Westward Ho!

A standout memory from my teaching career was the day that I had to defend William Shakespeare's choice of language from charges of inappropriateness. In The Tempest, Act I, Prospero summons Caliban, his beastly servant.

       '. . . What, ho! Slave! Caliban!

      Thou earth, thou! speak! 

There is no easy translation for 'ho' - though 'hey there' would do the job. To this classroom of teens, however, my attempts at offering alternate meanings were clearly inadequate. They were offended, in a giggly sort of way, that this old timer (Shakespeare, you understand) could use such pejorative language. To be fair, this is Caliban's first appearance in the play. Perhaps his gender was unclear. Perhaps Prospero was indeed looking for a ho . . .

Where am I going with this? Thanks for asking. Westward. Ho. In Bill.

Bill has had a life of his own lately (Bill, you ho!)  so we thought it time to renew family bonds. He has been rented out to couples and families wanting to explore the South Island, via the Mighway platform, which can be best described as Bookabach on wheels.

With two more hires still to come this summer, we seized the chance for a few days away on the West Coast. 

At the end of the Buller Gorge, there is a choice. Left to Greymouth and the glaciers, right to Westport. Left to the tourist trail. Right to empty roads and vast rain-washed skies. 

After a night parked on the beach just north of the Big Smoke, Westport, we continued up the coastal road, turning right at Waimangaroa to travel nine steep kilometers and 130 years back in time. The Denniston plateau,  well known probably thanks to Jenny Pattrick's novels, is another world, high in the sky. We rode our bikes over challenging and unforgiving rocky terrain before the encroaching clouds and precipitation forced us back to Bill and dry clothes. 

Then we wandered around the ghostly remains of the aerial tramway that took coal, on an industrial scale,  from this inhospitable landscape. The lives of the miners and their families were as fraught as you'd imagine. For the twenty years before the road was constructed, the only practicable way down the hill was by coal cart - straight over the edge of the plateau 500 metres above sea level. Some women never left Denniston in those 20 years.

Warning: more history to come.

Sometime during the last millennium, we took a road trip to the Coast with cousins Graham and Julia. This was probably in the 1970s, so picture us as four fresh-faced and naive city-dwelling 20-somethings.

North of the Denniston turnoff lie the three hamlets of Granity, Ngakawau and Hector. They merge into each other now but Ngakawau is the subject of this shuffle down memory lane.

Time for a beer?

After a night in Westport, the four of us planned to visit a distant cousin of Julia's. We drove to Ngakawau early in the morning, pinpointed the house of the distant cousin and knocked on the door, looking forward to a nice cup of tea.

The distant cousin's name is long gone from my memory but his hospitality has become legend. "Would you folk like a beer?" Sigh.

A little further north of Ngakawau, we parked up at Gentle Annie at the mouth of the Mokihinui River, a location better known to overseas tourists than to Kiwis, I suspect. It's a glorious spot, with the added bonus of a very cool cafè,  open 12 hours a day and staffed by wwoofers . It's also near the end of the internationally renowned Old Ghost Road tramping/cycling trail.

Comfy couches, great coffee ....
In the middle of nowhere

It was a leisurely start the next morning. I blame the café and the views. Our destination was the Charming Creek walkway. Yet another testament to the determination of early entrepreneurs to extract as much of our coal and timber resources as possible, this 9km track followed the original railway up into the hills above Ngakawau.

The rails and hardwood sleepers made this a bone-shaking challenge for cyclists. Which is perhaps why we were not only the oldest on the track but the only ones on bikes.

Charming Creek 

DOC staff were hard at work, maintaining the trail and re-roofing an old hut. This walk was also on the to-do list for overseas tourists, in the main young backpackers travelling in campers.

By this, our third day on bikes, legs and shoulders had had enough.  Well, mine anyway. I can't speak for Tour Leader.

Bill took us back down the coast road and into the Buller Gorge, a spectacular journey in its own right. Our final stop was at Lyell, a DOC campsite home for the night to cyclists about to start their Old Ghost Road adventure . . . and to a particularly persistent breed of sandfly.  The rain arrived shortly after we did. Tour Leader gave up on the idea of a wee ride on the track. We battened down the hatches and read our books, pretending we didn't miss the internet one little bit.

They have smashing sunsets in this part of the world