A great drive remembered on Home Services

Jan

A great drive remembered

posted by admin in Window Cleaning

The suck, draw and crash of wild surf is one of the surest cures for life-rage I know.

And there’s no coastline quite like that of the west of the South Island for putting things into perspective %26#8211 both visually and philosophically.

Where the Tasman Sea charges the land below Charleston, about 20 minutes south of Westport, there’s a series of bays and promontories with a stunning appearance that on a clear day can literally stop you in your tracks. Dark fingers of land are separated by the natural liquid lacework of turbulent, spume-edged, often impossibly turquoise shallows which fade out to indigo depths that don’t stop ’til Australia.

Fortunately, the nation’s road-builders have been forced to carve out SH6 quite tight against the angry Tasman for much of the Westport to Greymouth stretch, prevented by spectacularly steep, bush-clad ramparts just inland, from putting the road anywhere else.

It’s very much MX-5 country, a magic 90-odd kilometre snake of beautifully-wrought curves and sometimes deceptive hairpins that reward any driver with a modicum of petrol in their blood.

Driving south, as we were, on a well-earned weekend away from work, the Tasman surged on the right while a soft green wall of pungas, cabbage trees and nikau palms fluttered close by in our slipstream to the left.

Our destination was Punakaiki, or more accurately, the Punakaiki Rocks Hotel and Villas, for a restful overnighter, before heading back to the city we’d left some six hours before.

We’d taken our time over the uncannily exact 400km from doorstep to doorstep, driving “the long way” to the famous Pancake rocks, through the Lewis Pass, Reefton, the Buller Gorge and Greymouth, before the mighty Tasman came into view.

It all started with a grey, overcast morning out of Christchurch, heading north on SH1. We peeled off at Waipara to SH7 and immediately the traffic thinned to a smatter, while cool grey started to make way for Wedgwood blue.

Warm enough now to drop the top, we donned our necessary headgear and noted that from unclamping the hood (just one clamp on the new MX-5’s headrail) to clicking it snug behind the seats, takes about as long as it does to read this sentence. There’s also no fiddling with a tonneau, the roof forms its own cover %26#8211 nice.

The jinking curves of SH7 are pleasant and fun enough between Culverden and the Hanmer turnoff, but beyond, it becomes positively spectacular, as the Doubtful and Poplar ranges hove into view and you understand why watercolourists brush distant mountains in hues of purple %26#8211 it’s because they are.v

From the wide sweeping curves of the Waiau valley, the highway courses north and into the Lewis Pass proper. Here, open spaces and craggy outcrops are replaced by tunnels of sun-flecked beech forest as the road follows the Lewis river only to sweep westward again through Maruia Springs and down into Springs junction where we hook left for Reefton and the coast.

Well spruced-up from its earlier days, Reefton on a warm summer’s morning looks like its colours are yet to dry. There are hand-written vacancy signs, and advertising posters pointing to scones and teas, and a charmingly home-wrought frieze on the public toilet in honour of New Zealand’s first electric street lights which first ignited in August 1888.

Our route makes its final lunge to the west at the small gold rush town of Inangahua Junction at the confluence of the Inangahua and Buller rivers, 30km north of Reefton. It’s known for the earthquake on May 24, 1968 that took three lives from its tiny population %26#8211 which had thankfully shrunk back from the many thousands who called the place home during the early years.

The 45km run along the Buller gorge into Westport is a delight, with the Paparoa Range to the left and the Mount William peaks to the right. The road is often a single carriageway and the limestone sometimes overhangs the road.

At one time, Westport was a forest of ocean-going masts and sails and between the 1860s and 1900 the port serviced local coal mines and the gold dredges on the Buller River.

Now, along with the transporting of coal and cement by rail to the East Coast or directly to market by sea, there’s also a significant fishing industry. Westport makes much of being a hub for West Coast tourism and like all places on the coast: is particularly clean and well kempt.

Before heading south to Punakaiki, the well-signposted seal colony at Tauranga bay is worth a visit. It’s about 15km from Westport through Carters Beach and Cape Foulwind, where the wind will blow the cobwebs out of any hangover, the locals say.

Cutting eastward 10km across Addison’s Flat to the main highway, you take a hard right to join the road down to the tiny burg of Charleston.

In gold rush days, Charleston had more than 12,000 inhabitants, scores of drinking establishments, banks, theatres, its own hospital and a library. Now, the population is better measured in dozens rather than thousands.

Charleston marks the point at which the highway traces the Tasman’s ragged edge. It’s where the scenery starts to draw your breath away and where deserted beaches and lush green fernery compete for your attention.

Turn to I2

From I1

You’ll stop, as we did, a dozen times between Charleston and Punakaiki. The sea and its troubled relationship with well-eroded dry land is there to be seen, as the swell rhythmically hides and exposes rock and sand, its retiring hiss replaced seconds later by further waves of insistent surf.

We were lucky weatherwise %26#8211 even West Coasters will tell you that 25deg days are rare and it would be true to say we hadn’t seen a cloud since Culverden %26#8211 300km ago.

Where the first part of our journey brought the fragrances of blooming broom and cabbage tree into our open cockpit, the Tasman-edged part of our journey invited the tang of the sea. With the shriek of gulls and shags and the purer harmonies of the grey warbler and bell bird this would have given us good reason to drive top-down even if the weather hadn’t.

Cruise control was well forgotten at this point. The road ducks and dives so much along between Needle Point and Woodpecker Bay, that we were snicking through the Mazda’s switch-quick ratios with abandon and revelling in one of the world’s true drivers’ cars. It gets even better after stopping to photograph the headland at Kaipakati Point; from then on the highway takes on the guise of the Pacific Coast Highway south of Carmel, California in the late ’60s when it coiled challengingly down to Big Sur.

But as we tour on to Hatters and Meybille Bays, there are no long-boarders, just the spectacular antics of shags, some free-falling into the sea, others wings akimbo, drying their feathers in the warm spring breeze.

We park-up on the short raised seaberm at Punakaiki with not another soul in sight, photographing the car with Dolomite Point in front of us, home to the famous blow holes at Pancake Rocks.

The rocks consist of eroded limestone slabs which resemble stacked pancakes, with their corduroy of striations running horizontally through every outcrop.

The famous blowholes can be approached after an easy 10 minute walk through delightful bush and nikau palms. There’s a circular walking trail, at the edge of which numerous viewing points are set for photographing the rocks and blowholes or merely contemplating the steep lost-world hinterland and the Southern Alps.

To call the Punakaiki Rocks Hotel a complex doesn’t do it justice. It’s a pleasingly sympathetic accommodation, bar and restaurant with views you can’t match anywhere, good food, enthusiastic staff and, we were glad to say, villas that have the Tasman only a balcony and beach away at one end and native bush at the other.

Driftwood-covered and Dotterel-nested, the beach has coarse but not unpleasant sand upon it, and will not have changed much in hundreds of years. The surf, its calmingly natural white noise will be ever-present during our brief stay, wobbles, folds and tumbles in quick succession and we watch it do so during a late lunch of seafood platter in the bar. For dinner, we had a table at the window for the view, an excellent beef main and a bottle of more than potable house red to help lubricate the evening.

We watched the surf and swore we could hear the copper-gold sun hiss as it slid into the Tasman.

Motoring journalists’ weekends are seldom long and never without deadlines %26#8211 even when they’re “away” %26#8211 so we head home in the morning to Christchurch after a light breakfast, and to the same view we enjoyed the night before, we take a final stroll on the beach.

The 43km into Greymouth are much the same as those we’d driven into Punakaiki, surf on one side, bush on the other, and during one stop at Seventeen Mile Bluff, I could swear the sound of crashing waves was mixed with youthful laughter.

What I was hearing was a memory, wishful thinking if you like, perhaps a trick of the mind when you’re leaving something special, only eased slightly by the knowledge you can go back.

Greymouth has tidied itself remarkably in recent years. The wee museum is dapper and tidy, and on the sea wall, telegraph poles carved to look like giant drill bits stand proud and provide an unmissable photo-op.

South of Greymouth as we thread our way through Paroa, Gladstone and Camerons, SH6 is lined with homes and motels, and some light industry, but the abrupt turn inland to Kumara Junction at the confluence with SH73 and eventually Kumara itself brings us back to nature again.

As the day before, traffic was light, and after overtaking a wobbling Harley Davidson at Dillmanstown, we wouldn’t see another vehicle until Otira, where the best cup of tea in the South Island was consumed at the Otira pub %26#8211 made famous by Marcus Lush’s Off the Rails TV series.

Otira nestles snugly in Arthurs Pass National Park, and was originally a railway village when rail really was the only way to travel.

In the irrepressible sunshine, tea on the veranda at the pub was great, the biscuits welcome and soon we’d be away to Arthur’s for lunch before the descent onto the Canterbury plains and home.

Some railed against the building of the Otira viaduct, which was completed in 1998 to avoid rockfall and erosion dangers with the existing road. The 440m long four-span bridge is however, superb, giving nature’s own rocky magnificence a sense of human scale. In other words, without its post-tensioned box-girdered sweep, you’d never realise just how big and wonderful our main divide really is.

The old Swiss Chalet in Arthurs Pass does pizzas well and a good, thirst-slaking lemon, lime and bitters %26#8211 made fresh, not from a bottle. We spend time talking through the 650-odd kilometres we’d driven since the previous morning. The car was perfect, the seats brilliant %26#8211 important when you’re middle-aged and not as fit as you used to be %26#8211 and its chassis an ideal tool with which to negotiate some of New Zealand’s finest driving roads.

The final 150km is more sombre than the first day’s drive, despite great tussock covered slopes, riverbeds of bright blue and purple lupins and the reflective dapple of babbling river flats below us.

It’s because we’re slotted into cruise control, as camera vans line long downhill straights where neither accident nor fatality have occurred in living memory. The cynical safety policy takes the edge off a perfect golden weekend of great places, gorgeous roads, a fine car and a refreshed inner self.