The Wild West

Lonely Planet includes it in their list of the world’s 10 best road trips… the journey along a coast that drips, rushes and roars with water.

Words: Polly Greeks  Photographs: Bob McCree & Sandii McDonald

 AT THE START OF THE JOURNEY there are only the Canterbury plains rushing by, as monotonous and soporific as the song of the train on the tracks, but as the TranzAlpine Express pulls away from farmed flatness, something within me quickens. Is it me or the land that’s becoming more alive? Tussocked hills crouch like big tawny cats and a zigzag of silver river gleams at the base of a gorge. Beyond it, the Southern Alps rise in a full-scale crescendo to bite at the sky with their snow-white teeth. This is where east meets west. Forget cultural clash – this is all geological, with the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates slamming into each other so forcefully the impact has buckled the South Island’s spine into a thousand jagged, mountainous slabs.

Heading west, I pass through the great divide via a series of tunnels that opens and closes like an eye upon views of steep, forested slopes leaning in on dark, narrow valleys. There is a new roaring river, flowing in a different direction and tumbling over itself in its haste. It leads the train out of the mountains, past derelict, mildewed settlements, down a widening green valley and on to the West Coast, to Greymouth. There the river is swallowed by the churning ocean while the TranzAlpine too, reaches the end of its line.

I take a car north up State Highway 6 where the winding coast road is sandwiched between bush-cloaked, rugged hills and the surging Tasman Sea. Apparently it’s a typical Coast day, with the lines between land, sea and sky blurred by the haze of the pounding surf. The air is clean and fresh, scented with sun-warmed flax and a tang of kelp, and I inhale so deeply I grin with light-headedness. Everywhere I look this living land booms with presence. Sometimes the Coast shouts with fierce thrusting hills, at other times its narrow gorges whisper with mossy green secrets, while tilting slopes almost groan under the dense weight of nikau palms, ferns and flax. Water talks back. As well as the kamikaze Tasman hurling itself on to empty beaches, there are little creeks singing as they tumble from forests while roaring rivers pour from the mountains in a churn of white water before ironing into wide, silken silence near the sea. The rain’s language varies from sudden, deafening downpours to a soft, moody mist dripping like xylophone notes from the trees.

The sea’s voice at Punakaiki is like rolling thunder as it surges into caverns and erupts from blow-holes in salty, hissing plumes of spray. There is a sense of violence in its relationship with the land as it forces itself through narrow fissures and smashes to smithereens on the stratified rocks. Long strands of kelp trail the tide like a drowned woman’s hair. Pregnant with rain, the sky is hanging so low it almost touches the nikau palms that stand like a forest of umbrellas blown inside-out by the wind.

The restaurant at the Punakaiki Rocks Resort has a wall of glass overlooking the beach that makes dining a little like eating in a theatre. It’s not that my meal is unmemorable, just that the sight of stormy ocean being served up on the pancake-stacked rocks is far more engrossing. My hotel room is also sea-facing and I’m woken at 3am by a muffled roar. Sitting up in bed, I watch ship-wrecking surf washing up on piles of driftwood that glow like bleached bones. Even the stars here are loud, puncturing the silent blackness like a volley of gunshots.

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