Skip to main content

Nokomai: Day 7



photo (c) Wynston Cooper 2014
Leaving town in company with a small group of Waimea Plains parishioners, we walked past Ted and Shirley’s place, where had stayed the night before, and on to the newly formed Round the Mountain cycleway. The path sits on top of the stopbank of the Oreti River for a few km. It is broad and flat and has a pleasingly firm surface so walking was easy. About 3 or 4 km out of town a few people from Te Anau joined us, and a little further on, so did Dot Muir and one or two others from Invercargill.

Dot had brought Ezra, a 19 year old donkey and his paddock mate Rocky who is a small pony. Ezra has had a hard life, or at least he did until he was fortunate enough to be rescued by Dot a couple of years back. He was pretty anxious about Te Harinui, having some unpleasant memories involving people with sticks. Knowing that he also was a bit nervous about men generally, I bribed him by feeding him a couple of handfuls of scroggin before clambering clumsily onto his back. I rode him for a few km down the path. He wouldn’t go anywhere without Rocky, so the pony was led and the donkey followed. 

The short jerky vertical rhythm of riding a donkey is a bit different than the slow rocking motion of sitting on a walking horse. Ezra had an authentic Ethiopian donkey blanket on his back with a small cloth loop for hanging onto but we got on just fine and he never did anything that required an emergency grasp. John had a turn, his first time ever sitting on the back of a quadruped, and Phil tried, unfortunately synchronising his climbing on with one of Ezra’s unpredictable bolts forward.
We had lunch at the Five Rivers café before switching to a less interesting, more reliable form of transport: we broke out the bikes to continue on to Nokomai Station. The others wished us well, but shook their heads gravely and warned us of the difficulties of biking over the Jollies. Whatever they might be. We continued on the still unfinished cycleway for an hour or so, negotiating the odd bridgeless creek and the occasional electric fence slung over the path, until with the addition of hi-viz  vests we turned out onto the main road. Immediately there was a steepish downhill, on which it was possible to gather enough momentum to carry us up the modest uphill which followed. A bit of a grind later we stopped for a breather and learned we were at the top of Jollie’s Pass. Pah! Apart from one of our number lying gasping on his back, the Jollies held no fears for this intrepid band!

From here it was downhill all the way. There was an exhilarating sweep down a number of long curves and then a right turn onto a 12 km stretch of gravel. We rode down a widening valley with mountains towering on every side with increasing majesty until we reached the station. There was nobody home at the homestead, a modern two storey brick house, so we followed instructions and went inside to find rooms and shower and make tea.  Our hosts Ann and Brian Hore arrived by light plane from a trip to Dunedin a few hours later.

At 38,000 or so hectares, Nokomai is one of the great New Zealand high country runs. Brian and Ann farm beef and sheep, and the family has a passionate interest in horses which live in paddocks close to the house. In years gone by Nokomai was the scene of extensive gold mining operations. The pleasant valley in which the main buildings sit was quite recently extensively excavated but it has been restored to better than new condition and apart from a large pond, now covered in paradise ducks, nobody would know there had been a digger near the place. There is an accommodation business running near the homestead with several discretely landscaped cottages sitting around the exquisitely restored old stone homestead.

We had a short 4X4 tour of the land a look at the old buildings. We had a magnificent dinner and an evening of conversation. Here we are a long way from civilisation, but it all seems very, very civilised indeed.

Comments

What a joy is must be to move out from the city and experience the hidden gems of Southland i.e. the people, scenery, weather and types of travel. Thanks for your blog Bishop it also encourages me to look beyond our boundaries. Trish Ducker
Anonymous said…
A very special part of Northern Southland - for a few years we watched the massive machinery at work, on our regular visits to Janet & Frank - we likened it to a large sandpit that kept moving.
Adrienne

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old