The Great New Zealand Road Trip

There's a time and a place for cranking Belinda Carlisle at an unnecessary volume, and driving out of the Queenstown airport on a clear morning after flicking on the classic hits radio station is one of those times. Heaven is a place on earth baby, and it's called New Zealand.

I picked up my Transfercar relocation vehicle from Budget New Zealand around 11:00 – I could have hit the road earlier, but the deal strictly gave me 48 hours with my Ford Mondeo, and I didn't want to have to rush too much through Arthur's Pass to get into Christchurch first thing on Monday morning.

The road to Wanaka was about 100 clicks, with a heap of climbing and pivoting on a dime where you had to adjust your speed around every corner – thankfully, I'd seen the Crown Range twice, so I could concentrate fully on the road and my speed. And, you know, remembering which side of the road was left.

Before I came to New Zealand, I'd heard that driving on the other side of the road wasn't that big a deal, but I had a hard time believing it. Everything is in reverse, and when your instincts developed over two decades, a few months seemed like a short span of time to change them. Turns out though that after 800 km of highways, mountain passes, and city intersections and roundabouts, it actually wasn't a big deal. I wasn't even mildly tempted to get in the right hand lane and cause a catastrophe. I think it's got something to do with the fact that, even though I haven't been driving in New Zealand (besides that minor stint in Havelock three months ago), I have been in cars the whole time, and have gotten pretty used to it. Watch out for me when I get back in Canada and turn on the windshield wipers when I try to signal.

I went back to Luke's in Wanaka to pick up my friend Olivia, also pointed towards Christchurch. After stopping by the New World in town to get some fruit, chocolate, and bread, it was West Coast bound. There are only three routes over the mountains to the West Coast – the Haast Pass, Arthur's Pass, and the Lewis Pass further north. Just outside of town, a girl from Texas was stood by the side of the road with her bags and a sign for Franz Josef – the road trip had hardly started and I had my first hitchhiker in the backseat.

It's true what they tell you about hitchhikers. They're all dirty, crazy sleevens who are going to rob and/or kill you. Just kidding – maybe it's naive, but there's a decent chance they're just another human being. Someone who might have some good stories to tell and who might actually appreciate that little bit of time you spend together. If you turn on the TV or open the newspaper, there's a mind-numbing collage of greed, hypocrisy, bitterness, and people being generally shitty. And you know what? I don't believe it. I can't believe it, not entirely, because I've turned off the TV long enough to actually get out in some small part of the world, and seen that that's the exception, not the rule. I have found that people are, in general, good. It's so simple, but at the same time it's a bit radical – to think that the crowds of strangers that we're brought up to be suspicious of might actually be a bit like us. Self-interested, of course (that's just survival), but also able to recognize that human quality in someone else. People are good. There's an equally simple suffix to that mantra that might be all we need to know, provided you can actually believe it.

People are good – be good to people. That's it.

Anyway, the three of us went up through the aptly named Lakes District, along a highway straddling Lake Wanaka and Lake Hawea. The West Coast of New Zealand is supposed to be beautiful, but it's supposed to be wet. These are temperate rainforests after all, with a capital “R.” But as the afternoon wore on, dipping through some bushy valleys and mountainous basins, there was no sign of rain, or even of much cloud covering.

Through the Gates of Haast, a steel bridge spanning an impressive gorge, and alongside the Blue Pools of Haast, deep azure waters fed by melting glaciers, the road stretched on. When I picked up the car, I didn't know with absolute certainty whether it would be a manual or an automatic transmission – I've driven a stick before, but this would have been the worst kind of road to re-learn how to shift gears. Up, down, loop the loop – a lot of slowing down around tight corners and revving the engine to climb the next hill.

By the time the sun was starting to set, we broke clear of the inland road and ended up flush with the Tasman Sea, along the true West Coast. We watched the day end in a clear red sky over the waters off Knight's Point, driving into the dusk and following the illuminated markings on the road until the tiny community of Fox Glacier, on the cusp of Westland Tai Poutini National Park and Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park. This town (and Franz Josef, just down the road) shares its name with a giant hunk of ice up in the mountains right off the highway – but more on that soon.

Possums are a pest here in New Zealand, but I still cringed when I struck one in the deepening darkness, positive I was going to see its beady little eyes in my nightmares that night. We dropped our hitchhiker (was it Anne-Marie or Mary Anne?) off at a little hostel and took a drive through town, to look for a place to spend the night. There are a lot of benefits to having a car, but one of the main ones is definitely a free bed – assuming you know where to park. You aren't allowed to freedom camp just anywhere in New Zealand, and DOC will nail you with a fine if you break the rules – but if you end up in a legitimate spot, pull over, put down the backseat, move your stuff onto the front seat, and settle in for a moderately uncomfortable sleep. We drove just outside of town, to the edge of Lake Matheson and a little cafe. Pitch black, we saw no sign prohibiting our stay, so we killed the engine and ate our sandwiches beneath a brilliantly illuminated southern sky. A pair of headlights came along the dirt road soon enough, an American girl named Heather with a headlight and a tent.

When you go outside of the world of electricity, you tend to base your days around the sun. So, by 7:00, it had been dark for a while and it felt like it was past bedtime. Still, I had some battery power left on my netbook, which led to a bit of a surreal moment – the three of us, people who I didn't know two days earlier, sat in the backseat of my rented car, eating Tim Tams, and watching Flight of the Conchords in a starlit parking lot in the vicinity of Mt. Cook. Pretty frigging cool.

Sleeping bags sprawled out from the trunk to the backseat weren't the height of luxury, by any means, but even if I woke up half a dozen times, I still got a decently long sleep. I was awake by early morning, wiping away the layer of condensation to see a full parking lot of cars – no doubt there to see the sun rise over Aoraki/Mt. Cook (yes, you're generally supposed to use both the English and Maori name, in this case), the country's highest snow-clad peak at a whooping 3754 m, and the image reflected in the still waters of Lake Matheson. It's an iconic Kiwi image, and it was a good day to check it out – and to bring your Mom, since it was Mother's Day after all.

Still bleary from sleep, I opened the door to get ready for the morning. The door that I'd locked with the automatic key lock from the inside.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

Well, no one would have been able to break into our Ford bedroom without us knowing it. So, into a full parking lot of people on a still Sunday morning, I fell out of the backseat of the car, still half in a sleeping bag, arms flying every which way to find the key to shut up the alarm, which was pretty hard with no glasses or contacts on. When I stuck the key into the lock, I had a chance to scope out my surroundings – we could hardly have been parked closer to the “No Overnight Parking” sign if we'd tried. Subtle.

After a light breakfast of buns and a feijoa (it was my first time having one, and it disappointingly reminded me of cross between a melon and paint. Granted, I still ate it), we walked around the lake through a thin morning haze, slowly burnt off by the rising sun. At a viewing deck officially called “View of Views,” someone had scratched “Worth It” into the wood. True words – it took close to an hour to wrap around the whole lake, permitting a bunch of great views that a lot of people come a long way to see.

Bridge work over the Waiho River slowed us down getting into the neighbouring community of Franz Josef – some 2,700 people may visit the ice sheet in the hills every day, but only 330 people call the service town home. Just a blip on the map, but there's a lot of reason to spend some time here. The road to the 12 km glacier is a winding road alongside the river, with enough speedbumps to make sure you really take your time. From the parking lot, it's an hour walk to a viewing platform of the glacier's terminal face, walking along a wide rocky basin that was carved and covered in ice only decades earlier. The chalky grey river is fed by meltwater from Franz Josef (it gets that colour because of actual suspended rock particles, glacial flour, that the glacier has broken up through abrasion), and the whole thing is actually retreating pretty quickly, as far as a glacier's timeline is concerned. On a hot day like this, it wasn't hard to imagine it.

The viewing platform brings you to about 300 m distance, where you can see the massive head of ice course its way from the Southern Alps to a narrow valley. You can only poke around the glacier through an official guided tour – plenty of people have snuck past the barriers in the past, but DOC are quick to point out that plenty of people have died doing that, too.

All in all, it's a pretty impressive sight. The Franz Josef Glacier is slightly smaller than the Fox Glacier, but it's still huge – and that's only the little speck that you can see. The Texan we brought up the West Coast was skydiving that afternoon, and must have had a wicked, clear view of the full glaciers, in the vicinity of mammoth rock peaks – they say it's the second-most scenic skydive spot in the world, after Mt. Everest. I'll let that percolate in my mind for the time being, since I was on too much of a schedule to jump out of a plane this time through. For now, I had to settle for seeing it from the ground up.

Little towns dotted the road along the West Coast, which was farther inland than I would have thought (looking at a map, the northern stretch from Greymouth to Karamea seems to hug the shoreline a lot more than the southern half), but it was still a beautiful drive, in the shade of mountains and forests unlike anything we have back home. After a few hours, we came to Hokitika, where we stopped to stretch our legs for a little spell.

Hokitika is synonymous with jade, with all kinds of green jewelry shops lining the quiet streets. Plenty of pounamu comes from this area, so naturally we poked around a studio, to check out some of the polishing equipment, as well as rows of the final pendants and carvings. In the lingering daylight, we walked along the wide sandy stretch of beach, put a few dollars worth of petrol in the tank (the car would have gotten us to Christchurch on one tank, it turns out, but we didn't want to risk breaking down in the middle of nowhere), and continued on to where the road leaves the coast and heads inland.

Arthur's Pass is, strictly speaking, just a little section of the road between the West Coast and Christchurch, but the whole four hour drive is still usually ascribed to that name. The setting sun painted the mountains ahead of us a bloody red colour, the yellow horizon a point of fixation in the rear view mirror. The road started at the foothills, crossing viaducts, running alongside the railway line, and eventually climbing the Otira Gorge and reaching an elevation of 920 m near the little community of Arthur's Pass. We stopped beneath another clear, starry sky at Greyneys, an honest-to-God free DOC campsite by the side of the road. Other than the odd passing car and the midnight lights of a freight train, we had a quiet night in the road through the Alps.

Bright and early morning for the final leg of the road trip. The sun rose over the mountain plains as we set out on the winding road, and it really was a special trip. This is the New Zealand wildness, somewhere in the midst of the mountains and rivers. Around Castle Hill, we passed clumps of limestone formations clinging to the nearby hillsides, looking like some Pagan settlement but just part of the scenery out here.

On we went, for another hour or so, before the fog. The last few days had been forests, rivers, ocean, and mountains, but the final hour was shrouded by a thick, barely palpable mist – it felt like being on a treadmill, just a long stretch of straight highway with no change on the periphery. Eventually, solid shapes started to emerge: long, snake-like irrigation machines on the edge of long flat stretches of farmland. I guess I'd come through the mountains and made it safely back to Canterbury. Signs pointing to Ashburton and Methven cropped up on the side of the road – the weather was just like this when I was here in March, so I had a good idea I knew exactly where I was all of a sudden, even if I could only see a few feet ahead of me.

I didn't need to do any driving through Christchurch proper, the airport right on the drive towards the city. What a frigging adventure – hitchhikers, the open road, Bruce Springsteen on the radio, bread and cheese for every other meal, sleeping in the car, and in desperate need of a shower. I think, as far as "normal" civilian life goes, it gets tough to duplicate something like this, but a big chunk of you is forever glad to be able to  remember that crazy time in New Zealand when you could just go. I pulled into the Budget parking lot about an hour before I was due back, we collected our things, gave the car a quick clean up, and set about making a plan. Or rather, two different plans – Olivia and I parted ways just outside of the city intersection, after sharing a picture perfect drive and some great chats about life and the stuff that happens while you're out living it. Here we were, at the end of this particular road, with no idea where to go next.

And yet, in the airport terminal, within a half an hour, I had a flash of inspiration. And by that, I mean the logical option presented itself, and after a ride with a German artist, an hour and a half wait in Darfield along the Inland Scenic Route (not too scenic today – what a fall from grace, going from the luxury of a vehicle to depending on strangers by the side of the road), and a hitch with my second Maori sheep shearer, I was looking upon a familiar sight: the wide ribbons of the Rakaia River, riding shotgun with Colm McGrath and company.

In a lot of ways, this is a full circle visit – I've been here before, two months earlier, and have now completed something of a loop of New Zealand. The place is the same as I remember it, but the experiences that I've had since then have all shaped and contorted me so that I'm not really the same, and so it's kind of cool to see people I met then and gauge the effect the long road has had.

Over the next few days in Methven, I had lamb roast and an egg burger, got a tour of a full fledged farm, saw the snowy peaks of Mt. Hutt from up close (and the sprawling flat valley below), was able to borrow a car to go to Peter Jackson's Edoras near Mt. Potts Station, and am gearing up for a little jaunt to Lake Tekapo before spending some time meditating in Akaroa (seriously) – all of that is another story though. Just believe me that it's a story with a familiar theme: people are good. They're the ones that make Heaven a pretty cool place to be, right here on earth.

Cheers,

rb