Arrowtown's True Autumn Colours

When I left Te Anau the other day, I did so without a plan. I had a relative destination in mind, but that's about it – if I ended up on the road to Queenstown or not, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I headed out to where the road from Te Anau met the road from Manapouri, and there I set about hitchhiking.

When myself and Dorothée got picked up earlier this week, after the Gertrude Saddle hike, one of the passengers in the car remarked, “Oh, hitchhiking and Couchsurfing? That's pretty cheap.” I didn't read too much into it (partially because they were sleeping in their car along the side of the road rather than pay $6 to camp in a serviced area, so her preachy condescension was bullshit in a tacky disguise), but it warrants a bit of discussion to clear the air. Admittedly, I'm saving a heap by hitching through the South Island of New Zealand rather than take a bus. But that's not why I'm doing it. At first, it was for an experience – I would never have even considered it in Newfoundland, and I did it for a lark, one of these exotic experiences to tick off the list. But now that I'm into it (21 rides is my current count, and I still call that a relatively modest number), there are other reasons as to why I still do it. Part of it is to reduce costs, and part is to maintain this romantic idea of hitchhiking across New Zealand, but then another part is to meet and interact with cool people who I never would have met otherwise. And so that's why I hitched out of Te Anau with no set plan.

A few minutes before I got picked up (having waited on the outskirts of town for close on two hours), I got a phone call from a woman in Arrowtown who was looking for a WWOOFer. Yes, I had no destination when I left Des's in the morning, but I had emailed a few hosts in the Queenstown region the night before. Hilary and Graeme run a cozy, home-style accommodations spot in the small town on the cusp of the adventure capital, and they were looking for someone to pitch in around their home for a few days. I scribbled her name, phone number, and address on a gum wrapper, and assured her that if I made it as far as Arrowtown that day, I'd stop in.

Soon enough, I got picked up by a German beekeeper (I can now explain the honey making process, and tell you a bit about Manuka honey, too), who brought me through the rolling hill country, along the shore of the very blue Lake Wakatipu (the coldest lake in the country, if the guy at the pub is to believed), and back to Otago. He was bound for Queenstown, but left me at the busy intersection of Queenstown and Wanaka.

 

I walked a few hundred metres down the road, to one of those signs than list a bunch of different destinations and their distances. Arrowtown was at the top of the list, so I decided to point to it, mostly to assure any passing motorist that if they decided to pick me up, the longest they would have to put up with me would be 15 km. Only problem is, those signs are a lot bigger than you'd think, once you're next to them, and I'm what some would call vertically challenged . . . so I took out my hiking pole, extended it as far as it would go, and stood on tiptoes, one arm stretching up as far as it would go, the other trying to flag every passing car.

A few minutes later, the least amount of time I've yet had to wait, a family heading to Alexandra stopped. “Did my gesturing work?” I asked as I jumped into the backseat.

“Naw,” he said. “We just thought you looked funny.” I'll take it.

He brought me a bit farther down the road, to the turnoff from the highway. I had a bit of a walk – but what a walk it was. Sure, I tried to hitchhike, but I didn't really want the first car to pick me up, or even the second. That's because there aren't a whole lot of deciduous trees in New Zealand, so the autumn I'm used to in Canada has been hard to find – however, here it is, in the core of the South Island. Walking alongside Lake Hayes, there were trees painted yellow, red, and gold, a harvest mosaic on a sunny day. And y'know that smell that there is on a dry, sunny autumn afternoon? That was there, too.

 

Eventually I did get picked up, and the grandmother who stopped brought me right to the front door of Pittaway's Cottages (B&B says the sign – bed and bugger off, they say) on Buckingham Street, the main street through the tiny town of Arrowtown.

In 1861, gold turned up in the gently flowing stream of the Arrow River, and all of a sudden a gold rush near equal to the excitement of the Yukon brought people from all corners of the globe to central Otago. Arrowtown boomed overnight, and when the gold dried up (though you can still rent panning equipment – someone in 2006 ended up finding a chunk worth $15,000), the town shrunk. Today, it looks like a preserved, historic tableau out of a John Wayne movie from the Wild West – a quiet street, innocent storefronts from the 1800s (one of them is even a telegraph office), and the trees cushioning every avenue.
 

The trees. The gold rush these days is for the leaves – admittedly, I missed the 150 anniversary of the gold by about a year and a half, and came a week late for the Autumn Festival, but my timing was still inadvertently awesome. Arrowtown is alive with autumn, a once a year treat that I happened to stumble upon.

 

My lodgings for the next few nights are in a loft above one of the guest rooms, a spacious junk room. Hilary and Graeme are semi-retired, in the midst of a couple of different projects around the house. Not that it's particularly stressful – all I had to do when I arrived was join Graeme, a self-described cantankerous old fart, in a few beer and a chat while he smoked a cigar, and when I finally slunk off to bed I was told that they were not early risers, so get some breakfast and take it easy in the morning. Deadly.

After helping put together a greenhouse this morning (broken up soon enough by a coffee break), I went to the other end of town (a lot closer than that statement implies) to pick up for some pies for lunch. Man, I'm taking these crispy pies, stuffed with everything from venison to butter chicken, for granted – you don't get them like this back home, and I daresay I'm going to miss them in a few months. For a small town of about 2000, Arrowtown was pretty busy yesterday – it's the school holidays (a two week break for students between terms), not to mention that it was Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Day, the national war remembrance day on the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, a major disaster for all of the Allied Forces but particularly devastating to the Australasian troops.

After lunch, I went down the bustling avenue, to the Chinese Settlement along the quietly bubbling Bush Creek. Cramped, restored stone buildings are a testament to the difficult living conditions of the early Chinese settlers during the gold rush – it's a lot less pretty than the frozen-in-time, idyllic main centre of historic Arrowtown, but it's fitting, considering how hard things would have been for them (the 19th century isn't exactly known for its progressive, non-racist attitudes).

There are a heap of nature walks in this part of town, branching our from the Arrow River – I went along Tobins Track, a gravel road that climbs up one of the brightly painted hillsides flanking the community. What a treat for the eyes. Right from the trail through Wilcox Green, there are so many directions to look in, even when it's just a simple woods path. I thought this looked cool – not realizing until I got back that those arched trees were the very same ones that Isildur rode (and got ambushed and shot) beneath in The Fellowship of the Ring:

From up the hill, you could look out on the flat Wakatipu Basin, from the compact settlement as far as Lake Hayes and the Remarkables on one end (the iconic mountain range – why do you think they're called that?) and the Crown Range on the other. It's no surprise that Arrowtown has one of the most inland climates of anywhere in New Zealand – it's tucked right away in a sizable valley, safe and secure.
 

I haven't seen real autumn colours like they have in the Humber Valley in Newfoundland for a few years – I found it in Arrowtown. This is a pretty special place, small town New Zealand, only a short drive from Queenstown if you want your city lifestyle and nightlife. God knows I didn't come to this country on the other side of the earth to find a place to raise a family, but if I did . . .

 

That night, it was off to the Fork and Tap, a pub just 240 steps down the street. Myself and Graeme went out before dinner for a few pints with some of the local characters who tend to converge at the watering hole (the smallest towns have the best characters – one of Arrowtown's is Ernest Hemingway’s nephew, and apparently he's a bit of a prick with a famous last name. Their words, not mine). It was surprisingly busy for a Thursday night – with more than a few other old farts, but who's complaining?

 

Just around the bend, I bet Queenstown is pretty rollicking on a Friday night, but here in Arrowtown, the rainy afternoon is slowly turning into a quiet drizzly night – once the weather cleared a bit (I have a friend back home who would call this the perfect weather for eating stew), I went for a stroll along Bush Creek, through the forest along a damp carpet of gold.

Graeme told me that there is a difference between a tourist and a traveller: the former is led by the hand with no stress, while the latter immerses themselves in a new world to have an experience, their main objective survival. That doesn't mean they don't have fun in the meantime. Every day, I identify more and more with the traveller, and feel sorry for those people walking around with the guide books and cameras in front of their face – they're the ones who'll go everywhere and see nothing. They're the ones who'll have a three course meal, but never a home-cooked Kiwi dinner in front of the fireplace on a cool autumn evening.

Cheers,

rb