Te Anau – Manapouri

The now 'easy walk' along the smooth footpath that was then the awful coach road at Manapouri

The Manapouri river where it joins the lake where Connie sketched and 'photo'd'.

I worked as a waitress at the Te Anau hotel for the Christmas holiday in 1962. Apart from the fairly small hotel there were a few houses, a village store and an airstrip in a field out the back. The woman who filled my car with petrol this morning also lived here then and remembers riding her horse up what is now the main street. There has been huge development here in the last ten and especially the last 5 years with over 2,000 permanent residents and with at least 20 motels plus camp sites and day trippers on their way to Milford , who knows how many visitors. The airport is now 5 miles out of town but I remember coming in on a little Cesna plane and having to make a low pass to clear the sheep off the strip then hop over the fence, go round the one and only tree and regain enough height to get back in to land before the sheep returned. I also recall my alarm as the pilot said with true kiwi irony as we went sideways round this lonely pine ’ geeze someone’s gonna hit that bloody tree one of these days’. I guess today’s expansion has a lot to do with the so called ‘Lord of the rings effect’ and the trade expansion with Asia. I drove down the easy road to Manapouri where Connie had sketched and photographed, then on to Kingston where I joined the renovated steam train for a one hour round tourist trip to Fairlight . As we gently rattled along sitting in the luxury of what would have been the leather padded comfort of a first class compartment, I never the less felt quite shaken about. Think then of Connie’s hearfelt description of their journey down to Manapouri from Te Anau , “ We breakfasted at 7.30 and were off soon after 8 in a 3 horse buggy. Language fails to describe the jolting ( to use a totally inadequate word) which we underwent in those 12 miles – sometimes there was a track, sometimes none, sometimes ( and that was the worst of all) the road was being made; imagine a mountainous ploughed field with a stone quarry thrown in and you will have an idea of what we trotted over’ They even arrived late and missed the launch and the outing they were aiming for. Later she says ‘ We got back about 7, and it says something for the way the human body is put together that so far we have not discovered any displaced organs or dislocated bones. Though I am afraid the shaking was more than was good for ‘M’. Driving the easy road into Queenstown I reflected a lot on the nature of travel, why we do it, what human need is satisfied and whether there is any difference in that desire now and then. Why do we feel more impressed by high mountains than flat plains, by skyscrapers rather than bungalows? Is it scale and awe, the fact that we are overwhelmed by the greater height, but if so then why not feel intimidated rather than uplifted. Actually I think it might be more about hardwiring in the brain, that we simply react to verticle lines more than horizontal, to moving more than static and maybe even the ‘pure ’colour of green or blue is addictive to the visual cortex in some way. Of course the sense of escape from everyday life has a lot to do with the importance of travel. Some think the genetic heritage of connection with the land is still dominant but perhaps even more, a natural human curiosity is alive in us still.