The far south

The sodden forest near  Waitutu Lodge. Photos by David Loughrey.
The sodden forest near Waitutu Lodge. Photos by David Loughrey.
Welcome Rock Trail owner Tom O’Brien.
Welcome Rock Trail owner Tom O’Brien.
A wild day at Te Waewae Bay.
A wild day at Te Waewae Bay.
Paul Roff’s Hump Ridge Jet on Lake Hauroko.
Paul Roff’s Hump Ridge Jet on Lake Hauroko.
The beach near the mouth of the Wairaurahiri River, in Fiordland.
The beach near the mouth of the Wairaurahiri River, in Fiordland.
The Chinese-built sod hut on the Welcome Rock trail.
The Chinese-built sod hut on the Welcome Rock trail.

 

It's just down the road and boasts a remarkable variety of wild adventures. Otago Daily Times reporter David Loughrey spent an action-packed weekend in Southland, lurching from the coast through river rapids to tussock-strewn mountain tops.

There is an intensity of experience one can attain when travelling, gained perhaps by hard physical endeavour, perhaps by a solitary adventure, or perhaps by crashing at full speed into the wild force of nature.

That intensity has a way of etching itself into the consciousness, tattooing its echoes deep in the brain's labyrinth.

It may not always be the welcome Southland provides a solitary visitor motoring bravely through the nation's extremities past hulking, swaying multi-wheeled cans of milk and thundering be-logged juggernauts, but the world closed in near Riverton.

Squalls of howling wind and sheets of rain batter the two-lane black-top as the road sweeps past platoons of flax marching single file by the roadside like captured soldiers, their heads bowed and bodies bent into the gale.

The windscreen wipers struggle to clear the rain that pours down on the Orepuki-Riverton highway as the whole region seems bent into the whirlwind, crouching low and digging its fingers deep into the battered earth just to stay in place.

The winds push and buffet the car as the gale roars off the sea at Cosy Nook, before it tires and drifts north to leave the sky ripped open for golden shafts of sunlight to dazzle the heaving grey seas off Te Waewae Bay.

And there, with brilliant green grass glowing under deep grey skies and cabbage trees and flax, lies Southland in all its solitary, wild glory.

Despite its rough-hewn geography ranging from spray whipped boulder-strewn beaches to tussock-studded high country, nowhere is more than about two hours away in Southland, on some of New Zealand's very best, often empty highways.

And what becomes the Tuatapere-Orepuki highway leads quickly to Tuatapere, with possibly the world's best blue cod at the town's takeaway shop, and Janice and Trevor (Peanut) Campbell's B&B, a compact unit set in the couple's backyard.

Trevor, a trucking man, brought the unit down from Arrowtown and deposited it there about six years ago (complete with outdoor bath) as both a hobby and a way of meeting people for the couple who had lived in the town all their lives.

"It was just something Janice wanted,'' Trevor says.‘

"We quite enjoy people, really,'' said Janice.

About 90% of the B&B's business comes from people walking the nearby 62km Hump Ridge Track, a major attraction in the area.

From Tuatapere a drive of about an hour and a-half takes the traveller though the silver forests of Fiordland National Park to the shores of Lake Hauroko, where mists spill from the sky and cling in tenuous wisps to thick native bush on the side of steep mountain slopes.

It is the deepest lake in New Zealand.

It is a deep, dark green.

It is pristine.

Paul Roff runs the Hump Ridge Jet, which flies over the lake with a group from Bluff as the rain sets in again and stings faces and eyes and ears.

That rain thins out as the jet boat powers into the Wairaurahiri River, where native bush jockeys for position on the river's edge, tumbling down the slopes into the river itself like some impenetrable African jungle.

The boat flies headlong towards protruding rocks before swerving at the last minute, then spinning 360 degrees, leaving the women in the back screaming with laughter.

It propels us giddy and gasping to Waitutu Lodge for lunch, where within five minutes' walk is the boulder-strewn beach of the south coast and the most stunning sodden, fluorescent green native forest.

Paul, a former bushman, has been riding the Wairaurahiri's rapids for 22 years, and makes what seems a perilous journey look something close to easy.

His business attracts mostly Australians, Americans and Europeans, when it comes to overseas visitors.

"They just bloody love it,'' he says.

From Hauroko, the Ohai-Clifden highway again offers driving of the very highest quality, and the sun that has finally broken through the grey heats the road, and steam drifts and eddies across the asphalt, spinning out from car tyres then re-forming into a thick warm mist.

Small towns framed by hulking hills, men with ripped check shirts and red faces, endless wet green paddocks and obscure agrarian equipment loom then drift into the background as you sweep through Northern Southland, now headed for Garston.

For there is much to experience, and forward momentum is everything.

AT Garston lies the Welcome Rock Trail, and the O'Briens, a fourth-generation farming family who have owned Blackmore Station since 1911.

The family retired 1000 hectares, or half the farm, into a conservation covenant to preserve the high country, and in 1990 family and volunteers restored an old Chinese sod hut (complete with outdoor bath) that now provides an overnight stay for mountain bikers and walkers on the 27km track.

Tom O'Brien took on the job of building a walking and mountain-bike trail along old goldminers' water races that cut across the steep hillsides of the Slate Range above Garston.

That came after a chance meeting in Kingston with a cartographer who mapped biking and walking trails, which helped take an idea of using the water race for a walking track, an idea he had nursed for some time, to fruition.

Once mountain biking became more popular, the idea progressed, until Tom began a year and a-half's work, with help from volunteers, hand-building an incredible 21km of track - 6km follows the Nevis road - replicating what early miners had done.

The track opened late in 2014.

"Hopefully, anyone who uses the trail understands the difference between something hand-built and something machinery-built.

"It's about the best way to access that hill country for the general public,'' he says of the fruits of his labour.

The trail starts at an old ski hut on the Nevis road, and from there it goes up.

It goes up quite a lot, gaining perhaps 250m in altitude over a thin winding route.

Non-cycling fitness one might be overtly proud of, and of which one might have boasted just a little too much, is quickly found to be of quite limited use, as are cycling skills of years gone by.

But with a series of regular stops to allow the lungs to heave alarmingly then settle, and some near falls as fatigue saps what skills are left, Welcome Rock is achieved.

The view is stunning in the late evening, as the sun beams spotlights on the river valleys below, and jagged frozen mountain peaks nearby cut into the cloud.

From there to the sod hut the tight, twisting track finally heads downhill through tussock, rock and the ever-present and slightly alarming speargrass, racing around tight bermed corners past rocky outcrops, and slowly those old skills return and the elbows begin to flex and the body shifts and balances the bike over obstacles that regularly crop up.

It felt like that anyway.

After the downhill the route settles in to a more gentle ride to the sod hut, though a steep drop beckons for any who wobble off the thin trail.

Now at an altitude of 1100m, totally alone and with fading light in a vast mountainous wilderness, fire and candles suddenly become of the utmost importance to ward off the pitch black of night, as does wine.

A man slightly drunk, alone in the wilderness where he can spit into a nearby tussock, cuss loudly without being admonished, relieve himself on the grass and rub sooty hands on his trousers without a care in the world under stars and moon that blaze in the black sky is a happy man, with plenty of space to consider matters of great importance, then forget his conclusions later.

And space is what Southland is best at providing.

There's all sorts of space, much of it with nary a human in sight, and such variety of environment.

And Southland is different, like a trip to Nova Scotia, or somewhere in Alaska on a good day without any bears, except everything is just a relatively short drive away on a beautifully maintained road.

You can't do much better than that.

• The writer travelled courtesy of Venture Southland.

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