A growing number of travelers who elect to buy round-the-world airline tickets know that their ultimate point of no return–the place at which, inexorably, they must start coming back again–is New Zealand.
Most circumnavigators breaking their journeys here tend to stay around the environs of Auckland, a sprawling, undistinguished little city set beside a pretty harbor, with perhaps a foray down to Lake Taupo or Rotorua, where the geysers produce an atmosphere steamier than that of a Chinese laundry. But ask the Kiwis themselves where they would go and the answer is quick and unequivocal: the South Island.
Recently, I took that advice and flew off to Christchurch. The Southern Alps glittered under the first snows of winter and the air had a lens-like clarity that seemed to magnify the landscape.
An orderly, garden-filled town, it has always prided itself on its uncompromising Englishness. J.B. Priestley remarked after a visit in 1973 that Christchurch looked ”as if it might have been lent to New Zealand by the Anglican Church.” Now it is exploiting its cathedrals-and-cream teas reputation to such effect that the Japanese regard it as a kind of Cheltenham on the Tasman and flock down by the thousands, resplendent in their tweeds and cavalry twills. A hefty proportion are honeymooners, many of whom have elected to have a pretend ”English-style” wedding while passing through.
The $450 nuptial option buys them bells, bouquets, a full-color video of the ceremony, an interpreter who also throws confetti, an officiating canon, and rented costumes: lacy white gowns for the ladies, tuxedoes, spats and spotless white gloves for the men. After this novel diversion, the couples claim their videos, jump into a bus and race off to continue their honeymoons at the old Hermitage Hotel, standing hard by the flanks of Mount Cook.
The route from Chistchurch leads across the Canterbury Plains toward the Alps which, as you draw closer, start to fill the first few thousand feet of sky with granite and send inky black shadows spilling across the road. In the late afternoon I found a tiny church, no larger than a log cabin, on a tussocky, windswept bluff at Lake Tekapo.
It had a plaque commemorating the laying of its foundation stone by the Duke of Gloucester in 1935, and a wall-to-wall picture window providing the congregation with stupendous perspectivies of the lake and its ring of attendant mountains. By the door hung a faded photograph of the young duke looking faintly anxious as he stood, clutching a trowel, in the midst of this glacial wilderness.
Dusk fell while I lingered in the church, the color draining from the lake and being absorbed by the snowy Hall and Two Thumb Ranges which, for a few mysterious moments, glowed like peaks of blown glass with big volcanic fires burning inside. The fires went out and I drove on through the gloaming, recalling that Priestly, also traveling down this road, had found it
”fabulously beautiful” and pondered mountains ”that might have been guarding the fields of Paradise.”
He, too, was bound for the Hermitage, New Zealand`s most celebrated hotel, opened in 1884 by a proprietor who kept the mutton in a well, ordered his beer by carrier pigeon and survived immense shingle slides caused when sheep devoured the fields of Mount Cook lilies that wired the landscape together.
The rambling, homely Hermitage has hosted luminaries as diverse as Capt. Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary, who trained for his Everest ascent on Mount Cook (at 12,349 feet, New Zealand`s loftiest peak). More recently Prince Charles came to stay, disappointing the multitudes who arrived from miles around to dine in his proximity by having an early night and a ham salad sent up by room service.
I tucked into a plate of yam and wild boar. A front was coming through, with lightning rippling down the Tasman, Murchison and Mueller Glaciers and thunder bouncing between their icy walls. By morning the whole place lay ankle-deep in new snow. More blew down from the black overcast shrouding the peaks as the lobby filled with Japanese who peered at the blizzard and asked about aircraft flights up to the tops of the glaciers.
Curious about the little planes that land on skis high in the mountains, I went down to the airfield, walled in on three sides by towering escarpments of ice and rock, to see Wayne McMillan, training captain of the Mount Cook Line`s ski plane division.
He told me that first thing each morning, when the place wasn`t socked in by weather, a senior pilot moseyed up to snow-mark the glaciers from which they would operate that day, drifting in with full flap on and brushing his skis lightly along the tops of the fresh overnight falls. The tracks he laid helped his colleagues combat the problems of depth perception, or white-out, often experienced in alpine flying.
Last year McMillan and the division`s 28 other pilots put 47,000 people down on the glaciers for a few minutes of frolic and picture-taking, despite the possibility of extreme turbulence. There are air pockets like mineshafts, with drops of 3,000 feet being recorded.
