The road less travelled
This week’s Kaikoura earthquake has caused havoc along the backroads of the South Island. Reporter Philip Matthews and photographer Chris Skelton drove the new route from Christchurch to Picton to understand why the locals are worried.
Until last week it was easy. You got onto State Highway 1 and pointed yourself north or south. You simply followed the single digit.
But the 7.8 earthquake that shook the South Island two minutes after midnight on Monday and isolated Kaikoura by closing SH1 has made the trip north much more difficult.
Christchurch to Picton remains a lifeline for truck drivers, tourists and others but now the sequence is longer and more complex, a series of lottery numbers: SH1 to 7 to 65 to 6 to 63 and finally back to 1.
The drive to Picton used to take about six hours, perhaps with a food stop at Kaikoura. Now the New Zealand Transport Authority (NZTA) asks you to allow up to 71⁄2 hours. And not everyone is pleased to see more traffic, especially heavy trucks, passing through these quiet and isolated areas.
The east coast of the South Island, from Seddon down to Cheviot, is now earthquake country. It is fragile and broken. The new trip north skirts around the back of it. While the news pays attention to Kaikoura and Wellington, and our GeoNet apps ping all day long with brief details of aftershocks we don’t feel in the car, we test-drive the new route. For the next few months at least, this is the new normal: inland not coastal, wet and mountainous, often remote and sometimes dangerous.
We take SH1 as usual from Christchurch but turn inland at Waipara before the road closes. We see helicopters in the skies. The first settlement you notice on SH7 is Waikari, a tiny stop most don’t stop at. There is a pub, a gas station, a tearooms and a shop. Sorry, a ‘‘shoppe’’.
The trucks rush by and shake the tearooms. Manager Sharon Bom remembers the shaking the other night, but nothing broke. The Canterbury modesty and reticence is familiar from 2010 and 2011. It says that life goes on, this wasn’t so bad. She lives in Hawarden. That is pronounced ‘‘harden’’, as in ‘‘harden up’’.
There are the familiar Canterbury sights. The giant sprinklers keeping grass green, the carefully planted forests. The town of Waiau, the epicentre of the earthquake, felt overlooked as politicians and media rushed to Kaikoura. It is off to our right but we stop at Culverden, a busy service town that is busier than ever.
We hear the first warnings from professional drivers about how bad things might get on the narrow, winding sections of the new route. ‘‘A lot of people will lose their mirrors,’’ says a Fonterra driver who does not want to be named.
Earthquake stickers on Culverden buildings are a Canterbury earthquake throwback. White stickers say the structure can be used but an engineering building is yellow-stickered and roped off while unsteady concrete blocks are taken down one by one.
Alan Lattimore watches from the historic Culverden Hotel across the road. All this is deja vu. Lattimore and his wife Sarah are Christchurch earthquake survivors whose home was red-zoned; they took over the There is a lot of traffic on the road and we don’t know how it’s going to affect us yet. hotel just two months ago.
What did he think when all this happened again? ‘‘Good old times,’’ he jokes, ‘‘the rocking and rolling. But the ground is more solid here.’’
Fixing SH1 will take at least three months, possibly a year. Quake veterans know to extend timeframes. ‘‘It’s going to be a massive task.’’
All of the pub’s rooms are full. Lattimore needs more staff urgently. We hear that all the way along the road: how can we get some people over from Kaikoura?
Could this be a boom time for Culverden? ‘‘If you’re in a situation to take advantage.’’
Past the turnoff to Hanmer Springs, into the Lewis Pass, there are signs of recent rockfall. The wind and rain picks up. You go deeper into the forest on steeper, narrower roads. This is all misty mountains and damp trees. You lose phone coverage for long stretches.
Then there is a strange sight in the forest. We find James White in the dark, cavernous reception rooms of Maruia Hot Springs. White took over as co-owner and managing director last year and is busily turning a kitsch Japanese bathing complex into a new-age chill-out zone that is off the grid in a national park.
He has a nervy energy and his sales pitch has some appeal. ‘‘For people coming through this way, they get to see a part of the country they wouldn’t normally see,’’ he enthuses. ‘‘It’s a different loop. The whales in Kaikoura are superawesome but so is here. This property’s super-unique.’’
He is happy to get into his togs and pose in a hot pool for the photographer. And why not? This is a nice spot by the river. There are tui. There are native bats. There are millions of sandflies but nets will be installed.
Events have overtaken White’s low-key, unadvertised renovation plans.
‘‘There is a lot of traffic on the road and we don’t know how it’s going to affect us yet. There is going to be more people. The trucks. It’s only really the trucks so far. And some lost tourists last night. We doubled our bookings with lost tourists.
‘‘We’re going to have to step up to accommodate more people just because our road is that much busier. It’s sad that Kaikoura is not there at the moment but there are other places where people can have equally as good a time.’’
Springs Junction is just 15 kilometres down the road from White’s thermal meditation sanctuary but it is light years away in spirit. It is an ugly spot. Trucks come and go all day and night on the vast, muddy, gravelly forecourt. There is a tearooms somewhere across the intersection.
Drivers fuel up on the forecourt and swap stories if they can spare the time. ‘‘I’ve got four hours to get
to Picton or my log book’s f...ed,’’ one shouts cheerfully.
Another driver, Jamie Ayloff, has to get to Christchurch in three hours. Like most truck drivers who know these roads, he has warnings. This is not a main highway and was not built for these heavy vehicles.
‘‘We’re having to put up with the extra traffic on this road,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s a lot harder. No one’s driven that route before, so you’re looking at a lot of new people, new faces on the road.
‘‘It’s got the potential for more accidents. People still want to travel at the same speed. If you don’t bring the speed down, it’s going to turn to chaos.’’
Another veteran driver, named Pix – ‘‘just Pix’’ – tells the same story. ‘‘It’s different now because of the extra traffic, the extra trucks. The road’s pretty narrow from here down Shenandoah (SH65), to Murchison. Care’s got to be taken. The other problem we’re all facing is the build-up of cars. Them trying to overtake us. A lot of guys are having big problems.’’
When summer comes, this will only get worse. The police are adding six patrols and advise drivers to be cautious and patient. The NZTA says the same thing. Before the earthquake, there were 1500 vehicles a day at Springs Junction and 200 of them were trucks. Now there are at least four times that number of vehicles and a greater proportion of trucks, says the NZTA.
We leave Springs Junction as more trucks line up. It rains and darkens then stops and rains again. An hour down the road, Murchison is an old town that was hit by a devastating 7.8 earthquake in 1929. It killed 17 people, 14 of them in landslides. Memories are long here. Like Kaikoura, Murchison was isolated by disaster. A local tells the story of how children were rescued first.
Facades and old wooden buildings are set against the dark outline of hills covered in bush. Photos show the skyline has not changed since the 1940s.
The two-storey Hampden Hotel is still the social centre of Murchison. The bar is packed with truck drivers and all the rooms were booked by midday. Owner Leigh Knowles is running out of food, running out of linen, run off her feet. There is nowhere for all these trucks to park.
Across the road from the pub, Somebody’s Treasure is a large second-hand shop with a long history and a cheerful owner named Donna Thurlow.
The earthquake on Monday? Five vases broke. The salt and pepper shakers survived. ‘‘One book fell off.’’ But seriously, there is Murchison’s earthquake identity and solidarity. ‘‘We’re pretty understanding of what they’re going through,’’ Thurlow says. ‘‘The isolation and trying to get the infrastructure back up. We’ve noticed an increase in traffic. People are still a little bit stunned. We noticed that with the Christchurch earthquakes.’’
Can remote Murchison cope with the numbers of tourist buses, trucks and campervans? ‘‘We’re a tourist town. Our population swells in summer. The infrastructure builds in summer. We’ll just have to build it a bit more. Murchison’s going to have to crank itself up and provide for the people that come here.’’
Right on cue, there goes another truck.
‘‘We’ve already noticed the size of the trucks,’’ she says. ‘‘The big rigs that used to go down SH1 are coming through. That helps the one petrol station. They’re going to have to up their game to provide the fuel. The truck volume will be huge.’’
A little under an hour further on, St Arnaud feels woody and rustic. It is an alpine village. Even in November, light snow has fallen on the St Arnaud Range. This is one of the places on this trip that feels anomalous, a pocket of something unexpected. Maruia Hot Springs was Japan-land. Now here we are in ski-land.
There is pleasant birdsong and light drizzle. A family of German tourists in expensive knitwear occupy the cafe at the Alpine Lodge. It feels like winter again.
Dave Smissen and his wife Barbara are artists who live at St Arnaud permanently. He does ceramics and she does botanical watercolours. They like the isolation, driving just once a fortnight to shop at Blenheim or Nelson. It seems like the good life, but one suddenly disrupted by giant trucks on their quiet road.
‘‘There are potholes appearing,’’ Smissen says. ‘‘It’s going to get dangerous, it’s going to get difficult and it’s going to take a lot of patience from people to put up with it.
‘‘We can put up with it because it’s a national emergency but we would hate to think that this might become a permanent route.’’
There is enough concern among the 110 or so permanent residents of St Arnaud for the Tasman District Council to send someone across for an urgent community meeting. There is a 60kmh speed limit but trucks just barrel through, Smissen says. There is a school right there on the main road.
Finally, the last stretch. The Wairau Valley is dramatic, even in the rain. The scale is vast and the long run down to Renwick and Blenheim is a landscape of vineyards. You lose count of the one-lane bridges where queues of traffic are forming.
After all the emptiness, Blenheim feels like a thriving metropolis. Then you rejoin SH1 to Picton and see signage that still points towards the illusion of a coastal drive under blue skies to Christchurch. It is so close but impossible to reach.