The coast: Apart from ’asphalt jungle’

Press, 30 November 1978, Page 24

The coast: Apart from ’asphalt jungle’

“There’s something about the Coast,” returned travellers say knowledgeably, and not many New Zealanders have to be told that they mean the West Coast of the South Island. Its reputation as Something Different has become accepted, no mean feat in a country as diverse as this one. To Coasters are attributed pioneer virtues born of years of isolation beyond the Southern Alps. Coasters are friendly and hospitable. Coasters are . Dinkum Kiwis. The Coast is timber and coal and still gold in the creeks, the Coast is Mount Cook seen from the beach, fat cattle, fat woodpigoens in the cool evergreen forest. And rain. The Wet Coast has suffered from bad jokes since gold-rush times. Today P.R.O.s quickly counter with figures to prove that most rain falls at night, that the district has more rainless days than lots of other places, and more sunshine (Hokitika, for instance, usually tops Auckland in the annual sunshine count). But who cares? How else could you et such sparkle on the

lakes, such well-washed air such a cleaner-than-clean fragrance in the bush? It must be admitted that the first white visitors were not impressed. They' found fewer than a hundred Maoris living there; its main attraction was as the sole source of greenstone, a type of jade invaluable to a Stone Age people and still the Coast’s most wanted souvenir. But the Coast is not all paydirt and history. People have been going there for pleasure as well as profit ever since the times when they had to chance the bar-bound river-ports in tiny steamers, ride Cobb’s coaches over the scary transalpine road from Canterbury, or endure vintage car-sick-ness round the dusty bends of the Buller Gorge from Nelson. The opening of the five-mile Otira rail tunnel in 1918 was a help but • the breakthrough really came in 1965 when the Haast Pass road in the south was finished after thirty years in the making. This ended the need for back-tracking, a ma- " noeuvre traditionally ab- I horrent to travellers, moved the celebrated lakes and fiords of OtagoSouthland to within short

distance of the celebrated glaciers of South Wests land, and opened a scenery circuit that brought a dreamy look to the eves of travel agents. From the top, a quick rundown: In the north, beyond Westport, on the way to Kara m e a (subtropical, away-from-it-all) the coal townships of Granity and others sit by the sea below the plateau containing a vast bituminous coalfield (worth the drive up for the view alone). Coal trucks used to plunge some two thousand feet down the steep Denniston Incline, one of the engineering marvels when coal was king. Take the coastal road south, with a photographic stop at the pancake rocks and blowholes of Punakaiki, quite a sight if big rollers are surging in from the Tasman Sea. At Greymouth you can arrange a visit to a coalmine if you want to know what it’s like underground (spooky). Or try the jetboat ride up the Tara* makau River to the Ranieri sold dredae. last of

the fleet. Hokitika, alas, no longer boasts a hundred hotels and grog-shops but the little museum will show you something of those Good Old Days. Some people like to watch greenstone being polished; the factory is supplied by helicopter-lift from the Arahura Valley. Don’t miss the lakes: Kaniere, beautiful, but busy at holiday times with picnics and powerboats; Brunner, where guests at the southern lakeside lodge take over a thousand trout in a season. Drive on to Ross, once considered the richest piece of alluvial ground in New Zealand, and past lakes lanthe and Mapourika to the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, which surprise geographers by reaching some sjx hundred feet above sea level, a record for temperate lands. The glaciers are world-known resorts with first-class accommodation 1 and well-proved attract tions: sightseeing flights among the peaks, guided tours on the ice, rambles in the bush, excursions to

reflective Lake Matheson or to find gemstones on Gillespie’s Beach. After that there is only one way to go. Through the blue-green countryside of South Westland (where the whitebait comes from) then over the gentle Haast to the brown tussock lands of Wanaka — and a different world. The slim ledge of land running for four hundred miles between the snowtopped Alps and the ocean is a long way from the asphalt jungle. The skyscrapers are tall rimu trees, the smog is salt seaspray, the people have time to talk; it is good to go to sleep to the sound of Tasman breakers on the shingle or maybe rain on the roof. Yes, there’s something about the Coast.