Free pies help fuel the kms
It’s taken more than 500 free savouries, numerous radio station changes and a few different routes, but Tony Gillan has finally ticked over one million kilometres in his ‘‘Green Beast’’.
‘‘Getting to a million kilometres was the goal,’’ TG Couriers owner Tony Gillan said.
After just 10 years of couriering mainly newspapers, the speedometer reached his target on April 17 to a fanfare of balloons and party poppers from Bowater Toyota.
Gillan, 72, has driven his trusty green 2010 Toyota Hi Ace all over the top of the south between Nelson to Golden Bay and Marlborough since 2012 after crashing his original van early one morning, he said.
There were a number of crashes in the same area just outside of Richmond, he said, and his made the front page of one of the very same papers he delivered – The Nelson Mail. ‘‘Unfortunately, there was 380,000kms on that clock when it went on the roof.’’
But he said he was ‘‘good as gold’’. ‘‘At 6.30am I was upside down in the little white van, and at 12.30pm, BMG Toyota had me in that green van.’’
Gillan has run his courier company for the last 15 years, delivering a variety of items including newspapers, milk, blood tests and produce. Deliveries saw him hitting the road six days a week, often by 3.30am and reaching Pōhara in time for breakfast, before heading back over Tākaka Hill to travel in the opposite direction, to Marlborough.
Since the printing of the Nelson Mail and the Marlborough Express moved to Christchurch in 2017, the journey has been shortened to just the 248km round trip from Nelson to Golden Bay, still six days a week, he said, and sometimes he’s back home by 8.30am.
Breakfast was the last thing on Gillan’s mind, he said, when he left the house at the crack of dawn because he knew there would be a hot savoury waiting for him over the Tākaka Hill. At his first stop, The Top Shop, ‘‘they have an amazing array of pies’’, he said.
He said the owner ‘‘usually gives me a pie for bringing the papers over in the morning’’.
Less than 10km down the road at the end of his run, the Pōhara General Store has a coffee and a sausage roll if he timed it right, before another caffeine fix ‘‘from the Courtyard Cafe to get me home’’.
When his children were younger, he said they would sometimes join him. At the top of the hill, he would give Feel Good Foods a call and when they got to Tākaka about 6.20am, ‘‘they’d have chicken and chips ready for their breakfast’’.
By the time they were in their teens, his children were arriving home from ‘‘partying all night’’, he said at the same time Gillan was getting ready to leave for work.
These days the radio keeps him company in the early hours, he said.
‘‘I love all the music in the morning.’’
But with limited reception around the Takaka Hill, he listened to Magic from ‘‘Nelson to the top of the hill’’, before switching to More FM.
He had seen a lot of ‘‘different things’’ during his travels, he said, but the event that stuck out was, ‘‘when the hill got broken ... and Tākaka Hill was washed out’’ after ex-cyclone Gita tore through the region. For a week, Gillan said he could only get deliveries as far as Kaiteriteri where they would be picked up to sail or fly to Golden Bay.
The reliable old van, whether Gillan goes by his son’s name for it, ‘The Bizmark’ or the ‘Green Beast’, had ‘‘never missed a beat’’, he said.
‘‘It’s definitely done the hard yards’’, and it was ready for another million kilometres, he said.