Away from it all, upSnake Creek
Acouple of kilometres drive past the tiny settlement of Mangarakau towards Paturau you pass Snake Creek Road turn off, to my mind one of the coolest-sounding addresses in the whole country.
Select too, with only two households able to call this road home. First are Brett and Michelle Riley on 1080ha Lake Otuhie Station, formerly called Long Gully Station. They purchased it a decade ago, moving out there early last year to concentrate on running beef bulls and provide dairy support to their Rockville farm.
One of their priorities has been fencing off five major wetlands on the sprawling property which is hinterland to the great Taitapu Estate.
Just a little further on up Snake Creek are the road’s only other residents, Murray (Giff) Gifford and Sally Everett, who purchased their 47-hectare property around 2007. Calling it Wetland View Park, they soon after went into the business of attracting visitors to stay.
Their place is aptly named, affording magnificent views from its elevated terrace adjoining the Mangarakau Swamp.
In particular, the impressive limestone escarpments which they look out onto clearly echo the pounding waves of the Tasman Sea, a reverberation that is even more spectacular during thunderstorms.
A milestone for the couple was the completion of two quality tourist cabins, semi-kitset Shantysea Chalets shipped down from Tauranga. Next they concentrated on a walkway right around the lowland, swampy part of their property, now reserved with a QE11 Open Space covenant.
Tiny orchids grow everywhere, like the rare split-sepal Pterostylis irwinii, only the fifth place it has been found in the whole country.
Between meandering ink-black waterways full of mudfish, the avenues of three metre-high flax can fair rattle in the wind, so much so that Sally routinely warns parents with children: ‘‘Don’t get separated – you will not be able to hear their calls in the flax.’’
Out here there is much to take the eye, like the fantastic glowworm grotto complete with miniature waterfall, koura and cave weta.
Mature kahikatea grow bent over from the wind, branches only able to grow on the lee side of their trunks.
A scramble up a high forested mound affords yet another magnificent view over nearby ponds, while an old steam winch and tramway lines tell of the effort which went into hauling out the huge kahikatea logs.
It was Percy Prouse and Norman Saunders who moved the first sawmill here around 1906. Tramways were laid into the big stands of kahikatea as they cut them down.
One line eventually went all the way from Long Spur to the foothills of Mt Baldy, but all the early easy pickings came from Snake Creek and Long Gully area between Mangarakau township and Golden Ridge on Taitapu Estate.
Horses pulled the trucks of sawn timber down to Whanganui Inlet where it was hand loaded onto scows near Pah Point.
Giff in particular has become fond of his surrounding area’s heritage, clearing an old track down to the steel-girder bridge over the Patarau which was once used by the log trucks of the more recent Benara Timber Company on their way to Lake Otuhie, the magnificent white pine mostly just ending up butter boxes for the Australian dairy trade.
All around, the bush still bristles with luxuriantly tall, fat trunked nikau. Another short side track takes us to Lake Mangarakau, where Giff enthusiastically points out a floating island of rushes. Ducks are everywhere, this is indeed a wetland wonderland.
Giff has long been keen to work out, even re-establish, the line of the old Kaituna Track which ended up not at Knuckle Hill as it does now, but winding its way down Thompson Creek to end up in the Paturau River which diggers crossed and carried on up to the Golden Blocks behind Lake Otuhie.
An edition of the Golden Bay Argus in 1897 reported how Mr G H Allen presented a petition from 70 residents of Taitapu Estate asking for the construction of a bridle track to Whanganui Inlet via Kaituna Forks, which was let out for tender at 100 pounds a mile, the estimated distance being six miles.
Reckons Giff: ‘‘It’s a far better route with far easier gradients, and it actually took people somewhere, not like how it comes out now at Knuckle Hill now. That route was only put in relatively recently. ‘‘ He shows me an old map with the old track clearly marked on.
Sally was born in London and trained as a hairdresser before immigrating out to Australia when she was 25, ending up in New Zealand living in a community called Okoha (at the top end of Anokoha Bay) in outer Pelorus Sound.
There she met Giff, originally from Katikati, who was also then living in another community nearby in the NE corner of Beatrix Bay, called Saratoga.
The two of them eventually shifted to spend 17 years on a ‘boat access only property’ at Wakatahuri in Forsyth Bay in the outer Sounds, where Giff also got the job of running the mussel farm offshore there.
It was five hours by boat to civilisation, so they still consider their current 90-minute drive to Takaka ‘‘a luxury’’.
Giff has also spent notable stints in his working life building and boatbuilding. The couple also milked cows in Bainham and ran a busy motel in Christchurch where Giff also studied to pick up a degree in Computer Science from Canterbury University.
‘‘I’ve learnt a lot over the years, especially how to make a business run more efficiently,’’ he says.
‘‘I wish I’d learnt it all a lot earlier. Living out here at Snake Creek is our life now. The area is slowly being discovered for the fascinating place it is, but not everyone wants to rough it, which is why we’ve gone into offering a little bit of luxury on the wild west coast of Golden Bay.