The Great New Zealand Road Trip: Kilometers 0 - 450

My one night in Sydney, between getting off the Indian-Pacific and flying to Christchurch, I scrubbed my boots with a toothbrush. Not my tooth-brush, thank god, but a toothbrush donated by one of my roomies at the hostel. If you have never attempted to scrub cow shit and mud off of hiking boots with a toothbrush, allow me to recommend it as an exercise in persistence and gag-reflex control. At a certain point, I decided that I had had enough, tossed the toothbrush in the garbage, and tied my minty-fresh boots to my backpack. New Zealand can just deal with it, I thought. And New Zealand did deal with it, by detaining me, confiscating my boots, tent, gardening gloves, and gardening hat and taking them into a back room to do unspeakable things to them. After a thorough search of my bag to make sure I wasn’t trying to smuggle any other illegal dirt over the border, they returned my violated belongings to me - my tent still can’t look me in the eye. But on the plus side, they were very very nice while they did all this, so it was really hard to feel even remotely put out. Welcome to New Zealand!

Death's Corner. That's the actual name.

The next morning, bright and early-ish, I set out, with a rough map, a slightly broken GPS, and a vague idea of where I was going on my Great, If A Little Short, New Zealand Road Trip. The good news is that I have become very comfortable with driving on the left, so much so that I’m not sure I’m going to remember how to drive in the States. The bad news? New Zealand is committed to being the most terrifying place I have ever been behind the wheel of a car. My first day’s goal was to drive Arthur’s Pass, which goes up through the Southern Alps before descending to the ‘wild’ west coast. This, in hindsight, may have been a poor choice. Kiwis, as far as I can tell, like their roads as twisty as possible, the better to pretend that they are in The Italian Job. Get up into the mountains, and not only do these roads twist like a dancing snake but they also bob up and down and veer along sheer cliffs and dizzying precipices. Kiwis also appear to not believe in guard rails, so there is usually nothing between you and car pancake. Throw in confusing or missing road signs, more grit than I have ever felt in a road, and occasional rockfalls, and I think it’s a miracle I didn’t just turn around and head right back to Christchurch, where I might get swallowed up in an earthquake, but at least I couldn’t fall off of a mountain. Instead, I navigated these roads as best I could, stopping frequently to let death-seeking kiwis zoom past me (obviously, their driving classes involve some kind of Advanced Cornering workshop, because I still can’t fathom how they took some of those turns at the speeds they did; I saw road signs advising 15km/hr around some of these bends, which I think is roughly walking speed, and these lunatics were zooming merrily down at 100 km/hr. I can only assume they were all making ‘zoom zoom’ noises with their mouths while they went). I was not assisted in any of this by the fact that my car, try as it might, could barely exceed 80 km/hr on the downhill stretches, and probably weighed only slightly more than my backpack. I was concerned that a strong gust of wind would blow me off the road, or that one of the mountain parrots that landed on the roof whenever I stopped would get the idea to pick the whole car up and fly off with it. 

To quote a Kiwi I met, "They may be native, but they're still a bloody pest."

The difficulty of driving Kiwi-side is further compounded by New Zealand itself. I suppose you could say New Zealand is pretty. It would probably not be inaccurate to say that every 5 minutes I almost swerved off the road because something breath-taking appeared in front of me. I mean that literally, by the time I reached my destination that first night, hours after I should have because I kept stopping to take pictures, I was gasping from beauty. Never mind the soaring mountains, which rise up majestic and aloof above Christchurch, only to descend into supple rolling hills and soft green valleys on the west coast side, like Tilda Swinton suddenly turning into Scarlet Johannson, and never mind the rocky crags and icy lakes, and tiny towns nestled between the peaks; even if you can get through all of that without feeling like you’ve been transported into some land out of a fairy tale, the sea then rises up in front of you, as you’re still negotiating the final twists and turns of the foothills. This is, perhaps, the American in me, but there was something just utterly astonishing about turning a mountainous corner and having the ocean open up in front of me - I could still see snow-covered peaks in my rearview mirror, what on earth did the sea think it was doing that close to craggy summits! To compound it, the sun happened to be setting over the ocean as it came into view, creating this sun-gilded landscape of rich green fields, wind-swept trees, and iron grey beaches. I believe I actually started swearing at New Zealand at that point, because do you know what there was on this perfect stretch of land, this gem nuzzled between mountains and beach? Cows. And sheep. An occasional alpaca. Surveying the ocean, chewing their cud, and just generally not appreciating that they were in a paddock in probably one of the most beautiful spots in the world. In that moment, I was almost offended - I mean, what had those cows done to deserve that view - but in hindsight I think this is a huge part of New Zealand’s charm. It just doesn’t know how stunning it is; all the other countries must hate it for not even having to try. 

Just to really finish off this mental picture, you have to know that these are not normal cows. These are like half-breed yetis, venturing down from the mountains. They’re roughly the size of a ute, and covered in thick, luscious fluff that makes them look like they just had a perm. They also, apparently, are part mountain goat, because I frequently saw them halfway up a rock wall, happily eating whatever it is that grows on a rock wall. The sheep, likewise, are so absurdly fluffy and wooly that it seems like someone stuck their tiny black heads on as an after thought, presumably because giant walking yarn balls can’t feed themselves. 

After venting my anger at the privileged barnyard animals, and successfully managing to stay on the road and not swerve off while staring at the jade fields and amber sea, I finally pulled in to one of the most charming hostels I have ever seen. It was a two-story wood cabin, that smelled delightfully of wood smoke and mothballs. Perfect, I thought. The proprietress showed me my room, and then the lovely communal kitchen that felt like home, with quirky art and little jars with tea and coffee and a bin for food scraps to be fed to the chickens. There was even an old wood-burning stove, crackling merrily away, and a bunch of hot-water bottles hanging on pegs. Charming! Or, you know, a necessity, as I found out that night, when the temperature plummeted and I realized that no one in New Zealand appears to believe in central heating. I ended up sandwiching myself between 3 hot water bottles and stealing the quilt off the other bed in my room (there was no one in it, I promise), a situation which actually kept me fairly warm, but made getting up in the morning, when I could see my breath creating frost sculptures in the air, a wee bit unpleasant. Until I became more accustomed to the cold, I trudged around New Zealand looking vaguely homeless - I didn’t really have clothing suited to the weather, so I compensated by putting on everything I owned, and some things, in a variety of sizes, that I had borrowed, until it looked like I had rolled around in a laundry bin for a bit and then just walked away with whatever stuck to my body. I never quite got to the point of wearing socks on my hands, mostly because by this point my socks resembled a 5-year-old rag abandoned at the back of a veterinary hospital, but I compensated by walking around with my hands stuck in my armpits like a bad Saturday Night Live parody. 

Hokitika Gorge. Can you find the unicorns?

However, as soon as I started wandering around the next day, I didn’t care if I was freezing - in fact, I probably would have happily sacrificed a finger to New Zealand if it would have made her happy. There’s only so long that it’s interesting to read someone else rhapsodizing about how beautiful a place is, so suffice it to say that New Zealand made me wish I was a painter, or a poet, because there would be no other way to capture the unadulterated joy of that landscape. While I know that I have gotten significantly sappier as I’ve gotten older, I don’t know that a landscape has ever made me tear up before, but New Zealand did, with ease. That first day, among other stops, I visited the Hokitika Gorge, which looked like the kind of place where unicorns should bathe and fairies should sleep on flower petals. I didn’t want to leave, because it didn’t seem possible that such a place could actually exist; I was afraid I would try to look back and it would be gone, or at least covered in graffiti and strewn with litter. I found this constantly amazing, everywhere I’ve been in New Zealand - they basically let you go wherever you want, and no one seems to abuse this privilege. There are very few fences or gates, DO NOT ENTER signs or glass walls preventing you from cavorting on those mythic rocks. Just try not to hurt yourself. Perhaps some of this is because everything is in the middle of nowhere, so they figure very few people will actually figure out how to get there, let alone manage to do anything completely stupid. The road to the Hokitika Gorge meandered its way through farmland, across paddocks, around people’s yards; occasionally there would be a small, hand-painted sign telling you that you were still heading in the right direction, and you just had to hope that they weren’t leading you out into the middle of nowhere to feed you to the cows. Maybe that’s why their bovines were so big, because they were fed with gullible tourists. I decided I didn’t care, because the farmland was beautiful, damp and deep green, with picturesque fences and barns of weathered wood covered in moss. If I had to be fed to a cow, at least I would know if was for a good cause.

That night, after my day of adventure, which was rounded out with a hike around a forest-buried lake and a tree-top walk among the branches of giant Rimu and Kahikatea trees, I swung by a glowworm glen near the hostel. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I wasn’t prepared for a tiny pitch-black hole amongst the trees with a small sign that simply said ‘Glowworms’ with an arrow. I trudged in with my flashlight, keeping it pointed at the ground, and was rewarded with thousands of tiny glowworm stars twinkling on the walls. However, I was apparently feeling a little jumpy, perhaps all that time spent thinking that crazy Kiwis were going to try to feed me to their livestock, and as I turned around to head back to the car, I saw something looming over my shoulder. My heart tried to make a run for it, and I snapped back around with a little yelp, playing my flashlight over the poor defenseless glowworms until I realized that what I had seen was not a vampire, a rapist, or a giant spider-monster, but had in fact been…my braid. Swinging behind my head. Because I am Kate, the Hair Heroine, the Battler of Braids. I think maybe it’s time for a haircut. 

Glowworm Glen - what a tourist trap looks like in NZ