Flat, straight and true
Think of New Zealand and what pictures come to mind? Mountains of course, perhaps glaciers, probably Jonah Lomu and maybe kiwi birds. But not the Canterbury plains, although this area was something lodged at the back of my mind from school geography classes.
Until it was shafted by the mother country when we joined the EEC in 1973, NZ’s economy was intimately bound with Britain. It was the main export market, primarily dairy and meat products. Without gay abandon we snuggled up with the frogs and the huns and closed the door on our colonies, who no longer had preferential trade deals with Britain. NZ went from having the worlds highest standard of living – I’ll say that again, the highest IN THE WORLD in the 1950s – to economic decline in the 1970s. Nowhere was this seen more clearly than on the plains, a long thin stretch of flat land on the eastern coast of the south island. Here is the focus of the country’s agriculture industry, so you can imagine the scenery for the next few hundreds kms. Small towns with one pub and a pie shop along the main state highway interspersed the dry yellow fields. There’s no clearer demonstration of the impact of the Southern Alps than the drought the east coast is currently suffering: whilst in Fox we saw some of the highest rrainfall for years, just a couple of hundred kms furhter east on the other side of the mountains farmers are desparate for rain as they fight forest fires.
Maps can be deceptive, a prominent location on the map turning out to be a one horse town. Take Cromwell for example: pretty much a regional capital according to the maps but little more than a stopping off point between Queenstown and the coast. Envious of the prosperity of its neighbour, the council wanted to build an attraction that would make people stop off a while. What better idea than some giant fruit? Nothing, so here we have the Cromwell soft fruit memorial:
Indeed, the council were so clever they built the fibreglass fruit on the main road outside the town so passing tourists can take the picture from their car window before moving on. Now even less reason to visit the town.
From Cromwell we drove through several more towns, really villages, before stopping at Ranfurly. In the centre of a large plain, the town’s redeeming feature is a series of attractive art deco buildings, erected following a serious fire in the late 1920s. There are only a handful of buildings but each has been carefully restored, including the ‘refreshment rooms’ that now house a mish mash of art deco-ish objects.
There is also a pair of overpriced shops where Vic was astonished to see much of the old furnishings from her childhood now command high prices. Indeed, she remains convinced that a plastercast of an Indian is the very one from her family home.
Back in the car, following more sheep transporters taking little animals to their deaths and smelling of, er, slurry…
…before we hit the east coast and our first sight of the Pacific Ocean. Whilst the landscape of the east coast is less dramatic than the westlands – although the mountains can still be seen from the beaches – there are some geological oddities, most famously the Moeraki Boulders.
These are almost perfectly rounded, honeycomb centred rocks, concrete Maltesers I suppose, formed not by wave action but by the accretion of minerals around lime crystals. As the sea eroded the mud cliffs within which the boulders formed, the rocks fell to the beach where they remain to this day.
The Maori have some alternative colourful explanations for how the boulders came to be here, but regardless of their origin they’re a peculiar sight. And around 40 million years old. Some are quite big, as Vic’s failure to climb them shows.
We headed further up the coast to the town of Omaru where we finally managed to stay in a Bellavista motel (we’ll save that epic topic for another day) and admired another quiet coastal town.
The one thing to mention about Omaru is the quality of its buildings, all made from local stone following building regulations determind after a fire in the 1870s. The stone is a crisp white that has aged well despite the biting coastal weather, but these grand stone buildings seem a little out of place in a small NZ town. Their facades have little behind them, giving the impression of a Hollywood backlot.
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