On Christmas Day 2009 Richard and I drove from Wanganui to Golden Bay, where we spent a week staying in the Collingwood Motor Camp. I’m told I visited Takaka for half an hour at the age of six, but this was my first meaningful visit to the area. Without resorting to hyperbole it’s difficult to describe how lovely I found Golden Bay, the people, the lifestyle. In many respects it retains the best of the New Zealand I knew growing up as a child, underscored by a rare natural beauty and welcoming people.

I took with me on holiday a Nokia candybar cellphone with a 2MP camera and rudimentary email client. I used this to document some of the highlights by posting observations to my posterous account – you can read the originals there if you wish.

What follows here are my pick of these photographs and comments.

Christmas lunch

We left Wanganui at 5am on Christmas morning. After driving to Wellington and crossing on the ferry to Picton, we reached Ngakuta on Queen Charlotte Drive in time for a late lunch. Chicken sandwiches in the sun on the beach at Ngakuta, with Battenburg Cake to follow. No orange juice or apple pie though – someone left them in the fridge at Whanganui. Sigh.

Views north and south

As we approached Havelock (the real one, not the pretender in Hawkes Bay) we discovered a hill with a view. In fact, two views. From the lookout we could look south to Havelock or north to an arm of the Marlborough Sounds. The view in either direction was stunning.

Appropriately stunned, we got back on the road for the drive through to Nelson.

Resurgence

The final step of our journey from Wanganui to Collingwood took us through the sun-drenched landscapes of Nelson, Motueka and Takaka. This is fertile farming country, with much of the area around Motueka devoted to market gardening.

We stopped for a late afternoon tea at the headwaters of the Riwaka River. This leaps forth from the limestone Takaka hills at a spring called the Resurgence. When I walked to the source I met a scuba-equipped couple about to dive into the spring and enter the extensive cave system from which it emerges.

We had a welcome cup of tea alongside the Riwaka River and discovered something else we’d failed to pack: insect repellent. Sigh.

Picturesqcess

Bruce Cockburn wrote “too much pathos makes you crazy.” I sometimes wonder if the same dynamic applies to cutemess. If that were the case I might well die in Golden Bay – a form of photogenecide.

Item one for the coroner’s report: an unassuming roadside garage at Aorere.

Putting the store in history

The Bainham Store’s been trading since the mid-nineteenth century, and is still the local post office and meeting place for inhabitants of western Golden Bay. These days the store also offers a gallery of local art, the option of a cappucino and a freshly baked muffin.

Unlike the muffins, the history’s not for sale. Mind you, you can’t take it with you when you go.

A river of many parts

With a name like Salisbury Falls my mind automatically dials in Africa. The photograph doesn’t do much to set the record straight either. But Salisbury Falls and its historic (there’s that word again) swing bridge is in Golden Bay at the north end of New Zealand’s South Island.

The swing bridge spans a deep gorge above the confluence of two rivers. The riverscape is diverse, with schist and granite at the falls giving way to striated marble at the river junction, to quartz further downstream.

Variety, natural beauty, history … and a swing bridge. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Beached

With a name like Golden Bay you’d expect beaches. Golden beaches, even. And Golden Bay doesn’t disappoint – there are golden beaches from Rototai to Farewell Spit. But that’s not all.

As a region surrounded by mountains, the sea offered the easiest route in for early settlers and the easiest route out for their produce. Regular shipping services were a feature long after the Takaka hill road connected the Bay with the world beyond, and wharves, harbours and ports abounded up and down the coast.

The heyday of shipping is over and many of the wharves have been decommissioned, but they stand alongside the golden beaches as a legacy, a gift from the past to the future.

A rainy day in paradise

We awoke this morning to drizzle, a warmup for the day’s main performance of sleeting rain. Undeterred we drove to Farewell Spit on a preliminary reconnaisance mission, mapping options for the better weather we’re sure is on the way.

The mudflats at the Spit are so extensive that the tide retreats six kilometres. And when it turns, the tide advances faster than a horse can run. Impressive. We haven’t spoken to the horse about this, but we’re told the rider was scared to death.

By the time we returned to Collingwood for a late lunch the rain had stopped and the skies were clearing. We may be back at Farewell Spit before too long.

A grave beginning

In its infancy Collingwood had to endure that scourge of New Zealand development, a gold rush. For a period Golden Bay was feverish with prospecting, mining and speculating. On the back of this bubble some developers planned great things for the area.

But the bubble burst. The gold petered out, and today all that remains of these grand plans can be seen at the historic Collingwood cemetery. Among the graves of men killed in mine accidents and men killed crossing rivers is the map of the proposed town of Collingwood. Although forestalled by the demise of the gold seam, this grand plan for a large town of avenues and squares was mooted at the time as the capital of New Zealand. From the graveyard of its earliest inhabitants you can see the extent of the developers’ dreams and wonder at what might have been.

The graveyard is in Excellent Street. Although the graves are not in excellent order, it makes for an excellent excursion.

Kayaking

My Christmas gift from Richard was a day’s kayaking in the Abel Tasman National Park. It was a gift chosen with some trepidation, given my lack of previous boating experience. And to be quite candid, it was accepted with some trepidation for the same reason.

Against all the odds, it was the perfect gift.

After basic training from Nigel and the team at Golden Bay Kayaks we took to the water just after nine, returning at four tired, sunburnt and full of what we’d seen and done. It wasn’t just the scenery or the wildlife. There was also the quiet. Apart from the occasional incursions of jet skis and powerboats there was a rare stillness and peace to the day.

Do it again? You bet.

Meeting the natives

Within minutes of beginning today’s kayak experience we found ourselves face to face with a blue penguin. Although only a few metres from our boat it ignored us completely and continued determinedly diving for fish. After attempting a few photographs with mixed success, we wished it the best of luck and turned our attention to the nearby cormorant colony.

En masse these birds look like a Bill Hammond painting. In today’s frame they lacked the sepia tonings of Bill’s better known works, but retained the inscrutable demeanour and collegial sang froid. When unsettled the entire colony serialised, flying across the water in single file.

We finished our lunch date at Taupo Point at low tide. Crossing the Waimea Inlet a kilometre from the shore the water was still only one metre deep and suddenly – scudding through the crystal clear water beneath our boat – there was a stingray. It moved swiftly, far more swiftly than I’d expected, and was out of sight within moments.

Returning from our day’s adventure we took the time to traverse some of the rocky passages along the coast. Our attention to detail was rewarded … by a close encounter with a seal. Lazily cavorting in a channel between two rocky islands, the seal was unperturbed at our approach. Although we didn’t seek to intrude, tide and the seal’s movements brought us within a few metres of each other. Suddenly, with a breathy “pffft!” he brushed us off. Time to leave.

It’s not often we have the privilege of very close contact with so many different species in one day. I’m grateful for the experience.

The rocks have it

There are a lot of rocks in the Abel Tasman National Park. We met a few of them during today’s kayak journey.

We saw brown cliffs turned white with guano, composite rocks weathered into caves and archways, coal seams on cliff faces. Against a backdrop of golden sand and water that changes from azure to turquoise, the scenery is arresting and sometimes breathtaking.

But when you boil it all down it’s just rocks, right? Apart from the water, of course.

Even the weather’s local

This morning in Collingwood it was overcast and drizzling intermittently. We left in search of kinder weather, but abandoned our drive to Farewell Spit after just a few kilometres, when the intermittent drizzle became steady rain.

Driving away from Collingwood in the opposite direction, it took only a few miles for the rain to stop and the skies to clear. Golden Bay isn’t so much a unique climatic area as a series of loosely coupled micro-climates.

Pu Pu Springs

Takaka’s limestone hills are riddled with underground waterways and store large volumes of water, some of it two thousand years old, in vast subterranean reservours. One consequence of this is found in the Pu Pu Springs near the Takaka township.

These are the largest freshwater springs in Australasia, and deliver the purest springwater in the world: the only water that’s purer is under the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

Another artifact of the Takaka limestone hills are the extensive cave systems across the region, something I’m keen to explore when the opportunity arises.

Weir and wonderful

When gold fever gripped the bay, a company of ambitious prospectors built a weir on Campbells Creek in the Pu Pu Valley, diverting the water around the mountainside for several kilometres before sending it down the hill in a series of ever-smaller pipes to sluice gold.

When hopes of further gold strikes faded, the weir and the water race were pressed into service to generate electricity, continuing to do so until after Golden Bay was connected to the national grid. Then, like many local generation plants around the country, it was mothballed.

But decommissioning didn’t last forever. In 1980 a group of local enthusiasts started restoring the hydro station, an eight year labour of love that required complete refurbishing of the generating equipment as well as improvements to the weir and repairs to the water race.

Today the Pu Pu hydro station contributes 240 kilowatts to the needs of Golden Bay households. It also offers one of the country’s most beautiful bush walks.

After ascending a zigzag path through regenerated bush to the end of the water race, we walked alongside (and sometimes above) the stream as it wound its way around the mountainside to the weir. The team of enthusiasts who rescued this remarkable piece of technological history have gone the extra kilometre and built handrails and boardwalks where they’re needed.

The experience is well worth the hill climb, and left me in awe of the pioneers who originally built the water race, by hand, in the middle of nowhere.

Willing? Not Abel

In the late seventeenth century Abel Tasman sailed into Golden Bay, an event recounted in Maori oral history as well as European records. There was a naval skirmish with native warriors which left several Dutch sailors dead … but we’re told neither Abel nor his crew ever set foot on land.

In fact, if we’re to believe the official Dutch record, the expedition skirted the coast of Tasmania without making landfall, visited Golden Bay without making landfall, then traversed the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island without … you get the picture. Does this seem strange to you? Intrepid explorers, boldly going where no man has gone before, yet resolutely declining to set the first European foot on new soil. And let’s not forget the many long weeks since Abel’s ships had taken on water …

“No, no – blush – you go first Cookie”. It doesn’t ring true to me.

But officially we’ve taken Abel at his word, and even erected a memorial to his Golden Bay visit. The obelisk near Pohara is tall and imposing, and the shit on top is just the seagulls. Honestly.

A walk in the park

Today we drove to Totaranui in the Abel Tasman National Park and walked from there to Awaroa Inlet and back. It was a surprise to reach the end of the tortuous shingle road from Pohara and find hundreds of people holidaying in the Department of Conservation campsite without benefit of electricity, cellphone coverage or shops of any kind!

The National Park owes its existence to one Englishwoman who worked tirelessly over many years to have the area preserved as a recreational resource for future generations. Eventually the government listened, and today anyone can enjoy the unspoilt beaches, native bush, wildlife and hundreds of kilometres of formed tracks that make up the park.

Today’s three hour walk took us along beaches of golden sand, around rocky coastline, across mudflats and along bush tracks. We saw and heard native birds, including a face-to-face encounter with a weka and an oystercatcher, and shared these pleasures with the hundreds of other visitors spending the day in the park.

It was magic. Simple, unsullied magic.

Tide me over

The final leg of today’s walk from Totaranui to Awaroa took us across the Awaroa Inlet, a large tidal mudflat only navigable for a couple of hours each side of low tide.

Thankfully our schedule matched the tide table, and we were able to walk across and back without difficulty. We had to cross several small streams – knee high at worst – and avoid stepping on mud crabs, but these trials were more than compensated for by the views and the comparative novelty of the experience.

Evidently there’s a cafe a further half hour along the coast. This might have made an ideal target for today’s outing, but for the fact that neither of up had pocketed a purse or wallet when we put on our walking shoes. No matter, there’s always next time.

Goldirocks

Golden Bay’s limestone bones result in some exciting land furniture, and nowhere is this geological creativity more evident than at The Grove.

A short distance from Motupipi, the Grove looks like the playdough discards of an unruly giant. Towering rocks have been warped and twisted into unlikely shapes by powerful streams of water over a long period of time. Where the water’s gone, we don’t know.

It all makes you feel very small in at least two dimensions.

All good things must come to an end

We’ve spent a pleasant week in the Collingwood camping ground. Most of the other guests have been friendly, and we’ve had some interesting conversations while preparing breakfast or dinner with people from all over New Zealand and around the world.

We’ve had some relaxing afternoons too, sitting on the small verandah in front of our unit with a cold drink, cheese and crackers and Matinee Idol playing softly. That’s where most of these blog posts have been written.

It’s been refreshing to have this break from our usual routine, but the time has come to say goodbye to Collingwood. I’m very much hoping we’ll return before very long: there are many areas of the Bay we haven’t explored, and I’d like to revisit some of those we have.

Until then, a bientôt Golden Bay.