26 December 2016 - Lake Mahinapua DOC Camp, Westland

We left Weedons early on Friday morning, picked up groceries in Hornby and headed west on Highway 73. In fact the road is rarely directly west as it passes firstly through Darfield and other small settlements dotted across the expansive Canterbury Plains, changing direction as the land contours will only allow. Travelling south along the east coast one certainly gets the scale of the plains lying to the east of the Southern Alps, but this is amplified again when one heads west, expecting to arrive at the foothills sooner than reality. We had travelled this road less than two years ago when we had our tour curtailed by family bereavement, that which in turn triggered our more recent UK travels, but as I have said more than once before, a road travelled in one direction is like a differnet route travelled in the other.

View up Waimakariri River from Bealey Point

We climbed the steep road up over Porter’s Pass at 923 metres ASL and down past Lake Lyndon, past the impressive plateaus and steep sections of Castle Hill Station. I had suggested we stop and walk up about the limestone tors at Castle Hill, and although the cold drizzly conditions had not put so many other travellers off, I was pleased instead to recall the time we had done so in better weather. We pressed on through the Craigeburn area where the pines are still recovering from the terrible fires that swept through here some years ago, and pulled into the recreational area at Lake Pearson, for which our UCC Pearson motorhome is named. There we lunched and enjoyed the scenery albeit from the confines of our mobile home.

Candy's Bend on the eastern side of Arthur's Pass

Then on again, when soon the road runs alongside the Transalpine rail and the upper reaches of the Waimakariri River, still wide braided here as it is downstream. We had been surprised to see so many of the rebel Russell Lupins along this route, having belived them to be only in the Mackenzie Country. Perhaps they have spread or perhaps it was simply a matter of timing. Here as elsewhere, we were delighted to see the colour splashed about these forbidding and awesome landscapes.

It was bitterly cold at Arthur’s Pass, still drizzling from time to time, and we were not encouraged to stop and explore, although we did pull into the lookout on Deaths Corner that overlooks Candy’s Bend. While this amazing feat of road engineering is more common to the likes of Switzerland, it is rare here, and never fails to impress. The road drops so very steeply and I was quite concerned when Chris voiced his dislike of descending such sections in this motorhome of ours. I have become a bad passenger as I have become older, and I need reasurance from The Chauffeur, not shared fears. 

However, he is a very good driver, and we do have brakes, just not the wonderful exhaust brakes we had in our Canter; their throaty roar was always so reasuring as one plunged down such routes.

Soon we were travelling through the misty valleys of the Otira and Taramakau Rivers, the high peaks close about us rising into the clouds and where we had our first sight of the South Island weka for the year. One tends to think that once you are through Arthur’s Pass, you have arrived on the West Coast, but it is more than sixty kilometres from Otira to Kumara Junction, where we turned south to Hokitika, just a further twenty two kilometres on.

Looking up the Hokitika River

Hokitika, as with most of the settlements on this coast, owes its existance to the goldrush of the 1860s. These days it has a population of about 4,000, but back in its heyday, or at least within two years of gold discovery, was home to over 6,000. Conveniently situated this far down the coast, it leant itself to a direct shipping route to Melbourne which was also experiencing the same boom. Despite a particularly dangerous bar at the Hokitika River mouth, the port was briefly the country’s busiest, often with ships moored four deep along Gibson Wharf. In time, dairying and timber became the economic base for the area, although these days tourism is the mainstay. Events such as the annual mid-March  Wildfoods Festival which draw up to 20,000 and other similar fests keep interest of the town alive, and surely Eleanor Catton’s recent Man Booker prize winning novel, The Luminaries, set in mid-1860s Hokitika must be given some credit.

The Chauffeur resting on Hokitika Beach

We spent the night across the Hokitika River at the NZMCA Park, another familiar spot then moved into the Beachside Holiday Park back across on the northern edge of town the next day. It was there we spent Christmas weekend, plugged into power, making the most of long hot showers and the proximity to the beach.

On Christmas morning, after having made numerous telephone calls to family members, we wandered out on to the driftwood strewn beach and walked until we came adjacent to the commercial part of town before heading back. The beaches on this coast are wild, and although the sea was not overly wild this morning, the great tree trunks and stumps and smooth flat stones are evidence of the power so often exerted here. It is no wonder that there were shipwrecks along this coast in years gone by.

Driftwood at Hokitika

We spent the greater part of Christmas day relaxing and reading, pausing every now and again to consume food and drink we generally ration ourselves. Even today, the fridge is still bulging with icecream and other goodies that are normally verboten and there is still wine untouched. This will have to be consumed otherwise it will continue to tease us,  who have recently and temporarily removed the grape from our diet.

We drove south from Hokitika this morning, amongst the last of our fellow campers to leave but they probably had to get to Christchurch, or Te Anau, or even further afield by nightfall. Those who had spent the night here at Lake Mahinapua were not as hurried; those moving on left after we arrived. The camp is quite lovely on the shores of this typical West Coast lake, the rain forest reaching right down to the shores creating the impression of a drowned forest rather than a naturally evolved lake.

Lake Mahinapua

This lake was part of a chain of waterways that made for transport ease up and down the goldfields  and timber milling here on the coast during the mid to later 1800s. Here on the shores of Lake Mahinapua is a partially rebuilt paddle steamer , this one originally built on Gibson Quay in Hokitika in 1883; forty nine feet long and with a beam of fourteen feet. It was originally built for a contractor who was charged with dredging the Mahinapua Creek to a navigable standard.

There are several little walks accessed from the day carpark or the camp here; this afternoon we did the Bellbird walk, and did indeed hear bellbirds. But then we had been greeted by these medoius birds when we backed into our screened alcove. Blackbirds, tuis and a friendly weka, the latter whom I later fed with stale bread, had also greeted us on arrival.

Today, as over the days at the motor camp, we have had our awning out, a rarity for us who tend to remain inside looking out when not “doing stuff”. But today the cool wind drove us in early and the mosquitos kept us alert. Although I have suggested just recently that summer has arrived, I have still to shed the layers of clothing that hot weather normally forbids.