Transalpine train from Greymouth to Christchurch

We’re treated to a full English breakfast in Mary’s kitchen at 9 a.m. A picture of her four daughters is on the wall: one in Durbin, South Africa, one in London, one in Auckland and one in Wellington. “The two in New Zealand came to me one day a number of years ago and said, ‘We’ve got something to tell you, Mum.’ Well, of course, one of them was pregnant. The next day, my daughter in Durbin called me and said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Mum.’ And I knew straight off she was pregnant, too.” She pauses. “The very next day, the daughter in the lower right,” she points to the picture, “she calls me from Auckland and tells me she’s pregnant. Three out of four, three days in a row. The one in Wellington just had another but I’m not going to visit for at least three months. All babies do is sleep and poop until then. They’re much more interesting after that when they get a personality.”

“And did you raise all your daughters in this house?” we ask.

“We bought this house from Greymouth’s banker.” The house is huge: four bedrooms upstairs, a bedroom on the ground floor, Art Deco windows all around, just like many we saw in Napier (near Hawke’s Bay), a glazed brick fireplace, curio cabinets with ceramic thatched houses from … some shire or another, we guess. “His bank is now the gallery near the train station downtown.” It’s the one we went to yesterday. “He had put his house up for sale. We didn’t really know why. It was certainly one of the largest in Greymouth at the time. And we were living on the other side of town but we knew we were having more children and wanted more space. So we offered what the banker asked on the first day the house was available. We had a contract. The very next day the banker said he had changed his mind. He no longer wanted to sell the house and wanted it back. But we had a contract, you see. So there was nothing he could do about it. And I have lived here ever since though I feel a bit put out when my daughters ask if they can live here while they renovate their houses. And then they want to leave their dogs with me and they never take them back. Had one for fourteen years.”

“How did you meet your husband?”

“On the boat from Southampton, when I came to New Zealand with a friend, another woman,” she says, leaning on a rolling side table laden with yogurt and cereal and orange juice and granolas and jams and milk and … a lot of grub. “We were both from Wales and she had struck up a friendship with a Welshman on the boat, a merchant seaman who had a roommate. One night, a few days out of Southampton, she said the Welshman, his name was Taffy, was going to sing that night and would I like to go with her and hear him. I did, and I met his roommate, and the four of us ended up spending a bit of time together for the trip, which was long.

“By the time we reached the Panama Canal — shorter than going through the Suez, even from England — we were sort of paired off: my friend and Taffy and me and the roommate, but by the time we got to Pacific side of the Canal, we had switched as couples. And by the time we got to Tahiti, Taffy had proposed to me and I had accepted.

“We sailed on to Wellington and Taffy, who had no money then and was sending a big share of what he made to his mum, had to work another voyage. So I stayed in Wellington where Taffy sent word to his friend, who told my friend — we were all in Wellington then — that he felt he must have made a fool of himself proposing to me and that he wouldn’t hold me to it. Well, I told him that was rubbish. He had proposed and I had accepted and that was that. Indeed. So, when he returned to Wellington five weeks later, we were married.”

In the Methodist church in Oriental Bay … the very one that David looked down on when he climbed Victoria Peak in the mornings a few weeks (and … a lifetime?) ago. She seems to us very representative of the south island’s west coast people: very pragmatic and blunt and self-reliant. Not that many … most? … Kiwis do not also share those traits, but the westlands folk, as they seem to be called, seem to have earned a reputation in their own country for being, not sure exactly, maybe more libertarian. They certainly have had to fight for their share of New Zealand’s federal attention and tax dollars. The currently in-power Labour Party — a year-plus in power after the National Party held the PM position and Parliament for nine consecutive years (PMs have three-year terms) — has upheld some campaign promises and earmarked significant annual sums for the south island, even though it holds less than a third of the country’s total population.

Leaving Mary is a little like stepping from stone into water. We lose just a hint of foundation, of safety. But we must leave. So we pack with an eye to consolidating our luggage as much as possible for the train trip to Christchurch and drop our bags at the train station where Cynthia queues for our tickets while David parks the car in a nearby lot and notes that we have driven 2,836 kilometers in 30 days.

You have to have driven in New Zealand in general and the west coast of the South Island in particular to appreciate that mileage (kilometerage?) is meaningless. NO road has four lanes outside of Aukland (a very small exaggeration). The roads in the Westlands have corkscrew paths up, down and around mountain curves that you just cannot believe. We have driven mountains over which we never went more than 20 kph for a good 45 minutes … no cars in front of us, none behind; the curves are simply that sharp and come one after another after another after another until you’re dizzy. Our Toyota RAV4 had 103,256 when we got it and 106,092 when we dropped it off: a total of 2,836 klicks. Worked like a champ from start to finish. Kudos to Apex Rentals … no, we are not getting paid for this …

The TransAlpine train ride from Greymouth to Christchurch — we DID get left-hand seats facing the front with a table — should be an entry all its own. We will cut this account short, but we will remember what we saw for a loooong time. First some detail: Your luggage is weighed and put on a luggage car at the head of the train by station stevedores. The train is 14 cars long, including two locomotives (one at each end in case you have to back out of a tunnel), two concession cars, two open-air viewing cars (no seats) and eight passenger cars with really comfortable seats that have headphone jacks. The train leaves Christchurch around 9 a.m., makes six stops on its way to Greymouth, turns around and goes back to Christchurch, where it reaches the station at 6:45, 15 minutes before the station and everything around it closes for the night (guess how we found that out).

We tuck ourselves into our plush, somewhat contoured faux velvet seats in car H, which is about two-thirds full, and we’re off, chugging along Greymouth’s harbor and passing the Stillwater Lumber Ltd. yard that covers about eight acres of cut planks and 40 small rail cars of stacked but uncut logs each about 15 feet long. We pass the mine where an unauthorized charge killed 85 miners aged 13 to 70 (yes … 19th century), and we pass a meat processing plant that specializes in exporting halal meat to the middle east and Indonesia. Under clearing skies, we pass along the Arnold River — the usual glacial turquoise with wide meanders of granite — site of New Zealand’s first hydroelectric plant, which fed three kilowatts into Greymouth by 1932, a paltry amount that proved inadequate by 1936 when the plant was incorporated into a growing national electric grid. One of NZ’s first prime ministers, Richard John Seddon (1893 to 1906), affectionately or not called King Dick by his contemporaries, noted that New Zealand is “ineluctably pluvial.”

The train rolls along at a stately, leisurely pace … about as fast as our car on the corkscrewed mountain roads. Cynthia knits and gets up to take photos; David listens to the intermittent female voice in his headphones, trying to remember the threads of history she weaves. We chug through dairy farmland, the principle business of the entire south island. But the flat farmland, covered in pukeko (sp?), ducks, cattle with the usual magpies floating around, and mostly shorn sheep (merino is big here), quickly gives way to the southern alps. The first Europeans in the Westlands to explore them, Charles Heaphy and Thomas Brunner, undertook a 550-day trip to explore the west coast and had to eat Rover, Brunner’s dog, at one point.

The tracks are laid almost on top of the fault line between the Indian-Australian plate and the Pacific plate, which wants to climb over its neighbor. The Aussie plate grows “about as fast as your fingernails,” the voice tells us. The mountains just get bigger, the gorges deeper, the sky more distant, and we become a tiny bit less significant with every turn of the wheels. As Will Durant once said, “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice” (inscribed on a wall in Christchurch).

We pass through the 8.5 kilometer-long Otira tunnel, begun at both sides in 1908 but completed in 1923 by the government after MacLeans, the original private engineering company, went bankrupt (the rock harder than expected, more workers needed than anticipated, a time of union growth and dissatisfaction, a succession of hard winters, a world war that siphoned resources, and simple underestimation of the project’s difficulty). The path of the incomplete tunnels that had to join from both sides of the mountain had to be surveyed and calculated using trigonometry from paths cut across the mountain’s crest and when the tunnels finally met in 1923, they were misaligned … by 29 millimeters.

We spend some time at Otira while the voice explains that the length and narrow bore of the tunnel necessitated construction of doors at the east end of the tunnel to create a vacuum that allowed giant fans to blow the diesel fumes of 15,000 horsepower engines out the other end because people could not breathe when the early trains were so slow and laden with coal cars and freight that they would take a long time to go through.

A lone hiker with a week’s supply of necessities in a large backpack tramps steadfastly by the Otira station on a narrow dirt path. At a distance, the hiker seems a stout, long-legged sort with a determined tread. Her white scottie with six-inch legs about 100 yards behind her seems totally uninterested in accompanying her further.

The sun is totally out as we emerge from the tunnel. We won’t try to describe the vistas in the mountains — the gorges, the rivers, the clouds layered in the defiles, the talus slopes, the deep green forested sides — hopefully Cynthia got some good photos from the freezing open-air viewing car. The Rockies are majestic, but these alps have an intimacy that takes your breath away at every unexpected turn.

The landscapes change after Otira because the southern alps are behind us, they stop the clouds that drop 200 annual inches of rainfall from coming east where the annual average rainfall is only 62 inches. We enter the Canterbury region: alpine pasture with tussocks where the vistas and meandering riverbeds look like the backdrop for the pasture that Gus and McCall finally found for their cattle in Lonesome Dove. High plains and the train follows the track of the old stagecoach road with Mt. Misery towering in the background. A single file of about 500 sheep winds down a path. In these misty mountains, a rainbow crosses a gorge, one side to the other.

We stop at Rolleston, named after the last leader of Canterbury, before the provinces were subsumed by a national parliament. (“Modesty was not a characteristic of our forbearers,” says the voice. “Rolleston is the name of the stop, a lake, a river, a mountain range, a glacier and a town.” We’re in the largest flat area in all of New Zealand — fields and gigantic pine and gorse hedgerows as far as the eye can see: 120 miles by 45 miles … about 770,000 hectares.

And we reach Christchurch, named by John Robert Godfrey for the college in Oxford, and home of 360,000 people, including Stephen and Robyn Thomas and their 12-going-on-thirty-year-old son, Hugh, and several neighbors and friends whose dinner we interrupt when we arrive earlier than anticipated because … skip this, just because.

After dinner the women decorate a cake for friends daughters birthday.  The daughter has requested a unicorn cake and supplied a photo of what she wants.  Cynthia feels like she is on the set of the Great British Baking Show.

Another day of unforgettable people and vistas in Paradise.