It’s been some years since my tires touched tarmac. Hell, it’s been a while since I had wheels on at all, but in the days before I was a lone caravan, I was on the road and my, what roads they are. Indulge my reminisces for a moment. I used to love a long journey on the open road, the wind whistling through my windows and the scenery changing from one moment to the next. One particular favourite route was State Highway 8, passing Lake Tekapo, a great sweeping vista of black tarmac weaving through uninterrupted plateaus of tree lined valleys, dipping through azure lakes.
If you don’t mind the rain, the SH6 is a great road, skirting the rugged and wind-swept West Coast of the South Island. You pass some of the greatest scenery in all of New Zealand. If coastal drives are your thing, then you definitely won’t be disappointed after driving from Westport to Greymouth. The mighty Tasman Sea pounds the coast on your right while the snow-capped Southern Alps stand majestically on your left, with the drizzle of sea spray on your windows...
Some of the finest driving can be found on the road to Milford Sounds, in the largely uninhabited Fjiordland. I vividly remember a blanket of mist enveloping the surrounding mountains and the grazing deer. Glimpses of Fjordland’s beech forest tease their way through the morning haze, until the landscape gradually reveals itself. Steep mountain peaks appear, unveiled by thick waves of foggy cloud that rub out scenery like a giant eraser. The view, when finally revealed, was all the more remarkable for its gradual unveiling.
This road is not without its drama though. The same route to Milford Sounds includes the roughly hewn Homer Tunnel, a 1,200 metre long passage of terror, carved into a granite mountain. Made me nervous every time I passed through there. Way back when, work had begun on the tunnel during the Great Depression. In freezing conditions, men with calloused hands smashed through the impenetrable granite using hammers and dynamite. These were tough men in difficult times, a long way from home, and many of them died in the effort. One man would hold a sharp metal rod against the rock face (presumably having picked the short straw) whilst another wielded a sledge hammer. Once they’d created a crack in the rock, a stick of dynamite was wedged into the crevice, and gradually (they started in 1935, and completed the tunnel in 1953) more than a kilometre of granite was blown out of the mountain.
I remember driving through the confines of the tunnel, as rough jagged rocks peeked through the darkness. Water dripped constantly from the roof, and there wasn’t a single light or pair of cat’s eyes along its entire length. One careless slip of the steering wheel and car, man and caravan might easily be sliced in half along these sharp granite walls. I’d speed down the narrow lane, with only an occasional metal bracket overhead supporting the tonnes of mountain above me. I’d then emerge into the light at the end of the tunnel with immense relief, incredulous that there were cyclists brave enough to venture through. Some fifty years later, the tunnel has never been modernised or concreted over, and remains as treacherous as the day it was built.
New Zealanders love their roads and are addicted to cars, and it’s easy to see why. Trust me, there’s nothing like an open stretch of cool tarmac, leading all the way to the horizon to give you a sense of purpose and wonder. I hear there are more cars per person in New Zealand than anywhere else on the planet, except for Luxembourg and Iceland. You wouldn’t know it though. Aside from the suffocating gridlock and traffic jams that is Auckland, there’s plenty of space for car and motor home alike. Ours is a sparsely populated country with such rugged and remote terrain that the car is the ideal transport solution. No doubt, the popularity of the car and the absence of a decent rail network contributed to the popularity of us caravans, too. That, and our glowing personality, of course.
Of course, there are far more cows than cars. Not that you can, or should, ride a cow to work. It’s worth mentioning this ratio of cows to cars because as a signee of the Kyoto Treaty, New Zealand pledged to reduce its green house gas emissions. In an extraordinary twist, whilst the rest of the developed world explores ways of reducing damage caused by vehicles, in New Zealand the government’s latest initiative is to tax cows. The collective clouds of methane emanating from cows backsides produce enough green-house gases to cause a serious environmental problem. Instead of politely asking the cows to stop letting off wind or putting a cork in it, the government have instead decided to fine the farmers in the form of a tax and contribute the money towards eco-friendly projects to offset the bovines emissions. ‘Farmers Against Ridiculous Taxation (FART)’ are in uproar. Understandably, whilst the whole idea of a fart tax is really rather funny, the farmers aren’t finding any of this especially amusing. The newspapers ran a headline photo of a tractor half-way up the entrance to the Beehive, New Zealand’s parliament. Crowds of angry farmers blockaded parliament in protest. The cows continue to fart a hole through the ozone layer.
Meanwhile, people continue to drive like there’s no tomorrow. Make no mistake, driving is a hazardous occupation because the New Zealand driver, with a few good natured exceptions, pays no heed to the rules of the road. I’ve seen them overtake a funeral procession on a blind switchback bend and many a time I’ve been tailgated down a mountain for the sake of thirty seconds. I have a theory on this and again, it’s the wop-wops effect. These terrifying driving habits might have something to do with a law that enables youngsters to begin their driving rampage at the youthful age of fifteen. You can’t vote, get married, buy a house or drink alcohol, but you can drive a car. In the ye olde days, the thinking was that in remote areas, if you couldn’t drive then you might not be able to leave your own property, at least not without embarking on a five-day hike.
Today, New Zealand has a thriving boy-racer culture, where youngsters spend their pocket money and ill-gotten gains on lowering suspensions, fuel injection systems and go faster stripes. I have been parked by the roadside and witnessed many illegal road races at the dead of night, with tires scorching blackened lines down the freeways. Another popular past-time is chaining your car to a post in the backyard, and driving around in circles until the tyres vaporise, or the fire brigade arrives. And, no, I’ve never seen anyone attempt this with a caravan. But you can’t blame it all on the kids, as many adult Kiwis who are old enough to know better continue to drive like hormonal teenagers for their entire lives, potentially turning this quiet country into the world’s largest racing circuit.
I’ve had more than my fair share of bumps, scrapes and collisions. I’ve been to the panel beaters more than a few times to iron the dings out. Honestly, it’s a wonder my axle never snapped, but enough of my mishaps. Instead I’ll tell you about Jon’s recent crash; a cautionary tale of the mad men lurking on quiet country roads. Thank god for part-time police and small town hospitality.
Saturday 7 June
A loud squeal of burnt tires erupted from out of nowhere, and an oncoming car careered towards us. He’d taken the bend ahead too fast and lost control, his rear tyres spun out, leaving a trail of black skid marks burnt down the road. Wow, that was lucky, I thought. It looked, for a moment, as if the out of control driver was just going to miss us. The relief was soon punctured by a CRUNCH as the oncoming car punched us clean off the road. The other car spun 360 degrees before coming to a stop.
“Everyone ok?” I asked. I was travelling with friends who were visiting from London. David, Andrea and I were a little shaken but there didn’t seem to be any broken limbs or pools of blood. I opened the passenger side door and went to check on the other driver. “You alright there, mate?” I said to a man in his early forties with close cropped hair. He jumped from his car, walked around the pieces of scattered wreckage, and swaggered up to me, a little too close for comfort. I could smell his breath and it wasn’t pretty.
“What the hell d’ye think you were doing on my side of the road?” he ranted furiously, looking agitated, shifting from one foot to the other. I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You just lost control of your car, came around that bend too fast and smashed us off the road. Look, you can see the tyre marks.” I pointed at the road. “Your car is on our side of the road...”
“Don’t you blaady tell me it was my fault,” he retaliated. “You’re just a blaady liar. That was the worst driving I’ve ever seen!” I tried to calm him down. He was drunk or worse, which was useful if the police ever arrived, but he was also very aggressive and more than slightly unhinged. I tried to placate him, just in case he kept a sharpened hatchet in the boot of his car. Meanwhile, Andrea, who’d been driving, had realised that he was trying to blame her for the accident. She gave him a stinging rebuke, and I thought for one awful moment he would smack her one. I interrupted the shouting match, suggesting we swapped insurance details.
He paced about his car, his behaviour increasingly erratic and nervous. “Name’s Liam Dearsley,” he answered, as he pulled tufts of grass out of the ground, using them to wipe the dented remains of his front bumper. It was a start. “So what’s your telephone number?” I asked. “Erm, its 4789 mumble mumble,” his voice trailing off. “Sorry I didn’t quite get that... Could you repeat it please?” Again, he said “4978 mumble mumble”. This was hopeless. “Sorry, I’m still not quite getting it. Say it again?”
Meanwhile, Andrea had walked to a nearby garage for assistance. We were fortunate there was help to hand because apart from the garage, we hadn’t seen any sign of life for many miles. Dearsley, having realised the game was up, had returned to his car, started up the engine and fled the scene. We on the other hand, weren’t going anywhere. I turned the ignition key and put the car into first. The engine turned once, lurched forward a couple of feet and promptly died on the grass verge. The front axle had snapped.
It wasn’t looking good. We hadn’t got his insurance details, our car was a write-off and there was an excess of $1,300 on the car rental insurance. Most worrying of all, there was a strong likelihood that this lunatic didn’t have any insurance at all. In New Zealand there’s no legal requirement for car insurance. I didn’t exactly welcome the prospect of being a thousand bucks out of pocket, but for the moment I was more concerned with being broken down in the middle of nowhere, with no transport. Fortunately, we had a stroke of luck. The elderly couple who ran the garage had ushered us into their kitchen and offered us a pot of tea, along with plenty of sympathy. “Oh we heard the scream of his brakes, don’t you worry it wasn’t your fault love. Here, have a biscuit.”
I sipped the sweet tea, made the necessary phone calls and it wasn’t so long before the law arrived. Stepping through the glass patio doors, the policeman was so enormous, that for a moment he eclipsed the sun and cast the room into shadow. He was casually dressed in a t-shirt and pair of shorts, which seemed a bit informal, even in these parts. “You caught me cleaning out the pool when you rang,” he explained, as if this was normal behaviour for an officer of the law. We provided our statements as the policeman scratched some notes.
Speaking into his walkie-talkie he ordered four squad cars to apprehend the fugitive driver. Four cars? I could hardly believe it. In most other places, you’d be lucky to get that kind of response if you’d been murdered. “Well, it’s been a quiet day,” he explained, and it seemed unlikely that the police encountered many pandemic crime waves out here in the wop-wops. “So could you give me your name, address and details then?” he asked me. This was something of a problem. I desperately tried to think of my address but I just didn’t have one. I attempted to explain, but failed hopelessly. “I’m living here, in a caravan, in the Muangatuks, in the bush...I don’t have an address because the postman won’t deliver to us, because we’re too far from town.” The policeman towered over me and frowned. He looked at me suspiciously, as if he’d never heard so much nonsense in all his life. “I think I can remember my postal box though,” I faltered. “Um, will that do?”
Squeezing into the back of the police Land Rover with our luggage, we were kindly offered a lift to Christchurch. Chatting away, he revealed that as well as cleaning his swimming pool and being a policeman, he farmed alpacas in his spare time. The radio crackled into life. A squad car had apprehended Dearsley down a side street, while he was trying to give the police the slip. Intriguingly the crackling voice added that Dearsley was a “patient”. The officer wouldn’t elaborate on what sort of patient, but we figured that we’d been smashed off the road by an escapee from a mental hospital.
We were taken to the local police station in Darfield where the policeman went to find his trousers, before paying a visit to headquarters in Christchurch. We were briefly left in charge of the station until he returned. “Help yourselves to coffee,” he said hospitably. “But don’t answer the telephone, and don’t let anyone in until I come back.”
Left in charge of a provincial police station, we made the most of the situation, helping ourselves to a cuppa, and using the phone to book a hostel for the night. I’d heard that people in the smaller communities of New Zealand were trusting types, but this was staggering. The computer had been left switched on and the police station’s email account was on display. We were so impressed by the hospitality and efficiency of the local Kiwi policeman and llama farmer that we returned the favour by leaving our mugs clean and dry, and resisted the temptation to load his rifle and try some target practice.
End of diary entry
I can’t say that I miss the hazards of the road, but besides admiring the towering mountains, vertiginous volcanoes and phosphorescent grassy meadows, I used to amuse myself by spotting the peculiar letterboxes by the roadside. Creating your own hand-crafted scale replica of your home is a Kiwi tradition, and these mini homes are stood outside the drive to be used as a letterbox. Like a dolls house, every detail is replicated in miniature, with tiny tiles painted on the roof, and little windows and doors, and sometimes even their own miniature letter box that’s the size of a matchstick. I guess it was the No. 8 wire phenomenon at work again, where people made what they needed instead of buying a mass produced product.
I used to pass my time on the road by spotting these quirky letterboxes scattered across both the North and South Islands. They come in all sorts of unusual varieties. Some resemble grinning friesian cows, another looked like a round-faced pig. One letterbox had been bizarrely made out of an old lawnmower and one farm had set an entire fridge outside their gate, presumably in case the mail got too warm. I never did spot a miniature caravan letterbox though. They do make for an interesting distraction - you’d be shocked and dismayed at how often my tyres sighed at the sight of another endless sublime soaring mountain and rolling hill.
Ok. I had a letterbox obsession, but it was harmless. I’m fond of people too, sometimes. I particularly liked the fleeting company of hitch hikers. As a nomad myself, I have some empathy for these hapless creatures waiting on the kerb, always on the move from one place to another. You’d have thought there were enough cars to go around in this country, since there’s twice as many cars as people, but there is a strong tradition of hitch hiking in New Zealand. I hear hitch hiking has all but vanished in Britain and disappeared along with hippies and free love in the USA. New Zealand may be one of the few English speaking countries that still has hitch hikers. Why? I cannot say, although if you’re waiting for a bus to take you to the next town, you may die of old age and disappointment. I cannot count the number of times a stranger has stood by the roadside, arm out stretched, thumbing for a lift. Most often we just passed them by, their stories untold, but sometimes we picked them up to help out and listen to their tales.
There was one hitch-hiker, I don’t recall her name, a San Franciscan in her autumn years with wild white hair, and a spark in her voice that suggested she hadn’t lost any of her energy since Woodstock. She was smoking some pungent Afghan weed that made my windows all hazy. I hiccuped so hard I burst a tyre. “My mother always wanted to live in New Zealand, and we stayed here for a number of years while I cared for her before she died. Now I’m back here visiting friends and well, I’d like to stay, but…” She paused. “I was staying at a hostel up in the Northland. Y’know way out in the middle of nowhere, real boondocks. I’d been chatting to the hostel manager, and told him about my situation, how I wanted to stay in the country, but couldn’t, not without marrying a New Zealander. I’d only been joking, but he was very understanding and said that he could arrange something. He had this gentleman friend in Auckland called Granny, who might be able to make some kind of arrangement.”
The hostel manager had then attempted to arrange a marriage of convenience between the San Franciscan and Granny, who I imagined to be some camp sort of Noel Coward fellow. The plan was that a little cash would change hands and they would be married in name only, living separate lives, before amicably divorcing. “Except, Granny changed his mind, and instead I arranged a pre-nuptial agreement with the hostel owner. We agreed that I would help him run the hostel for a year or two, we’d have separate rooms and we’d divorce after three or four years. But things didn’t quite work out, let’s just say that his intentions weren’t exactly honourable. He was twenty years younger than me, and I never thought sex would come into it. Anyway after we married, and I was living at the hostel and helping to run the place, I discovered that he was filming guests with hidden cameras in all the double rooms, and selling pornographic videos…”
Another hitch hiker was young Chrissie, an infectious force of nature who exuded warmth and confidence. She had big blonde curls and despite the possible dangers of hitch-hiking from one end of New Zealand to the other, she had met a series of extraordinary people who had returned her good nature and offered nothing but generous hospitality.
“One time,” said Chrissie, bubbling with enthusiasm, “this super friendly guy pulls over, and gives us a lift to Lake Taupo. He was a salesman for Tui beer. Anyway, after two hours driving, my friend Karin freaks out! She’d left her camera back at the hostel. I tried to calm her, telling her we’ll ring the hostel and get it sent to us, but Tui man, he won’t have it. He turns the car around and drives us two hours out of his way to collect the camera. So we’re sitting there, telling one another stories and we stop to look at a ravine. He laughed and said that it would nice to take his jet boat out on the river. A couple of hours later, we’re jet-boating with his two daughters, having the time of our lives - although my legs were hurting for the next week! His family let us stay over for the night. And when we left, he gave us Tui shirts, Tui hats, Tui scarves, Tui socks and Tui sunglasses. It was a perfect moment.”
She’d found no shortage of offers of a lift, although not everyone had been so fortunate. Recounting another story, she showed the flip-side to honest rural New Zealand life. “I’d just arrived at the hostel and was making a cup of tea, when this flustered looking Canadian kinda stumbled into the kitchen,” Chrissie explained. “He was a proper Canadian though, not one of those Americans pretending by plastering their bags with maple leaves. He had this serious, sort of haunted look about him. Told me he’d just escaped after hitching to the hostel. He’d parted from his friends out in the wop-wops, and tried to flag down a car.”
“Quite a few passed him by and he was beginning to wonder if one would ever stop, when this beat up old truck pulled over, just sort of dissolving from rust. And then this scruffy face with a beard peered out of the window. ‘Boy, ye lookin for a ride?’ ‘Uh, yeah, sort of’, he replied. ‘Well, we got just enough room for you,’ he offered. The Canadian, he was pretty scared, but got into the car anyway. Sitting on the backseat was this huge dog, who kept growling in the Canadian’s ear, stinking of bad breath. The driver sparked up this huge joint, took a deep puff, and offered it to the Canadian, who was too terrified to turn him down.”
“There was nothing on the road for miles, they were in the middle of nowhere, and the driver was telling him about all the people who’d been killed on the road. ‘A girl in 1989, buried right here, a car, there, which had rolled over onto someone’. The Canadian was already freaked out, when the driver suddenly turned the truck around. ‘Boy, d’ya smell ‘em?’ he said, talking to his dog. ‘Dya smell possum, boy?’ The dog was barking in a frenzy and they pulled over. The driver got out of the truck with a shotgun in his hand and walked towards a ditch. The Canadian just sat there, quietly praying he’ll get out of this alive. Fifteen minutes later, the guy dropped him off in town and shook his hand. ‘Boy, it was nice meeting you’ he’d said and drove off.”
Before leaving, Chrissie pulled out a photo of another couple who had offered her a lift. The elderly pair might easily have lived on the frontier two hundred years ago, the woman adorned in a bonnet and old fashioned colonial dress, him with a check shirt and long tufty hair, holding a garden rake in his hand. Kind souls, although from the photo you might mistake them for ghosts.
They reminded me of the tale of a father and his young son who’d broken down one dark, windswept night along the Desert Road. Hailing a lift from a passing vehicle, they’d thanked the driver for rescuing them from their plight. The driver leered at the pair, disturbingly regaling his passengers of past accidents along the road. “One man and his son were hitch-hiking just along this road, but they chose the wrong car. The driver brutally murdered the pair of them.” The passengers on the backseat looked at one another. “I know,” said the boy, “we were the ones who were killed...”
New Zealand is a country well suited for a road trip, if you can dodge the oncoming traffic and get out the way quickly enough from the guy tailgating your rear bumper. There’s plenty enough space between destinations to appreciate a couple of hours drive through the scenic route. Trust me though, a scenic route is not a journey to be taken lightly. In this caravan’s experience a scenic route will typically include two features. The first is that it will, of course, provide a pretty, if not dramatic view of the surrounding landscape. The second is that it will probably be a near terrifying journey of hairpin bends, landslides, and lunatic drivers. I remember along one lane a sign hung outside a local bookbinder’s. With typical Kiwi bluntness, it summed up the New Zealand driving experience: “Bill’s Bookbinders. Slow down you bastards! Speed kills!”
Speed isn’t the only thing that can kill you, of course. I can tell you a story or two. One time, I was enthusiastically pulled along the scenic route through the Whanganui National park, despite being rather too narrow for me. An area with a long Maori tradition, the missionaries arrived in the 1840s, renaming tribal villages after Christian cities, and established churches and a convent. The distinctive angular maraes were present in Hiruharama, Ranana, Koriniti and Atene, translating as Jerusalem, London, Corinth and Athens. The nuns of the convent had long since passed on or moved away from the remote clapboard convent. Rumour persists that one very ancient nun still resides there, creaking about the wooden floorboards of the convent like a living ghost. The poignancy wasn’t lost on me, particularly when the loose stones of the scrappy unsealed road pummeled me like gunfire.
We arrived in Pipiriki and the unsealed path became even more rutted and cratered, as we drove along a track cut deep into the valley face, the Whanganui River flowing forcefully below us. Something was wrong. Somehow we had left the road behind and ended up on a disused track that disappeared deep into the bush. My suspension creaked with displeasure as I was very carefully manoeuvered through a three-point turn. To be honest, it was probably closer to a fifteen-point turn, before I was turned around. Below us, by the river’s edge was a scrap yard of rusting cars - past casualties perhaps. With a sigh of relief I was returned to the road, having managed to avoid falling into the river or joining the scrap-yard.
My driver that day was Joe, who had briefly stepped out for directions. He headed over to the Park Office, which seemed totally deserted. So he went to knock on the door of a nearby house. It was an ageing wooden clapboard house, white paint peeling off the veranda. Its curtains were drawn and the building had the distinctive smell of decay about it. An old pair of pants hung unpleasantly on the washing line. Walking up to the building, he was within a few steps of knocking on the door when a creeping nervousness took over and he dashed back into his car. I didn’t blame him. It looked like a scene from The Amityville Horror or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Joe spotted a friendly looking Maori woman standing outside a sign for the local Medical Centre. We pulled into the drive to ask the way. “Kia Ora”, he called out, “can you show me the way to Raetihi?” She stopped what she was doing and eyed him warily, as her husband stepped out of the house. He had greying hair and his eyes were rolling about in their sockets. Gesturing towards the road, his arms were waving about all over the place in a twitchy, manic fashion. Without uttering a word, he indicated that we ought to continue along the road. There was some confusion, as Joe questioned his directions. The man with the rotating eyeballs stepped out of view for a moment. “He’s got a gun!” “What?” The man had returned and there was a rifle case in his hands. You’d be surprised how quickly a car can move whilst towing a caravan, but we surely left there as quickly as we possibly could. Ours was a lucky escape. I’d heard numerous stories of drug abuse in rural outback areas, especially among Maori communities. He looked like he’d been liberally helping himself to the Medical Centre’s supplies.