The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Be astounded by the sweeping enormity of it all’
New Zealand has yet again been voted best country by Telegraph readers. Griff Rhys Jones falls under its dazzling spell
‘Have you done New Zealand?” What sort of question is that? People don’t visit a place any more. They tick it off their list like a tax return. Mind you, when I first went to Aotearoa – the “Land of the Long White Cloud”
(voted best country once again by Telegraph Travel readers) – I was on a comedy tour, so all I explored was hotel rooms, airports and minibars. I didn’t really do anything else.
Returning after 35 years for more theatre-bashing, I decided to put in extra time to find out what all the fuss was about. I had played Christchurch but was ready for the deep south.
The devastating 2011 earthquake in Christchurch killed 185 people. It razed countless buildings and sadly made the centre more like the
“English town” that it purported to be in 1985, with blank, empty lots on every corner. Magically, however, the trees of Christchurch survived. The quake shook their roots, but few toppled. At the beginning of November, when I was there, chilly Pacific winds were tossing their bright green leaves.
Despite the fond belief among Kiwis that they live in a semi-tropical paradise, Christchurch felt exactly like a breezy, brisk early English summer. What a treat. To transport yourself from autumn in Britain straight into spring was like some miraculous marvel of time travel.
“This rain is good,” the security man told me, as I boarded a connecting plane south. “You have to see the fiords when the waterfalls are at full pelt and the water charges off the mountain.”
And “latitude 40” was delivering a freezing, slanted, drenching waterfall of rain when I arrived in Queenstown. Mounds of rhododendrons and swags of May lined the route to what was clearly the departure point for every conceivable test of human endeavour – rafting, kayaking, biking, canyoning, falling, tumbling and getting soaked.
The town has a resident population of about 16,000 but visitors number more than three million a year. It bursts with opportunity and enterprise, ranging from horror dungeons to cake shops. I felt bogus sitting in the comfortable foyer of the luxurious Hotel St Moritz, surrounded by the type of tourist I had only ever seen in magazines: leggy girls in woolly bobble hats; and thin, sparsely bearded young men in collared cardigans. They were waiting to take their polypropylene up the Remarkables mountains. Mrs Jones and I were off on a comfortable drive.
By morning the cloud had lifted, revealing snow on the peaks. The winter season had officially ended, but nobody had informed the climate. We set off on the long haul along the lakeside road. The odd impatient local zoomed up behind, and I let them get by. I didn’t trust myself. I needed to gaze. Like everyone else I pootled along, then stopped to gawp. I had to. You bathe in awe. That’s why you go.
Wakatipu is the longest lake in New Zealand. Bent in the middle like a sleeping giant of Maori myth, it is a cold, deep, wondrous pewter slab, magnificently fringed by mountains and fed by melt water.
It wasn’t a long ride. The trip lasted 25 minutes. The geography lesson, though, will endure a lifetime