Roaming Around Nelson

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30971, 29 January 1966, Page 4

Roaming Around Nelson

Nelson Pilgrimage. By A. H. Reed. A. H. and A. W. Reed. With maps and 49 illustrations. 120 pp. The glorious scenery and unspoiled retreats treasured in the northern end of the South Island are revealed and discussed in this slim, informative. copiously illustrated book. More than the information he gets so informally, the reader will surely be impressed by the remarkable man who has written it—a man 90-years-old, a prodigious pedestrian and a simple philosopher. who even as the book was being published was completing another long walk 600 miles from Sydney to Melbourne.

The authors physical qualities are remarkable, enough, but readers cannot help noting the simplicity, sincerity, friendliness and kindliness of this man who delights in all that Is beautiful and wholesome. He takes us afoot and afloat over the magnificent mountains, through the native bush and round the lovely, quiet bays and sounds of the Tasman National Park. We meet friends. We philosophise a bit now and then. There is a history of the park territory from the marauding times of Te Rauparaha. And, to heighten the impact of the scenic splendours, there is a poem by Henry van Dyke expressing a love of the open spaces. Afterwards, with Mr Reed and his innumerable friends, we take part in that notable first community walk from

Picton to Blenheim. Next, in company with this perenniallyyoung man, we walk the Heaphy Track as far as Karamea, making more friends on the way, listening to the songs of birds, and sharing the discomforts of the journey. But we find the discomforts were trivialities compared with the hardships, including near-starvation, of earlier adventurers—the first of them Charles Heaphy, V.C., and his companions—who walked the then ill-defined, hutless track in vain searches for grassy plains. Not a literary masterpiece this book, but a friendly guide to life and the things of nature that delight the eye and the senses.