No spice of life for S. Island travellers

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33964, 3 October 1975, Page 5

No spice of life for S. Island travellers

'By

ROSSLYN RIX)

An Australian newspaper columnist said recently that if Australians had forgotten what their country’s food was like before the New Australians arrived to do the cooking they could hop across the Tasman to New Zealand to refresh their memory.

Alas, on trips around the South Island this has been found to be true. Travellers can feast their eyes on magnificent scenery and revitalise the spirit with exhilarating -outdoor activities while the ■body is starved of the spice lof life and pained with I indigestion. ■ The Prime Minister (Mr Rowling) said at the annual convention of the Travel Agents’ Association of New Zealand, on Thursday evening, that New Zealand’s tourist industry was a healthy one. Healthy the industry may be, but the tourist who considers that sampling a country’s national delicacies should be as interesting as sightseeing might not enjoy such feelings of wellbeing. Some tourists would perhaps be amused at our custom of eating fish and chips from a newspaper and would try it, but it is doubtful whether they could survive a six-weeks holiday on such a diet.

No-one can deny that food is a matter of taste and that one man’s fish and chips is another man’s poison, but it is the lack of variety and imagination that irks. .

The monotonous selections on the menus of the eating establishments “along the way” rival the Monty Python hyberbole “spam, spam and spam.” One one trip a friend and I stopped at a cafe on the Main South Road between Ashburton and Timaru where patrons could choose between national delicacies such as fish and chips, egg and chips, egg and sausages and chips, sausages and chips, egg and bacon and chips, baked beans and chips, steak and chips, steak and egg and chips, spring rolls and chips, to mention but a few. The desserts come without chips, but not always the salads. At a restaurant at Hanmer Springs I ordered a salmon salad, to be on the safe side. It appeared — a circle of salmon, a handful of shredded cabbage, a few slices of tomato, tinned peas and a mountain of chips.

The spring rolls or steak, or whatever, come to the table buried under the mountain of übiquitous chips and embellished with a meagre scoop of vegetation, usually shredded cabbage or lettuce which someone has taken the trouble to squeeze the moisture out of. This is topped with a slice of tomato and a dollop of mayonaise. If that were the case in one or perhaps two restaurants between New Zealand coasts, travellers could possibly avoid them by travelling a different route but the menus are the same in so many restaurants that they would have to take a detour to a major city to have a decent feed. “PRISONERS” The service in many of these places would leave nothing to be desired if you were an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp. We enencountered a waitress at one West Coast hotel who herded her “prisoners” down to tables near the kitchen door, actually uprooted them from their tables in the quiet little comers. The meal was breakfast and those who suffer from an inability to communicate at an early hour of the morning were appearing to find it difficult to make polite breakfast-table conversation

with the strangers who had been ordered to sit at their tables.

Because the dining room eventually filled up, the waitress did not save herself any time or energy by ordering patrons to sit closer to the kitchen.

This experience left us

somewhat daunted and (around noon) back on the open road again we tried to ignore the rumblings emanating from our stomach and stop somewhere for a cup of coffee only. “You can’t have just coffee. lunch is on,” growled the waitress at our coffee stop. Pushing back our chairs in noisy disapproval we headed for the door refusing her ungracious offer of take-away coffee or tea in a waxed paper cup. Later that day when oiiri intestinal rumblings reached, a crescendo and we began: looking for signs of scurvy and malnutrition we decided to book into a motel, buy some provisions and cook ourselves a decent meal. If it had not been for the pouring rain we would have lit a fire in a camping area, boiled a billy and had a barbecue.

We have learnt to do this whenever the weather permits. It is really the only way to eat out when travelling round the South Island.