The coach-driver’s lot is a wide and varied one

Press, 2 September 1986, Page 24

The coach-driver’s lot is a wide and varied one

Entertainment officer, accommodation co-ordina-tor, luggage overseer, first aid officer, crisis manager, and chief adviser — the lot of a coach driver is a many-varied one. Mr Tommy Christieson, a Mount Cook land-line driver, has had 19 years in the business and says he would not swap it for any other profession. Seated behind the wheel of an MC-D (Mount CookDenning) coach with a load of passengers aboard. Mr Christieson could not be happier. “I had always wanted to be a driver, right from the days when I used to see the Mount Cook coaches pictured in advertisements forging through the snow and rivers,” Mr Christieson said. The Hawera-born Mr Christieson has done his fair share of coping with the south’s fickle weather

and terrain, and recalls particularly the day when everything went dark in the Homer Tunnel en-route to . Milford Sound.

“Suddenly the light we had been able to see at the other end of the tunnel just vanished,” he said.

An avalanche had blocked the end and Mr Christieson was forced to back all the way out — no mean feat without the aid of reversing lights which did not feature on the coaches of the day. Meeting people is one of the highlights of any driver-couriers’ career, and Mr Christieson is no exception. In the days when the Mount Cook company ran a fleet of Impala Chevrolets for individual tours he chauffeured the likes of composer Benjamin Britten and Princes Marguerite of Hess.

His oldest passenger was a Tasmanian woman who turned 90 the day the tour left and lived it up all the way. “She started off with a birthday morning tea, had

her photograph taken for the newspapers while in the driver’s seat, landed on the Tasman Glacier in a ski-plane, rode jet boats and helicopters in Queenstown, flew into Milford Sound and got the most out of every minute of the trip,” said Mr Christieson.

Coach travel often spurs passengers to break into song, and never has Mr Christiesen appreciated this as much as when he drove the Vienna Boys Choir to Invercargill. A big fan of the choir he could not believe his luck to be driving to the harmony of Viennese songs the whole way. Not all passengers are as easy to cope with. Mr Christieson remembers one trip when nothing was right for one passenger. Things came to a head when the passenger complained long and loudly about the quality of the soup in one of the hotels — soup which he regards as the best he has ever fasted.

"Another of the passengers was so fed up with this woman’s moaning

that she got up and tipped the soup over her.”

How do you cope with that? Mr Christieson did, and it will take a lot more

than that to dampen his spirits and take the shine off his profession.