Hi all,
Since arriving back in New Zealand, I’ve:
BEEN left bruised by a flying fence post,
THEN been asked by colleagues if “flying fence post” is a euphemism for an athletic new sexual position,
WENT to yet another climbing colleague’s funeral,
REALISED I last saw most of those I knew there at Sir Ed’s funeral,
HIKED through pristine West Coast forest that will be underwater if a hydro scheme goes ahead,
DRIVEN up and down the stunning rainforest-and-glacier country of the West Coast, impervious to petrol prices, and
FOUND out what happens to doomsday cults when they realise, 25 years later, that doomsday isn’t about to happen any time soon. (answer: seek justice in the secular environs of the High Court in Greymouth, since the Almighty is taking His own sweet time bringing about the celestial version)
It’s all in a day’s work (actually five and a half week’s work) as The Press’s West Coast correspondent. Those who received my last missive will know that my bread landed butter-side-up when I arrived back in New Zealand and within a week of returning, I began temping as one of The Press’s regional reporters. Some regions are better than others and The Press was having trouble finding qualified people to do the West Coast job, which seems astonishing when for someone like me, it’s the best place to be — a great deal of autonomy, a company car and the magic petrol card and this magnificent landscape as not only my playground but my workground as well.
Rapahoe Beach, five minutes from the Tuscan end of Greymouth
I was based in what I began referring to as “the Tuscan end of Greymouth”, an allusion to the pseudo-Italian delights of the Bella Vista Motel, a chain of mind-numbingly indistinguishable rooms that are exactly the same no matter which one you go to in the country. It was my first taste of Generica — the term for the insipidly inoffensive corporate look favoured by generic American chains — in New Zealand, although to be fair it was not quite as unsettling as going into the Motel 6 room in Mojave while on my PCT hike in 2006 and thinking that I’d crossed through some tear in the space/time continuum and walked into the room we’d taken at the Big Bear Motel 6. But since the company was paying for this in Greymouth, it would have been churlish to complain.
More Rapahoe magic
This job has been vacant since March and the unspoken undercurrent of my appointment was that if I did well, it would give the editorial side some ammunition to fight the shiny-bottomed accountants who question if we need to have an office there at all. I’d like to think I bolstered their position, aided by the usual journalistic combination of work and serendipity.
Serendipity came in the form of a one-in-100-year windstorm (or so the media says. In my experience 100-year storms seem to happen every decade or so) which lashed the South Island. The south-westerly storm meant serious rain on the East Coast, which is normally in the rain shadow of the Alps, and dry but even more serious winds on the West Coast. Or at least in selected parts of the West Coast, where the wind channeled and funneled. As anyone with a knowledge of mountains or flying would know, the worst winds are the rotors that occur on the leeward side of mountains. Fortunately for me the nexus was about two minutes drive from the Tuscan end of Greymouth.
It took a while for me to realise this is one of the few times I’ve been in a serious storm and not been witnessing it in a tent on a mountainside somewhere. I suspect a mountainside would have been a safer place since here was still a lot of the detritus of civilisation — sheets of corrugated iron, bits of siding, and obviously a fence post — flying everywhere. Not quite as bad as in Twister (the movie, rather than the game) but that was only a matter of degree rather than genre.
There were times when I couldn’t get the car door open. Other times when the wind was flowing the other way and I feared that I wouldn’t be able to control it if I did open it. And then there was the time I went up to talk to a cop who was closing a road because of the debris flying across from a disintegrating shed. I was trying to yell to him from about two feet away when a particularly savage gust came through and we both turned to hunker down. Then I felt this great thump on my lower leg and found I’d been hit by a fence post. Not a paling, as I was asked, but a real 100×100mm fencepost, about 2m long and attached to a bit of artificial grass which was acting as a sail. I didn’t think much of it at the time and was fortunate that because we’d both turned away, it hit the meaty part of my calf and not the shinbone, which had until then been facing the upwind side. It didn’t hurt then and I spent another couple of hours following the volunteer fire brigade in the midst of their 18-hour day. It started to really hurt that night and I was pondering whether I ought to get it X-rayed but through what I’d like to think was stoicism (but was more likely procrastination) didn’t get around to it. It still hurt a month later but has come right now.
Mokihinui River, which will be 80m underwater if the hydro scheme goes ahead
Overall, the coast was a really fun newsy place with not too much ambulance chasing or the other drudgery parts of newsgathering. And it was good to be able to head into the hills and claim I was working. I can thank Meridian Energy for planning a hydro scheme in a particularly attractive valley just north of Westport, which justified me driving there (with a stop at the pancake rocks of Punakaiki) and then hiking in several hours to get a first hand report on a track that will be submerged. Rarely have I been so interested in production values.
There were some cracking stories. I was particularly amused by one in which rules, designed to stop boy racers by seizing their cars if they are disqualified drivers, caught a council worker driving a 22 tonne front end loader who hadn’t bothered to mention to his bosses that he’d lost his licence through accrued demerit points. They had to hire another digger at $500 a day during the 28-day disqualification period.
But nothing could compare to finding out about a doomsday religious cult that formed in the late 1970s, convinced the end was nigh and bought a block of wilderness land on the upper West Coast in which to prepare for the end of days. Except the days didn’t end and they variously sloped off to other endeavours, finally prompting a court stoush nearly 30 years later because what once was an out of the way worthless block is now in prime dairy country. Having been let down once by celestial judgment, they opted for the New Zealand courts.
So, a lot of fun but I also knew I was only there a little while so didn’t bother making much social contact with the locals. And living in the Tuscan end of Greymouth in a generic hotel certainly paled. But it was a job I could imagine doing permanently if I wasn’t heading for the Gulf. I’ve included some pix, of the hydro-threatened river, of the sunsets at the beach five minutes from my Tuscan enclave, of the view across to Aoraki-Mount Cook, of sledding on Porters Pass, and of the windstorm. No pix of the fencepost, sorry.
The last main job I did for The Press before leaving in January was Sir Edmund Hillary’s funeral. An unfortunate parallel here was that just before I was due to finish on the coast, one of our more prominent mountain guides, Gottlieb Braun-Elwert, died suddenly from a ruptured aorta. This made the news more than it otherwise would have because he was in the back country skiing with our Prime Minister at the time and she joined in the two-hour attempt to save him, thinking it was a heart attack.
I’d last seen him at Sir Ed’s funeral and at his funeral service in Tekapo, of those in the hall that I recognised, most I’d last seen there too. Gottlieb could be a cranky old bastid and he didn’t talk to me for almost a year after I’d reported comments from the NZ Mountain Guides Association that he didn’t agree with. But all that was past when we saw each other in Auckland and then shared the flight back to Christchurch. He even asked me to pass on his regards to Base Camp Lisa on Denali. And even though it had been a couple of years since he’d been there and more than 1000 climbers briefly head up and back through base camp each season, she remembered him fondly.
Ship Creek, south Westland
Since then I had a final weekend in Christchurch, had yet another series of going away parties at work and for the Lyttelton mafia — the second in five months, which is taking the mickey a little — and then flew to Australia for a week to see my family before flying to Abu Dhabi. I fly tomorrow and arrive just before midnight on the first day of Ramadan. The UAE is pretty secular and tolerant toward westerners but at the newspaper I won’t be able to drink coffee or even water at my desk, let alone eat. A room out the back for hungry infidels has been established.
It’s always suited me to go straight in the deep end and arriving in the Gulf in the middle of summer (108degF/43degC) and in the middle of Ramadan fits that to a tee. Since I was standing on snow in New Zealand the day before I left and with Brisbane having maxima of 24degC/74degF, arriving in Abu Dhabi is going to be a rude, rude shock. I guess I’m going out of the freezer and then into the metaphorical frying pan of Brisbane (really more of a roux dish but let’s not get persnickety), so Abu Dhabi will well and truly be into the fire.
I won’t post again for the first week I’m there. Experience has shown that first impressions are often wrong, especially about foreign countries and cultures, so I’ll let it distill for a while before I attempt to postulate. And it might take that long to get over the heat stroke.
Take care everyone
jh
PS and two more Rapahoe images
