Posted by John
At Fortrose, at the south end of the south island of New Zealand, we camped on the shore of Toetoes Bay and nearly got blown away during the night. Our cheap tent only looked like one that could handle the weather conditions of Mt. Everest base camp, but in reality, we knew it could not. As the wind increased and the situation continued to worsen, we lay awake formulating a plan of escape. We were certain it was only a matter of time before either the seams started ripping out, or we’d be inundated by blowing sand and crashing waves. We executed our escape just as soon as we had enough daylight to see. Fortunately, our tent did not take off and fly away like an inflated bouncy house.
We drove to Invercargill, and then out to Bluff, before finding a cafe open for breakfast. Bluff was dark, windy, and felt like the bottom of the world. After some coffee, we turned around and headed north, up the west coast of the south island, and on to Fiordland and Milford Sound.
Milford Sound is where pyramid-shaped Mitre Peak rises from the water’s edge in the iconic image of New Zealand as a remote, quiet, unspoiled land. We had hoped to spend a few days there, to maybe even take a boat tour, but we went at the height of summer tourist season and barely even found a place to park, much less a place to camp.
The road to Milford Sound is a mountain road with views of many waterfalls and high, hanging glaciers on steep, rocky peaks. The road winds up into a steep valley until it looks like there is no way out. Sure enough, there is a tunnel dug right through the rock ridge at the head of the valley. Traffic only goes one way at a time, controlled by stoplights, and the tunnel, hacked out of solid rock, is one of the spookiest I’ve experienced. Once inside the mountain, the road angles downward for some distance until it finally pops out high up a cliff on the other side of the pass. It switchbacks down from there. At the bottom are parking lots full of huge tour buses, crowds of people, tour boats, and an airstrip with sightseeing flights and helicopters taking off and landing continuously. The scenery is spectacular, but quiet and unspoiled it is not.
With no place to spend the night, we turned around and went back up through the tunnel and down the valley on the other side until finally finding a campsite just before dark. It cost us $45 to put up our tent. There was no drinkable water, and we had to take our rubbish with us. After Milford, we continued up the west coast, through Queenstown (nice, but no place to park) and on to Fox Glacier (road washed out), Franz Josef Glacier, and three nights on the Tasman Sea coast at Greymouth and Westport. We left Westport on our way to Nelson, but found ourselves up the river without a spare, in a one tow truck town.
Our little Holden Barina, once we had worked out a way to fit everything into it, had done us good up to this point. But we really should’ve checked the spare tire—or tyre, as they’re called here—when we bought it. We were going up the Buller River, which is a long (100 kilometers between petrol stations), winding road through a sometimes narrow, steep-sided gorge (gorgeous gorge?). Most roads in New Zealand are just two lanes, except for short sections where there is an extra passing lane. But those extra lanes are often canceled out by the many single lane bridges and road sections that are only one lane, with traffic alternating in each direction. The road through the Buller Gorge has many such sections, including one where the single lane is carved out of a rock face like half a tunnel. It was not far beyond this spot where our left rear tyre decided to start peeling off tread and become flappy. Kind of like a shoe with the sole coming off. The only place we could pull over was on the wrong side of the road. We took everything out of the back of the car and piled it onto the shoulder. We found the spare and pulled it out. We found the lug wrench. We could not find the jack. We had bought a used car, took it on a long road trip, and never even looked to see if we had a jack—or any tools, for that matter.
The traffic zoomed by. Sometimes they honked, maybe because we were on the wrong side of the road? But no one stopped. There was no phone service. We put everything back into the car, turned on the flashers, and drove real slowly, waving cars past when they bunched up behind us, and pulling over wherever we could. The road had many worrisome blind curves. We came across a lime works with an office—the door was wide open—and a pickup truck parked in front. No one was around. I went into the office, but the only people there were the many pictures of women on the many calendars hanging on the wall. The ground was all covered with a deep, slimy, white, lime mud which got onto everything. We limped on, eventually coming to a parking lot for “New Zealand’s longest swing bridge,” which you can walk across for $5 per person, and for an extra fee, ride the zip line back in the other direction.
We borrowed a jack from a European tourist couple in the parking lot, got the bad tyre off the car, put on the spare, lowered the car back down, and watched as the spare squished down to the rim. Huh, there was zero air pressure in it. We next found a couple from North Carolina who had bicycles on a rack on the back of their camper van. He was wearing a T-shirt from Orcas Island, WA. Our lucky day. They had two bicycle pumps, but apparently, at some time since I was a kid, they’ve changed bicycle tire valves so that they are no longer the same as car tyre valves. The bicycle pump didn’t fit our tyre valve. One of the staff at the swing bridge offered to call the tow truck from the next town on his landline phone, but it turned out that the only tow truck had already been sent out on a call.
We were able to borrow another jack from another European couple in another rented camper van, swap the flat spare out with the flappy-treaded tyre, and reload everything we had removed from the back of the car into it again. We turned on our flashers and drove—at about 20 mph—with two tyres on the shoulder, one of which continuously flapped, the 14 kilometers to the Mobil station in Murchison. It wasn’t a full-service station, just pumps and a convenience store, but it had an air kiosk. We took everything out of the car once again, pulled out the spare, and pumped it up. Then I went on foot in search of the hardware store where people thought we might be able to find a car jack. They did have one. Just one. Our lucky day. By the time I got back to the car, the tyre pressure was down by more than 10 psi. Of course, there was a reason that the spare in the trunk had been flat. It had a screw stuck in it.
The Mobil convenience store had a can of Fix-A-Flat. We left the screw in the tyre because we had no pliers to pull it out with. We jacked up the car and took the bad tyre off—still covered with lime slime, and put the leaking spare on again. We emptied the can of Fix-A-Flat into the tyre, bought some cold drinks from the store, and continued on to Nelson. The tyre didn’t leak at all. In the morning we bought two new tyres to go with our new jack, and then headed out on the road again.
Such are the joys of road tripping. We’re almost ready to start thinking about going back out on the open ocean again. But we still have a little more driving to do.
