The next day I had another early start to catch the last run
for the season of the Christchurch to Picton train, using identical rolling
stock to the TransAlpine, and even the same train manager, who reconized me
from the previous day’s trip.
This route is less scenic than the TransAlpine, meandering its way up
the coast to the port of Picton in Marlborough. The ferry service between Wellington and Picton is
more or less the equivalent of a Channel crossing, albeit across a stretch of
water – the Cook Straight – which can become pretty rough, while the passage
through the Sounds provides a scenic spectacle which the cross Channel route
can't match.
Picton is the jumping off point for the Marlborough Sounds,
an impressive landscape of steep hills and flooded valleys. There are numerous walking routes
across the hills and between sounds, with varying types of accommodation from
the Spartan to the sybaritic. Like
Greymouth, Picton is working hard at attracting and entertaining tourists, and
there is a little local museum as well as an aquarium and a maritime museum
which preserves the hull of the 19th Century ‘Edwin Fox’, ‘the ninth
oldest ship in the world’, ‘the
world’s last surviving East Indiaman’ and ‘the oldest surviving ship that
brought immigrants to NZ’. Picton
was also, in earlier times, a whaling port, though fortunately the hunting of
cetacea for oil and bone has been abandoned in favour of hunting them as
entertainment for tourists, providing a new economic basis for the former
whaling port, Kaikoura, at which
the train stops, between Picton and Christchurch.
Besides many memorabilia from the now defunct dairying and
whaling industries, the museum also displays a selection of photographs of
mixed race families, since some of the early whalers married into local Maori
families of standing, alliances which must have had commercial benefits. From the Victorian sepia photographs
the serious faces of members of the Love, Aldridge and Norton families confront
the 21st century visitor.
Very likely their descendants still live in Picton, as do those of the
Perano dynasty, one of the major whaling families, whose name now appears on new
four storey flats and retail space at Picton’s harbour. I was told that the founding ancestor
was probably from Brittany, and
that the spelling of the family’s name had been simplified. The histories of
the these two sets of whaling families seemed very neatly to epitomise the
kinds of alliances, adjustments and ethnic mingling which are an integral part
of the evolution of the Kiwi identity.
In Marlborough, there are two main sounds: Charlotte, on
which Picton is located, and Pelorus, reached from Havelock, where scientist
Lord Rutherford was born and raised.
There is a certain amount of parochial rivalry between the two sounds,
Kent, the manager of the motel where I stayed, being a staunch Picton-Queen
Charlotte Sound man, who pointed out that whereas much of the forest in Pelorus
is ‘secondary bush’, in Queen Charlotte it was your authentic primary forest. In fact, the hills in both sounds were
extensively plundered in the past for timber or were cleared, which even
involved engineering temporary railways, to make pasture for sheep and cattle.
Considerable areas were subsequently replanted with pine trees which, when
mature, are clear felled, leaving denuded hills. Increasingly, many such areas are
now not being replanted with pine seedlings so as to encourage the regrowth of
native bush. The process of
restoration goes through several stages, starting with the growth of manuka scrub, then tree ferns, which
provide shelter for the subsequent growth of seedlings of the larger trees that
make up native forest or bush, now regarded as a precious resource to be
conserved rather than exploited, while alien growth, such as pine and willow, is
now being poisoned. The dying pine
trees become an autumn coloured feature of the landscape before transforming to
bleached dead skeletons.
Sheep and dairy farming in the Sounds is no longer really
viable, although there are still a few working sheep stations reached via the
regular mail boat runs that are also a popular tourist attraction. Instead, a new industry has been
spawned, quite literally: fish farming. The most significant in the Sounds is
mussel farming, an environmentally more acceptable form of fish farming than
salmon farming, which involves a lot of environmentally undesirable inputs and
polluting outputs. Most of the
green lip NZ mussels exported worldwide will have their origins in the
Marlborough Sounds, where they grow on ropes suspended from long lines of buoys.
Having explored some of the Sounds, and not being prepared
or, thanks to a gout episode, able
to think of doing any tramping, I rented a car and did a day trip to Nelson,
renowned for its sunny climate. On
the day of my visit, Nelson lived up to its reputation and it struck me as a
very genial place, where I was able
to get a good lunch in a
restaurant in what could be thought of as the fashion quarter, a recently built
pedestrianized square lined with smart clothes shops, with a farmers’ market in the square itself. Nearby a gingko tree framed a fine
stone faced art deco building, now a restaurant.
Unfortunately, the high street in Nelson hasn't escaped the
signage free-for-all that has spread like a blight across both NZ and
Australia. A number of the
national chains that were doing business fifty years ago are still to be found,
among them Hannahs, the Clarkes equivalent, and originally established by the
maternal great grandfather of film director Jane Campion, whose parents founded
and ran the New Zealand Players theatre group. The current Hannahs shop on
Nelson’s high street can't be missed.
The return journey to Picton in the late afternoon and autumn/early winter countryside was to be a preview of the attractions
which awaited my relocation to Blenheim and the Wairau Valley, heartland of the
Marlborough wine industry.
Although I've visited wine country in France, this was the first time
I’d been in a vine growing region in late autumn when the foliage provides a
spectacular display before it falls.
Whereas Picton is highly dependent on summer tourism, so that in May the town has a
distinctly out of season feel, Blenheim and the Wairau valley are much less
dependent on seasonal tourism, even though the production of wine is a seasonal
activity. Furthermore, they are part of an economy in which most of the value
is added where the wine is actually made and bottled, the one variable over
which there is no control being the weather. Fortunately,
the 2013 crop was good and the vintage likely to be excellent. One wine maker, reported
in the local Friday Sun of May 10th, described
it as follows: “In terms of Sauvignon Blanc, we normally take 22-26 days to
harvest all our fruit. This year we did it in 16. It all seemed to ripen at
once. It was intense and we broke records in terms of intake, so yes it was
rushed – but it is very satisfying in terms of the fruit flavours we have
got.” A more sceptical view of the
rushed harvest was that the growers were unwilling to pay holiday rates during
the public holiday which coincided with the ripening of the crop. As a result,
post holiday picking had to be rushed to get the grapes in before they
spoiled.
The Wairau Valley, formerly devoted to sheep farming, is now
dominated by vineyards, and livestock farmers happily discover the financial
benefits of leasing their pastures to one of the fifty wine producers. Although the
employment offered in the vineyards is largely seasonal and is not well paid,
the bouquet discernible in the Wairau valley is less that of wine than that of
money, since the corporate world is quick to sniff out a profitable sector for
investment. The big players, such as Cloudy Bay, Brancott and Wither Hills,
have set up very smart premises complete with sophisticated restaurants, and
commensurate prices, so that a
tour of the cellar doors can be not just a truly sybaritic experience, but quite a costly one as well if tasting is augmented by fine dining. None of this could have been predicted
fifty years ago, when NZ was totally unknown on the global wine scene.
A 100km drive up the Wairau valley to the Nelson Lakes area
showed why Marlborough has achieved the status of the New Zealand's major wine producing region. Thousands of acres of vines cover the
valley for many kilometres, until at a critical altitude, grape cultivation
ceases. Evidently it is the bulk wine which is sourced from these grapes, and I
was soon to learn of the distinction between grape growers who supply grapes to
the wine makers, and proprietary vineyards whose grapes are made into the wines
bearing the name of the vineyard.
Indeed, there was more to the subtleties of the wine industry than could
be grasped by a short term visitor like me, who was in fact more fascinated by
the photographic opportunities of the landscape than the niceties of the
product. In any case, like
many UK visitors, I was disappointed to find that even on its native turf, the
splendid sauvignon blanc is pretty well the same price as it is on the shelves
at Waitrose. Even so, I didn't overlook opportunities for consuming examples of Marlborough's best known product, and I particularly recommend Cloudy Bay's Te Koko sauvingon blanc, which, despite being made from a quite different grape, has the slightly smokey character of Pouilly-Fuisse.
Blenheim and its surroundings are not just devoted to the sybaritic, however. Mortification of the flesh is also on offer. The day I left coincided with the annual
20km run/walk which was testament to the importance of physical activity in the
NZ way of life. This kind of event is evidently widespread, a similar challenge
being promoted in Palmerston North, which I visited a week later. Although obesity and health problems
resulting from a modern way of life and diet exist in NZ, by and large this is isn't a country for the indolent, there being no lack of opportunities and reasons for being physically active, as the
tramping, running, climbing and cycling activities of my cousins and their
families demonstrated.
Fortunately, the next stage in my journey didn’t involve strenuous
physical activity, but a quiet sea voyage through the Sounds, across Cook
Straight, to Wellington, capital
city and where I first entered the world.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75004468@N08/sets/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75004468@N08/sets/
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