The Ride West

I had a fresh start to the morning with no dollars for a hot shower and no one to ask at reception for change! Having been positively woken up we headed off towards Glacier country, driving along the windy road between Lake Hawea and Lake Wanaka with Mt Aspiring in the background to Makarora where there were the blue pools, a set of brilliant azure glacial meltwater pools. We walked over the rope bridge and watched a few people jumping off into the freezing cold pools below - not going to catch me doing that any time soon. Hugo said he had forgotten his trunks. To complete the aquatic theme we stopped off at Fantail falls, Gates of Haast and Thundercreek falls before it started bucketing down. As there was a weather warning, we decided to stop for the night and found the only campsite between Haast and Fox glacier, the Pine Grove motel. This was a pretty poor campsite that consisted of a concrete slab and the world's smallest kitchen; we got pretty cosy with 3 French guys who were also staying there.

The next morning we headed off towards the glaciers, however the heavy rainfall had not subsided, so all we saw as we drove past the (supposed) locations were walls of grey fog. Needless to say we didn't stop to go hiking. What we were not aware of at the time was that there were multiple landslips along the road between Haast and the Pine Grove motel due to the weather after we had left. Based on the news reports we read later that day, we worked out we were just 20 minutes and 40 minutes ahead of two of the landslides! Getting caught behind them would have been a bummer as this was the only road up the coast so we would have had to return and detour via Christchurch, but getting caught between them would have been significantly worse! While an exciting story, getting rescued by the NZ military did not feature on our itinerary.

Forging a path through the blanket of torrential rain, we scoured the lonely planet for indoor activities, finding only a replica plane in Hari Hari. We pulled up in the car park and scuttled to the small building (which was sheltered from the rain). It was a small one story building that looked like a shop front, with a replica plane and a mannequin of Guy Menzies, the first person to fly solo across the Tasman sea from Sydney to the west coast of NZ. He had prepared for his adventure for some time, but told the authorities and his family that he was flying from Sydney to Perth, for fear of not being granted permission. He did crash land upside down in Hari Hari, but success doesn't come without risk I suppose! He was only 21 years old at the time and did go on to fly in the Royal Air Force for Britain in WWII.

We walked back to the van full of facts and ready to continue to our next destination to discover that tragedy had struck: Hugo had left the lights on. Poor Moa’s battery was so old that it had gone flat in the time it took us to look at the plane. This was bad. Despite being at a ‘tourist destination’, we were practically in the middle of nowhere. Ironically there was a closed garage across the road advertising new car batteries, but only a notice on the door saying to ring a guy on his mobile in an emergency. The people who turned up to the car park were also tourists who had hired a car and therefore did not have jumper cables, and even if they did, we were faced with problem 2: we could not for the life of us find the battery. Usually it's under the hood next to the engine but Moa did not have a hood. After quite a while of Hugo standing in the pouring rain poking around for a seam or latch, while I sat inside googling where the engine was, we eventually figured out it was under the seats. After pulling them forward, we unveiled a little hatch, which unfortunately was partially blocked by the sink behind the driver's seat. I lifted the sink while Hugo wrestled the hatch off and voila, there it was, and only half an hour later! Just in time as well, as the next car we flagged down were a French couple who had jumper cables. He hooked us up, Moa turned over and we were up and running again. We thanked the French profusely before scooting on down the road. We won't be making that mistake again! (Foreshadowing alert…)

Next up on our coastal journey was the Bushman's centre, a recommended stop off in the middle of nowhere dedicated to life as a bushman. This was an official educational institution run by highly trained staff in a well equipped modern museum... or at least that's what we expected. In reality it was a large wooden shack with the most bizarre assortment of taxidermy, newspaper clippings and salvaged agricultural artifacts, run by a crazy retired bushman and his wife. After looking around the strange gift shop, we were greeted at the front desk by the bushman, who told us he had a film for us to view. We were the only ones there so he whisked us into the ‘theatre’ (a curtained-off section of the building with some chairs and a projector) and sat down. He popped in his DVD, pressed play and left us to it. What followed was an incredibly amusing amateur production centered around the history of deer hunting in New Zealand. This amounted to various clippings from 90’s nature documentaries interspersed with homemade shots of the bushman himself posing with his rifle and pretending to shoot deer off camera - presumably shot on a vintage VHS video camera he picked up in a thrift store. We left the theatre and walked around the exhibits in the main room. There was a definite 'conspiracy theorist’ feel to this museum, with laminated newspaper clippings pasted across the walls akin to a school project, mainly centered around the negative effects of a government-run poisoning scheme called 1080. The theory was to kill the invasive pests such as possums that kill the native species. Unfortunately the poison also reportedly kills the native species. The whole issue is highly controversial and we've heard about it frequently across New Zealand. The exhibits ended with a live possum on display in an enclosure who looked just as confused with the bushman centre as we were.

Leaving our new furry friend to his fate, we drove off towards Hokitika and found a couple of art galleries to browse. Hugo had a good chat with the man at the till of the art cooperative, who was the woodturner that made the items on display, about the various tools and processes involved. There were some great items for sale. We found our campsite for the night just outside Greymouth, which had an indoor hot tub, so naturally we parked up and got into our 'togs’. After a relaxing soak we returned to the van to discover that disaster had struck again… clearly having had such a bad experience just hours ago, we wouldn't forget to turn the lights off again, right? Wrong. The battery was once again dead as a doornail and we began our search for some jumpers. Luckily the owners of the campsite were very friendly and the old man came to the rescue with his well stocked workshop. He took out our battery and put it on his trickle charger to be good as new in the morning. This was not to be the end of our troubles however.

As it had been cloudy and raining all day and the previous day, the solar panels had not been charging the house battery and this was therefore also dead and the fridge had had to be turned off earlier that day. This meant that by now all the food in there was going warm and needed to be cooked. The problem with this was that we had about three days of meat, so the only option was to cook up a monumentally big pasta meal containing pork chops, sausages and bacon, a recipe known as ‘three little pigs’. We had a chat with some of the other guests in the kitchen, seeking refuge from the rain. One girl was selling Cookie Time cookies for charity so purely out of the kindness of our own hearts, and not at all because we needed a pick-me-up after our unlucky day, we decided to buy a bucket (this sounds pretty greedy but it did end up lasting us a while). This is about the time that the next disaster of the day occurred. We had not experienced so much rain up to this point so had not yet discovered one of Moa’s odd little quirks: when it rains, the door lock becomes incredibly stiff. This clearly was a problem for the previous owner as the key was pretty bent out of shape. This resulted in us breaking the key trying to open the door. Luckily it held on by a tiny strip of metal so didn't get stuck in the lock, so we were able to get in and out of the van (calling a locksmith would have been a real disaster).

To top it all off the seal on the boot was not what it used to be so the rain had gotten in and got the bedding wet so we had to pay to put it in the dryer. Overall, after our series of unfortunate events, we felt as though today the universe was testing us, so we were happy to just go to bed. Travelling isn't all fun and games, you know!Meer informatie