspapers are full of it - never mind the poor woman missing and murdered in Christchurch - what are the people of Otago going to do to rid
themself of the scourge that drives their highways?
At our confession he gave a sharp intake of breath! Damn - he must belong to the anti campervan group. Before he could say anything I said “Don’t diss us - we provide you with an income. I mean look at it - we’ve just bought some jewellery from you.”
He paused. Then he uttered these words. “We don’t have a problem with people like you. We have a problem with the Neanderthals that rent Jucy vans and the like.”
Tim and I were dead silent.
“There should be psychological testing at immigration,” he said “ to weed out the sort of people that hire a Jucy. Not your sort”
It was time to leave. It was time to leave Dunedin.
As we turned into the street Tim and I giggled rib achingly.
“Come on Neanderthal,” I said “Let’s get back to our van.”
“Yeah,” said Tim “And hightail it out of Otago.”
.
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Richard
non-member comment
Very Nice
Good one, Catherine. Your descriptions don't need the pictures but they did help. Love, Big Brother.