Cycling to the Coast

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32702, 3 September 1971, Page 6

Cycling to the Coast

By

RAY PIPER

A few weeks ago I flew from Harewood Airport to Hokitika in a matter of 35 to 40 minutes. Aloft in a clear, blue sky the view was magnificent: the patchwork quilt of farms on the flat terrain of the Canterbury Plains, with their neat symmetrical paddocks, changing quickly to the ruggedness of the snow-laden foothills and mountains of the Alps.

The speed of that trip bore little comparison to my first visit to the Coast early in 1932. Mind you, my mode of transport then was a little less sophisticated —a bicyce, and a very ordinary model at that.

The urge to make my first journey stemmed from the fact that my schoolmate’s elder brother was at that time working in Grey-

mouth and the stories he told us of life there so stimulated our interest, we tossed aside the works of our favourite authors (Zane Grey and Jack London) and transferred our affections to whatever we could find in our local library on early Coast history. Of all school subjects, history ranked lowest in my popularity poll, but the tales of those romantic, gold-rush days read more like best-selling novels. More important still was the fact that the events took place only a matter of a life-span ago and only 150 miles away over the hill! This was for us!

It was now just a matter of two bikes, as little camping gear as necessary, some pertinent advice from our respective parents on camp and personal hygiene, and we were almost ready to go. One small duty call had to be made before we headed west. My friend’s grandmother said she would cook something sustaining for us to help us on the way, and this she did, in no uncertain terms a Christmas pudding large enough to feed a regiment. I’m sure she believed that, fortified by its rich content, we would cycle gaily up Porter’s Pass no hands and whistling “Rule Britannia.”. And so it became part of our luggage—in terms of weight and inconvenience, the greater part of it. Two

days later we shared a portion of it with a roadman and left him the balance, in spite of his protestations. He probably used it to fill a pot-hole. I won’t retrace every mile of the journey, except to say that from around about West Melton it was unsealed road to within a few miles of Greymouth; we faced a nor’west wind all throughout the first day; we had a horse tangle in our tent ropes and rip it asunder on the second night; and we spent most of a frustrating, exhausting, third morning trying to wheel our laden bikes across the wide and thenunbridged river at Bealey. Perhaps it is a personal reaction of mine (after the original ordeal) that I now approach the stretch of road between Bealey and Arthur’s Pass with such enthusiasm. I traversed it in 1932 by bicycle, in midsummer heat; a few weeks ago by car, in late-winter crispness, the trees wearing Nature’s make-up of fine, talcum-like powder snow, icicles hanging from the rocks like swords and daggers of glass. It is really the first part of the road where you find yourself at close quarters with the bush, a welcome relief after looking at the grassed, almost treeless hillsides that constitute so much of the landscape from Springfield to Bealey.

From the time we left Christchurch that first journey it three and a half days and several unrevealable blisters later when we cycled triumphantly into Greymouth—no red carpet, no Mayoral welcome. In fact, the only evidence suggesting our arrival had been noticed was an asthmatic whistle from a railway engine to warn us it was about to cross Tainui Street.