Kiwi Tracks (8 page)

I disembark from the catamaran with decidedly unsteady legs and a queasy stomach. Despite being in no shape to hitchhike, I am barely onto the road with my thumb tentatively stuck out before a black Holden sedan skids to a halt beside me. I study my thumb with amazement. The Holden has darkened windows, fat low-profile tyres, and what looks vaguely like a gurgling chrome toilet seat sticking out of the bonnet. The jacked-up rear-end of the car growls and sputters outrageously. I cram my pack into the back before climbing into the fleece-covered bucket seat, where I sit as if embraced by a convulsing sheep in its death-throes. The driver is so young he barely has peach-fuzz gracing his upper lip. I doubt if he has ever shaved. This quivering mobile steel contraption is his mechanical steed, his throbbing pride and joy, his proof of rites of passage. A pair of fluffy dice dance from the rear-view mirror as we shudder off the shoulder, kicking up a rooster-tail of gravel. We accelerate down Dee Street a lot faster than the twin-engine Islander airplane had managed at take-off. This time it is the Holden defying the law of gravity by remaining on the ground.

We soon find ourselves behind a police car with flashing lights, following two halves of a house, each dwarfing a low-bed tractor-trailer. The concept of ‘home-delivery’ is given a whole new meaning. We vibrate impatiently behind the house before we finally pass with a squeal of tyres and a rumble like thunder. My stomach is mimicking the furry dice dancing from the mirror and just when I think I am getting used to the Mad Max ride, I puke
violently into my lap. Vomit puddles into the sheepskin under my groin. The driver pulls over to let me off.

Abandoned in the middle of nowhere, I clean up as best I can. A Good Samaritan soon pulls up alongside, dressed in white from head to toe. He opens the boot of his car automatically from the driver’s seat and I hoist my pack inside. When I jump into the front seat he says: ‘Never do that. If I had been a Bad Man, I could have driven off with your pack.’

‘Well, if I had been a Suspicious Man, I could have taken your Car Licence Number as you drove off and then I would have told the Police.’

‘True.’

He relates the minutest details of his life story to the accompaniment of proselytising gospel tunes on the tape deck. I try to ignore the smell of my crotch. My next ride is from a tired but gigantic sheep shearer who says absolutely nothing, not a word, but plays the same gospel as the Good Samaritan. We pass someone with a backpack walking on the shoulder of the road, head down. I guess it is the Englishman on his way up to Cape Reinga. Contrary to my expectations, he looks perfectly sane.

I am dropped off on the outskirts of a small settlement, but before I can stick my thumb out again, the air brakes of a double tractor-trailer snort and gasp. It pulls over on the shoulder, engulfing me in a cloud of dust. The driver jumps out of the cab wearing an oversized baggy jumper and apparently not much else over bare legs. I am apprehensive about his intentions until he helps lift my pack into the interior of the trailer, revealing a tiny pair of stubbies, rugby shorts.

An hour later he lets me out at a fork in the road. A driver stops his car to ask if I would be interested in delivering his sedan to Christchurch. ‘I’ll pay the petrol and you can take two or three days to deliver it if you wanted.’ I decline, as I’m not heading back to Christchurch just yet, but I have to wonder at the trusting nature of these people. Within minutes, another ride picks me up.

I could be tempted to settle in this hospitable, bucolic corner tucked away from the rest of the world. Even while I talk with the
driver, I cannot take my eyes off the spectacle of a world so incredibly pure and unspoiled. I want to saturate my senses with the feel of this peaceful place. The sparse, small frontier settlements of rectangular bungalows on either side of the road do not have the charm of old European villages and towns, but they are clean, appear safe and fit the clich�d description of New Zealand. It is like an innocent Midwest North America, or Britain – at a stretch of the imagination – fifty years ago. A man walking his dog waves as we drive by. I smile and wave back, as though I knew him.

A little old lady stops to give me a ride. Like the rest, she asks how I like New Zealand and when I respond positively she invites me home for tea in Te Anau. After pavlova – meringue with fruit and cream piled on top – she drives me to a backpackers lodge. I walk to the supermarket under low-slung black clouds threatening to rain or snow, and ask the manager if the grocery bag I mislaid a couple of weeks ago was ever returned. She remembers me and smiles. ‘Ah yeah, we got it back. The person behind you brought it in. No worries.’

At a pub that night, I recognise the tall muscular Maori, nodding in time to the beat of the local band. ‘You were the guy who was behind me in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago,’ I yell over the awful noise blasting out of speakers the size of a vertically mounted DOC bunk bed. ‘I think you accidentally took one of my bags of groceries.’ He barely notices me. ‘Thanks for taking the bag back,’ I bleat, looking up at him.

He glances down at my earnest upturned face. ‘No dramas, mate,’ he says. He seems unsure why I would bother to thank him for his honesty, which is normal here, even if it isn’t in the rest of the world. As we watch the band render their barely recognisable imitation of a Beatles song, he says: ‘Going off in here tonight.’

‘Yuh, you can say that again,’ I reply, flubbing the ‘yeah’ yet again. I shrug my shoulders in approximate time to the tune, attempting to look cool, like one of the boys. The music is more than just going off though, it’s rancid.

‘Yeah, choice group,’ he adds, totally confusing me.

Return to beginning of chapter

   
QUEENSTOWN – WANAKA – GREYMOUTH – CHRISTCHURCH
   
AKAROA
   
CHRISTCHURCH –KAIKOURA–NELSON
   
ABEL TASMAN NATIONAL PARK
   
HEAPHY TRACK
   
CHRISTMAS DAY, KARAMEA
   
BOXING DAY, WESTPORT
   
NELSON LAKES NATIONAL PARK

‘
Cool
,’ the young Scot replies, when I tell him I am headed for Queenstown. ‘So are we. Throw your pack in the back seat.’

I crawl in beside my pack, which takes up most of the room. ‘Queenstown is fantastic,’ he adds, as we continue down the highway. His girlfriend sits up front with him. They look like teenagers, although he must be at least twenty. Must be their sun-protected complexions with all the rain back home. In New Zealand everyone looks older than they really are. Must be the sun and the hole in the ozone layer.

‘That’s where they invented bungee jumping,’ he continues with enthusiasm. ‘Cool place. You can do anything there. Go bungee jumping off the biggest jumps, go on jet-boat rides, dirt biking, parachuting, paragliding, river-boarding, skydiving, hang-gliding, kayaking, canoeing, horse riding. Full-on place.’ He uses the Kiwi vernacular, having picked it up, he tells me, during the six months they have been driving around the country in their Holden. ‘Tried to get a job in Queenstown but everyone wants a job there. Queenstown has it all. Ever been bungee jumping?’ he asks, lighting up a cigarette. I have to concentrate to understand his broad Scottish dialect.

Distracted, I reply, ‘Uh-uh.’ I continue to admire the perfect scenery, while sticking my nose out the open side window to get
a whiff of fresh air. It doesn’t get much more picturesque than this anywhere in the world.

‘You should. You’d like it.’ His head bobs in synchrony to the radio tunes. ‘It’s cool.’

‘Actually, I would like it about as much as I would enjoy dodging highway traffic during rush hour. Not a lot of skill involved in having someone tie a giant rubber band around your ankles and push you off a big drop.’ I can be such an amenable guy but sometimes little twerps like this start wagging my tongue for me.

‘Tried parachuting then?’ he asks, undeterred.

‘BTDT,’ I reply dismissively.

‘What?’ he asks.

‘Been there, done that.’

‘How about jet boating?’ he persists.

‘Too wilderness intrusive,’ I respond. The jet boat, invented in New Zealand, is unique in that it dispenses with propellers. Unfortunately, the impellers built into the hull provide powered boats with shallower draft. Practical as that may be, it gives jet boats greater access up otherwise non-navigable rivers, into what would normally be impenetrable wilderness regions. Great when you are trying to ‘tame’ the bush, but not so great when you are trying to conserve it.

‘Should try rafting then. That’s not wilderness intrusive.’

‘I used to own a rafting company in Norway, on the Sjoa River.’ That’s also about as beautiful a setting as you could ever hope to find. I’d be hard put to choose between the Sjoa and here for scenic beauty.

‘You don’t any more?’

‘Every time there was a drowning, the bookings went up. Didn’t like the mentality of the clients. Bunch of yahoos.’ At his age I was rafting and doing a lot more foolish things too.

‘You had drownings?’ He turns around, eyes wide, as if this were an inconceivable consequence of rafting.

‘Every summer.’ At least he is quiet after that. I stare out the window at the landscape. To compensate for my testiness, I fill
his car up with petrol when we get to Queenstown. I love the enthusiasm of younger travellers; their lives are in front of them and they’re excited about everything. I hate it when I start acting and talking like a killjoy.

Queenstown is the kind of party place that fills up on Friday and Saturday nights and empties just as quickly on Sundays. Arriving on a relatively subdued Sunday afternoon, I walk up to the gondola on the mountain overlooking the town. Despite the beautiful setting, the ‘full-on’ tourism of Queenstown has destroyed whatever authentic New Zealand atmosphere there might once have been. The commercialism has little appeal for me, despite the build-up given by the Scottish couple during the drive up here. With all the businesses vying for the tourists’ dollars I can’t help but feel uncomfortably like a punter, and I decide to continue on to Wanaka tomorrow.

A casualty from the party weekend walks up the path at a snail’s pace in front of me. As I pass, I stop practising saying ‘cool’ with a hard ‘kuh’ and ask her: ‘What’s there to do in Queenstown?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I arrived here on Friday night to party, and this is the first time I’ve been outside since then.’ Although she is young, she has dark rings under her eyes. ‘Still got a hangover,’ she adds proudly.

She has what I detect is a Scandinavian intonation. Sometimes I amaze myself at how quickly I can recognise foreign accents. Often I can guess within a couple of spoken words

‘Kuh-ool,’ I say. ‘You’re Danish, right?’

‘Canadian,’ she replies.

The Wanaka backpackers lodge reflects the tone of this settlement, which is downright sleepy compared to Queenstown. Befitting the more laid-back atmosphere of the place, classical music plays softly as backpackers play chess or read. I set off early in the morning for Mount Roy, which towers solitary on the other side of the lake. In a setting like this, it is impossible not to
fantasise what it would be like to live here permanently. I could easily be tempted to settle in Wanaka, a community in a setting as beautiful as Queenstown’s, but still unspoilt by mass tourism and rabid urban development.

From the summit of Mount Roy, I peer through my camera at panoramic views of tiny sheep in green fields, a turquoise-blue lake and snow-clad mountains. By twisting the polarised filter to punch out the sky and paint the lake a darker blue, I can saturate the colours by removing the extraneous reflections.

It takes me most of the day to walk all the way around the lake to the top of Mount Roy and back to the backpackers. My mind is full of thoughts, memories triggered by the cool air and the scenery. The hike reminds me of walking in the mountains of Norway some months ago. On my last day in Norway and our last day together, Kirsten and I walked up a familiar valley, well above the tree line. It was one of those rare September days, the weather stable, the sky blue; although it was cold, the sun was strong enough to warm us in its direct light.

Already the grass and bracken had turned rusty autumn colours. We both knew that this time tomorrow, I would be gone. I wanted to climb one last peak. With the intensity of the condemned we hiked to the summit, where we sat huddled together staring out over the surrounding mountains and valleys. Only the fading September sun kept us warm. As it dropped in the sky, the shadows crept up the hillsides. Then the sun disappeared behind the mountains, casting us in its shadow. Once again, the familiar deep-rooted fear of an impending Norwegian winter cast its icy tentacles into the depths of my being.

I held Kirsten tightly, knowing that tomorrow I would not be able to hold her any more. As I scrunched up my eyes, the tears I had successfully been holding back squeezed out, dampening her hair. She started crying too, great hulking sobs. The sound carried far down the valley.

In the morning, when I roll up to pay for the overnight accommodation, the owner of the backpackers says: ‘You look terrible. You going to travel feeling like that?’

I nod. It’s hard to know if am really sick or whether I’m just so psychologically down that I feel like an invalid. LONELY GUY is emblazoned on my forehead again – and I don’t have a sense of humour about it today.

‘God loves a trier,’ she says, shaking her head.

I sleep on the bus most of the way to Franz Josef Glacier on the West Coast. I have a burning fever, my joints hurt, and it feels as if my eyeballs are being pushed out of their sockets. It could be psychosomatic, but I am sweating despite feeling cold and shivering uncontrollably. Everyone avoids me as if I had the plague, just when I could do with some TLC. I have a cold, probably the flu, but I worry this may be a recurring bout of malaria. I had planned to walk up the glacier as soon as we arrived in Franz Josef but I feel too sick to manage that. The idea of a glacier extending down through rainforest almost to sea level had seemed incredibly appealing when I read about it. But now all I want to do is get into bed.

At a hostel in Franz Josef, most of the backpackers sit hypnotised in front of a television, watching
Seinfeld
. Why come all this way and then watch TV shows from home? The owners of the hostel must love the television. Keeps their clients nice and docile. I watch for a few minutes and find myself even more alienated from my fellow humans. Never having owned a television, I find it hard to understand these sitcoms. Sometimes I think I must be a Martian, unable to relate to a vast component of earthlings’ lives. I feel as strongly about television as I do about recreational drugs. It can be such a waste of human lives, especially young ones. I catch myself again, being crabby, antisocial, although it can hardly be social to sit with a bunch of uncommunicative backpackers watching television. I crash on a bed and dejectedly study the poem pasted on the back of the bedroom door.

Hostel Life

Well, I’ve roamed the world, over many a day,

And a hostel’s the place I generally stay.

Now there’s some things about them that’s always the same,

It’s a world-wide conspiracy, that’s what I claim.

’Cause there’s always one who stays out till three,

Then turns on the lights ’cause he cannot see.

He smells like a pub, and he’s usually drunk,

And he steps on your arm when he climbs in his bunk.

And then there’s the one who leaves pots in the sink,

And when they run out, it’s your milk that they drink.

They sprawl on the sofas so there’s nowhere to sit.

Consideration? Hell, they don’t give a … !

And the worst ones of all, they’re really a drag,

Keep every bloody item in a different plastic bag.

Now I’ve spoken with others, and they all feel the same,

We’re all considerate and we are not to blame.

So who is this group which disrupts hostel life?

Who stirs us from dreams and causes such strife?

Now I’m not paranoid, but it’s a thought that I’ve had,

They’re all on the payrolls of our mums and our dads.

They follow us around wherever we roam,

Making life miserable so we will all go home.

But the last laugh’s on our loved ones,

And that is for sure,

Because as for the travel bug,

There is no real cure.

They can torment us and tease us,

But when all’s said and done,

In spite of it all, we’re still having fun.

Cathy ’90

BC, Canada

I feel sick. And empty. And I’m not having fun at all.