From wonder to indifference

We turned off the towel rail, mowed the lawns, said goodbye to the goldfish and drove west. Then southwest. In Hokitika a vast Russian man and a small Thai woman sold food from a caravan. She worked the wok, he the till. We ordered lemon chicken. He said there were no lemons in Hokitika.

In Bruce Bay the only human presence was another food van. We bought coffee out of sympathy and stood on the jumble of rocks to drink it. The Tasman roared in and sucked back, roared in and sucked back. Gulls mewed. The ends of the bay were long green arms and the light was startling.

Further south the road cut through bush. At home, we plant a tree and think we’ve saved the world. Here trees by the million plant themselves and the bush encroaches on the road. Work gangs cut it back, but it just keeps coming.

The sea to the right was invisible. The mountains to the left were invisible. There was only the tunnel of bush. With nowhere to stop and nothing to stop for, we speared through the trees at 110k. Possums littered the tarmac. Sometimes a hawk would lumber into the air as we approached. Once we saw a stoat.

At Haast the bridge was long, the river sapphire. Just back from Haast Beach stood a derelict building, the windows blown, the doors long since gone. Swallows wheeled in and out of it.

Sandflies drove us from the beach. We went back to the motel and returned dressed like astronauts. The photos of the sunset won’t show the sandflies. Nor the mindless roar and suck of the waves. We dined in a pub hung with antlers. Lying in bed in the motel you could feel the waves, like a heartbeat heard through a stethoscope.

In the footsteps of Julius von Haast, we followed the river he named after himself to the pass he named after himself. Then down through beech forest to Wa¯ naka, Queenstown and a landscape papered with money.

Between Te Anau and Milford we stopped to scrabble up a track by a river. You could hear the river from 50 yards. It boomed over boulders. Streams ran through the bush. Trunks dripped with moss. Underfoot was just rock and roots. I tripped half a dozen times. My shins bled.

There are several eighth wonders of the world. Milford Sound was Kipling’s. He saw it with few tourists. We did too. Covid has tied up most of the cruising vessels, grounded the planes and helicopters, turned the huge coach park into a sea of silent asphalt. The safety warnings in six languages went unread.

What Kipling saw was still there. Waterfalls pencilled the cliffs. Seals hauled themselves onto rocks. Mitre Peak did its symmetry to please the eye. Tu¯ ı¯ gurgled. Pigeons soared and dived. And everywhere the rock rose sheer.

Dining by the window in the only restaurant we had to press our faces to the glass to glimpse sky. The visual scale was dwarfing. The timescale double-dwarfing. These walls were carved by glaciers. This had been thus for millennia.

We were away a week. When we got home the lawn had grown a crop of daisies. Possums had eaten the geraniums. Spiders had found the car we didn’t take and webbed the mirrors. A friend had been in to water plants and fetch the mail, but the house still felt and smelt different, stale, and in an early phase of entropy.

The goldfish greeted our return with utter indifference. We turned the towel rail back on.