Camera obscura at Karamea

The beach at Hector.

Yes, snow at Hector!

Folk art cushion at Hector.

More Hector folk art.

Intense weather travel must surely be an obscure object of desire.

You could say that winter’s chilled heart is perfect introvert weather. Let the party types slurp their cocktails in warmer climes!  In the South Island the roads are free and mostly easy and you may or may not see another car for an hour.

After the fiasco with my camera on last month’s trip to Dunedin, I bit the bullet and bought another. There’s some funny stuff going on with me and cameras.

Friend Annette was staying on the west coast at Hector, just down the road from Granity and we were both keen to push on to the end of Highway 6 to Karamea.

Lily and I set off from Motueka in the afternoon rain, along the valley highway to join highway 6, past the Nelson Lakes’ region. Before Murchison, we stopped at Owen River Tavern motels. The overnight tariff was $99, which I, hoping for a more economical night, rejected.  We ended up at a generic motel for $89 with a tiny bit of room to swing Lily by her fancy-pancy tail. For those who don't already know, Lily is a Pekinese with a great toi toi at her rear.

The weather may have been crap but the genuine west coast reception was not: en route to Karamea at every shop, motel and camping ground, smiling folk were ready to help and exchange a few friendly words.

From the women at the ATM in Westport laughingly drawing our attention to headlights left on, to the marvellous Margaret at the Karamea camping ground who did her best to fix our telly at night with a full on cold and a smile, we were warmly greeted by the coast.

By contrast, our encounter with a local bandit came as a shock but the story of thievery, thinly-veiled desperation and the final outcome will live on...

At Hector, the reddish rata driftwood was as thick on the beach as the spume. The beach changes rapidly. The froth disappeared in the super-energetic tide.

Accompanied by the swollen Buller river on the way Murchison, we hardly saw the Karamea bluffs driving through hail, rain and thunder to the ‘last loneliest loveliest’* outpost of Karamea at the end of Highway 6.

I considered stopping for a bite at Mohihinui Hotel, in a ‘blink or you’ll miss it’ township, but it was raining too hard. (Mohihinui’s river and the primeval forest along its banks, is threatened by an 85m high dam creating a 14km long lake - opposed by environmental lobbyists and the Department of Conservation. Court case next year.)

It was a long drive before I reached the hotel at Little Wanganui, ravenous for f and c. Little Wanganui hotel is the birthplace of a famous wild meat sauce. The blurb goes thus:

“Batch after batch, brew after brew, whiskey after whiskey we endured, seeking the perfect sauce to complement the famous wild meats of the West Coast of NZ, that up until that hazy night (in our red eyes), did not exist.” 

Glasseye Creek Wild Meat Sauce was dreamed up during the 2008 whitebaiting season by a bunch of mates that included David White, Little Wanganui's publican who died while stopping a brawl between two women. 

60s style at Karamea.

Karamea, home of the largest and healthiest cabbage trees I’ve ever seen, is the last town before the Heaphy track. We settled into the Karamea Holiday Park before the wildest weather on the first night. Annette thought the roof was going to come off as I snored on. The 60s-style motel unit was roomy and warm. The camp, with many small huts and buildings, is for sale. Whitebaiting and summer seasons see it overflowing, which is why I was glad to be there in the winter.

One of the area’s attractions, accessible through exquisite podocarp forest, the Oparara arch was much bigger than I realized and climbing up into the cavern I had an attack of vertigo, looking down at the swollen tannin-stained river than raced through it. I did a bit of poking around in vain to see the giant carnivorous snails, confined largely to this part of the South island.

I was unable to photograph the arch because the camera went missing from the picnic area where we’d had lunch before we set off. We searched all around, including the car, but the camera was firmly lost.

We had obeyed the sign saying not to feed the wekas but instead, the sign should have read ‘watch out for wekas, they take stuff'.

I went back to the camp trying not to worry about the camera. After all, what was losing two cameras in as many weeks?

The upshot was that we went back the next day and Annette found the camera in a shallow hole quite close to the picnic area. The weka was fussing around it. There was also a small bag and a washing up cloth in the hidey-hole. The fact remains that Weka Camera Club members are gutted by their loss...

Primeval forest at Oparara.

*Misappropriated from Rudyard Kipling's oft-quoted “The Song of the Cities” poem about Auckland, now not at all lonely.