A spring in my step

Jon and Janine lend me one of their cars and I make my first four-wheel foray out into the Kiwi wilds. It's a lovely sunshine-dappled drive north east of Christchurch, the iPod is on shuffle and mountains are shaping up in the distance.
I cross a narrow bridge over a gorge, which looks like the perfect spot for bunjee jumping and sure enough, there on the banks is a company offering 'adrenalin-fuelled thrills on the water'.

I arrive in Hamner Springs, one of the top spots on the South Island for a sulphurous soak, but in this shoulder season the atmosphere is low key with just a few visitors mooching around the crazy golf courses and snacking in the cafes.

It's warm enough to don shorts for a walk up Conical Hill, a hike through tall trees with toadstools nestling in the undergrowth, to a summit open to views north, south, east and west (the W is the view west, natch, with a dusting of early winter snow on the tops). 

I lunch on kumara and cashew pie followed by a piece of ginger slice. Ginger slice is like Millionaire's Shortbread with soft ginger icing instead of caramel and chocolate, not something I've come across before but I must say, as a fan of ginger in any incarnation, I'm hooked.

It's time for the hot springs, $20 for as long as you like lolling around in pools varying in temperatures from 36 to 40 degrees. I have a nice time floating about and listening in to other people's conversations. It's incredible what the heat brings forth but hey, my lips are sealed – what goes on in the springs, stays in the springs.

Duly simmered and basted, I head for home, or Christchurch. My trip back across country and via the coast takes in all sorts of rural delights – a village called Rotherham with a heritage cottage built by an early Irish settler, cows blocking the road in the midst of dairy farming country, the pastel-hued sunset over the chalky coloured cliffs of Gore Bay and, in the fading light, a glimpse of the area's Gothic-style Cathedral Gorge.

Banks open

There may not be much left of what made Christchurch a tourist mecca but the people who live there have choices galore should they ever feel like escaping for a day. The Banks Peninsula, named after the botanist who travelled out with Cook, is perhaps the closest away day opportunity. 

My pal Jon drives us over to Banksy, as I'll call it, and as we come over the Port Hills the peninsula strikes me as looking like a great soft yellow lion's paw stretching down to the water with each knuckle an inlet or cove.
We have lunch at Hilltop, a great pub overlooking one of the inlets, and choose a pizza topped with Barry's Bay blue cheese, from the cheesemaker at the bottom of the hill. 

There's a little walk Jon has found in a book that takes in a 2,000 year old totara tree (the soft wood was favoured for Maori war canoes), then a scramble through dense bush and over fairly hefty rocks to the shoulder and views out over both sides.



It's a bit of a tree stump graveyard up here, from clearing by early settlers for building materials, farm work, agriculture, whatever. It's very sad to see, but I gather the Maoris did a fair bit of tree felling in their time, to create gardens to grow kumera (sweet potato) or to make it easier to hunt the moa birds into extinction. The water appears an icy glacial blue and there's a great view of a Maori 'pa' or fortified island (in the middle of the inlet above).

We get as far as Akaroa, known as the French town, after some French people settled here in the early days. I'm not sure how many French people still live here but they're hanging on to their claim to fame, with l'essence available at the garage instead of petrol and French store, cafe and street names. The bright blue sheds on the main pier actually look more Scandinavian to me (see below).

After a stroll along the quay we turn back inland to meet up with Jon's wife Janine and the kids at her cousin Marcus's quirky campground in the Okuti valley. It's called Manaia and its rambling grounds reveal tiny wooden cabins with eclectic collections of furniture, a few teepees, an outdoor kitchen and a stream with native eels.
The family are all playing football when we arrive, boys against girls. Janine is staying the night so she can hang out with her cousins and has been allocated the Love Shack, a hideaway in the trees that is ever so scenic, but promises to be ever so chilly.

We enjoy a sumptuous buffet laid out in Marcus and his wife's cosy cabin and then move out to the campfire to toast marshmallows.
There's a glitter ball hanging from a tree above the fire that catches the light from the flames and throws out reflected sparkles. Jon, Tarn, Grace and I sing all the way home.

Ch Ch Ch Changes

My flight arrives in Christchurch, New Zealand / Aotearoa / Land of the Long White Cloud so early it's dark outside. I can't see any clouds, let alone long white ones. The wait for the Vodafone desk to open is a long one and I spend the time reading up on a little NZ history. Do look away now if you've heard it all before but it's new to me so it may be new to some of you, too.
So, Aotearoa is what the Polynesian explorer Kupe called New Zealand when he first clapped eyes on the place, but he didn't settle in. The Great Migration happened centuries later, around 1350AD when 10 great canoes followed Kupe's navigational instructions, setting sail from Hawaiki, which could have been somewhere in what is now French Polynesia. Each canoe group established itself in its own territory. All tickety boo apart from heaps of wars between the various canoe people's descendants. Abel Tasman, a Dutch explorer skirted the islands in 1642 but when several of his crew were killed and eaten, he high-tailed it north and discovered Tasmania. He did give it its name, after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Then came Cook in the Endeavour in 1769 and the rest is recent history.

My historical research is conducted to a background of airport announcements and as I'm only half listening, I'm sure she's talking about 'chicken discs'. What the...? Then I hear it properly and realise she's talking about 'check-in desks'. My first introduction to the NZ accent on home soil.

I take a taxi to my friends' Jon and Janine's bungalow, on a leafy road in Merivale, just north of what is left of the CBD. Jon King is a friend from my early years in London when we lived, with four others, in a big house in Clapham South. He married New Zealander Janine Puentener, a midwife, and they have two children Grace, 15, Tarn, 12, and Jimmy Jimmy the cat. Here's Jon in the Port Hills with Christchurch in the background, and the Christchurch coastline below.

Grace has given up her room for me. So the first thing I do is crawl into her soft bed and drift off to sleep wrapped up in cosy flannelette sheets. Yes folks, it's colder. Out come the fleeces for the first time but I derive a certain amount of pleasure in this as I always like to use or wear everything I bring on a trip. 

That afternoon I stroll around Jon and Janine's block and stop by a local cafe for a piece of pie and a coffee. I can't see much damage yet, except for a crumbled looking local church. Later on Jon cooks a lovely spinach and feta pie. I'm back with the veggies. We spend the evening sharing music and reminiscing. We also watch When A City Falls, a moving documentary about the earthquakes, in preparation for my disaster tour the following day.

The next morning Jon takes me around the gap sites, the closed-off streets, the bumpy roads of central Christchurch. It's the crumbled historic buildings that seem the most forlorn – the basilica, which was once declared 'the most beautiful building in the Southern Hemisphere' by George Bernard Shaw. The city's favourite clock stopped at 12.51, the time of the second, most devastating quake, and hasn't moved since.



The iconic cathedral is no more and a temporary cardboard construction is in the process of going up, until the people decide what they want and the Anglican church decides what it can afford. Debate rages in the local press as architects' drawings are released.

There's a cinema (I think) where all that's left is the grand circle of seating, and Christchurch's famous theatre, the facade of which the city can't bear to pull down so it is literally all that is left, fastened to a stack of containers to keep it upright.


We drive around the red zones by the river Avon where liquefaction has made most of the houses unstable so whole swathes of residential areas have been cleared for demolition. A massive central park along the river is planned.

We take a detour out to Sumner where whole cliffs fell in and rocks tumbled into the houses below. The main road is now lined with containers to stop any more rock-fall damage. Christchurch seems to have more containers than a shipping port. The new urban landscape is container shaped.
Up in the Port Hills south of the city a whole road has crumbled away and will probably never be rebuilt.

Some buildings cling to life, against all the odds, but look lonely without their former neighbours. The two safest buildings in town are the Women's Hospital, built on an isolation plate, a sort of shifting base that takes all the impact of the tremors and protects the structure above, and Grace's school that was solidly built in the Eighties, to LAST.
There's a colourful container shopping mall in the centre of town, called Re:start, with cafes and the streets around it landscaped with seating areas, bike racks and the odd splash of graffiti. There's a showcase of black and white photos from before the earthquakes displayed on the exterior of many of the container units. Jon says this one is of the child of friends of theirs, larking about on the street as part of some summer festival.

It's in the container mall that we find the 'disaster experience', an audio-visual exhibition that pulls it all together, from the science to the sadness. Little broken-off bits of the cathedral are stored here... the spire and some shards from the stained glass windows. Then there's the humour... the exhibition features a slide show of cartoons printed in the local paper in the weeks following the earthquake. I particularly like this one.

The exhibition touches on the future, too, with rebuild plans and models, the gap-filler brigade which goes around finding interesting things to do in gap sites, like this fabric-wrapped tree we spot and just have to go and hug. 

On Sunday I spend the day in Sumner with my old colleague Dan Park, his wife Emily and their three children. The eldest, Imogen, points out the giant boulders that dropped off the cliffs behind their road, some rolling into the park opposite.

Dan and Emily's house is a modernist gem, designed by New Zealand architect Paul Pascoe in the Fifties. It's all glass and wood with key pieces of fitted furniture and boasts the standard quarter of an acre of land. Being overlooked is not much of an issue here.

It's nice being with young families again and I'm enjoying being dropped into a world of French homework, rugby trials, Duke of Edinburgh tasks and Tim Tams. I've missed that, I must say. Not so sure about the temperatures, however, and as I go to bed after my first weekend in South Island, I need two duvets and a hot water bottle.

Snowy business

First of all, a word of warning. This post, covering my Easter weekend in the Snowy River National Park, is a long one...
So, the background to the annual Easter trip is that when cousin Bern Lyons came to Melbourne in his twenties he joined the climbing club and made lifelong friends, including his climbing partner Pete Smith, married to Fran. Forty three years ago a group of them arranged to meet at the Snowy one Easter, and they've been coming every Easter since, adding wives, then children and now grandchildren to the group, not to mention assorted hangers on, like myself. 

It's lashing down in Melbourne when Uncle Mick and I climb aboard Bern's 4WD van and I'm wondering if I've made the right decision to change my flight for a hefty extra fee. Mick, like some prophet of doom, announces the unpromising weather forecast at regular intervals. Camping in the rain… ugh. Last time I did that was on the Isle of Skye with my brother Rod and three of his kids. We had to work hard to make it fun.

The drive is an adventure in itself, as we stop off in hick towns for pies, loo visits and ice. Turning left away from the sea we climb through farmland and rolling hills and finally somewhere just past a place called Suggan Buggan we enter the Snowy River National Park. This is Suggan Buggan bridge on the (sunny) drive home.

The road clings to the hillside and as it's raining the surface is slippy. I forgot to say, the tarmac runs out somewhere just past Suggan Buggan, too. So, every time Bern turns the wheel, the back of the van spins out to one side. I'm sitting in the back, letting out mini-squeals every time there's a corner. My stomach is in knots. As the earth is pretty red around these parts, there's a river of what looks like blood flowing down the side of the road. 

But the rain is lifting and I get some sense of the landscape around. The mountains stretch as far as the eye can see and their thickly forested slopes and ridges look like bottle-green velvet rolled out in soft folds.

We arrive finally and the rain stops (and stays away for the whole trip). The campsite is on a large bend in the river with a riverbed beach that the kids can play on. You can see the bend in the picture below. The water level is very low, I'm told. The Snowy River dam has put paid to any hope of even a mild torrent these days.

We choose our spots and pitch up, cracking open the beers once that is done. People gradually arrive and wander over to say hello. The only facilities are two outside toilets. They are awfully scenic, though. It's down to the river for anything else.

The first night we stay round our own fire, but the following night, after we've eaten (among our Lyons family group we're on a rota of meals, everyone having prepared one meal for six to eight people), we head over to the Smith campfire for wine, banter and song. The Smith campfire is quite the place to be, with up to 30 people gathered round it in a circle. The fire is big, too, with whole tree trunks piled into a pit. Bern turns out to be quite a crooner, summoning up all the old cockney ditties and folk songs, many of which he's taught to the Smith clan. It's very strange to see Australian children singing On Ilkley Moor bar t'at and being word perfect. I eventually pluck up the nerve to sing a song and what comes into my head? Flower of Scotland!

Bern's son Michael and his wife Ayako arrive first thing in the morning with four-year-old daughter Maiko in their gleaming white 4WD landrover thingie, stuffed to the rafters with all you might need for a month in the mountains. Michael has spent 12 years as an outdoor education teacher so what he doesn't know about kit for all eventualities could be written on a postage stamp. Ayako's meal is a hard act to follow.

Bern's daughter Jenny arrives from Canberra on Saturday in a yute with her partner David. They're the gourmet wine connoisseur element of our little group, and David brings out a new wine with every meal and gives us the rundown on its provenance and eligibility. He has a wine cellar of several hundred, he tells us. Jenny's first culinary offering is kangaroo burgers. Very healthy as it's high in protein but low in fat.

One of Fran's nephews is here with his twins, also four, and they and Maiko make a mischievous little trio. It's lovely to be around kids again. I can be Auntie Cate again! I manage to persuade the girls that my bird earrings are volume dials, and that if the bird's head faces down, that means I can't hear what they're saying. The twins are freakishly lively and yet very sweet. Maiko is adorable, with a will of iron. I overhear them playing in a hammock and there's some altercation about who's turn it is to push. Tess says to Maiko, 'You know what you have Maiko? You have an attitude.' Too funny.

The night sky here is something I'll never forget. In this completely light-free area it is mind-blowingly clear and alive with possibility. I recognise a few constellations, there's Orion, for example, but his 'sword' is above the belt, and I see the Southern Cross, I know where to find it now. I get up early one morning and Bern and I go down to the Snowy to take photographs of the morning mist on the water. I'm paddling because it's actually warmer in than out. The campfire-cooked breakfast proves to be just the job after that little excursion.

The big Saturday bush walk is something else I won't forget in a hurry. We have to be transported to the start of the walk in 4WD vehicles and I soon find out why. The track up is almost vertical in places and the surface like a river bed, with giant gorges and mounds worn into it. Most of the time I'm thinking to myself, surely we won't make it up/over/down/around that… It's so bumpy that when we finally reach the plateau after half an hour, I announce: 'I'm glad I wore my sports bra – just for the ride up.' 

The view from the top reaches far across the mountains, towards Kosciuszko, the highest mountain in Australia, at 2,228m. There's a lot of map consultation (makes me miss my siblings) and discussion about where we're going to walk and in the end we go with Pete Smith's route.


Pete is in his seventies but sets a cracking pace, closely followed by Uncle Mick 'The Treadmill' Lyons. I'm invariably bringing up the rear, wanting to do frivolous things such as take photos, drink water, look at a view or, God forbid, stop for a rest.

There are funny moments. When Pete's daughter-in-law Jenny offers a bag of snacks to the old boys, saying, 'Sweet nuts?' it has us all laughing hysterically. Injuries I sustain include lacerated shins and arms from the bush bashing, a sprained thumb from slipping on the dusty path and putting my hand down to break my fall and bending my thumb back the wrong way, and aches and pains at the outer edges of my feet, from hours of traversing or winding down ferociously steep gradients. We are rewarded in some measure by the sight of several brumbies or wild horses. All the way down Jenny, who is a horsewoman, tells us how fresh the horse poo is, and therefore how close we are to brumbies. I know about these from watching a DVD of The Man From Snowy River at The Louise hotel in the Barossa Valley. It's one of those Eighties Aussie classics based on a poem written in 1890 by Banjo Paterson about a young man from the mountains of the Snowy River who daringly recaptures a prize colt which has escaped and joined the brumbies. 

Easter Sunday kicks off with the Easter Egg Hunt and Jenny and I help hide a few of the hundreds of eggs that have been collected from everyone in a section of the bush roped off as an 'egg domain'. Mine turn out to be far too obvious and I have to revisit a few of the hidey-holes to make the hunt a little more fiendish. When the kids are unleashed with their 'sacks' I see why. They are relentless and not one egg is left undiscovered. Wee Maiko is certainly on a mission.









Another Snowy River Easter tradition started some 20 years ago is the Snowy River Hash. Since the children are now involved it has become shorter and a little easier. This year Uncle Mick and Pete set the Hash around the bush between the campsite and the 'main' road and it lasts about an hour. There are special tasks to carry out at each Check, which gives little ones (and me – those older kids run like the clappers) a chance to catch up, something to sing, for example.



Apart from that all the normal rules apply, from the 'down downs' for Snowy Hash organisers and virgins (me and Tess the twin), to a special solo 'down down' for the other twin who rolled in the flour. Mick presents me with a Hash t-shirt for changing my flight to join them all. And I have to do another 'down down'.






I go off for a couple of walks on my own, just along the river to the border with New South Wales, surprising a family of kangaroos at one point. The Snowy features a lovely mix of trees, with pockets of temperate rainforest alongside drier forests of white cypress pine (or are they black?) and nearer the banks of the river what is called wattle, with soft bluish-green foliage. 
On our last day I go paddling down the Snowy in an inflatable kayak with Michael and the three girls. There are gentle rapids and at the river's edge, rocks carved by the water into Henry Moore type sculptures. The girls shatter the calm by standing up in the boat to do The Birdy Song. It makes my day. Correction, it makes my weekend.

So it's time to leave and we drive out of the park in glorious sunshine, detouring slightly to view a spectacular gorge at Little River and the tiny former schoolhouse at Suggan Buggan. Then, just as Mick is saying, 'You still haven't seen an emu, Cate', we pass a whole field of them. My Australian wishlist is done and dusted. 

Actually, it really isn't. I've barely skimmed the surface. But the big country and the big hearts of the people I've spent time with have left me wanting to see more. Australia, I'll be back...