It’s as dark and forbidding as the inside of an All Blacks scrum when we arrive late at Rough and Tumble Bush Lodge, having been caught out by the brevity of the early winter’s day. After a long drive from the other side of the south island we’ve reached this outpost perched on the edge of some of New Zealand’s wildest, loneliest country..
The lodge, about an hour south of where State Highway 67 abruptly ends, is enveloped by the northernmost wilderness of the South Island’s West Coast. This is our starting point for a road trip that features some of the most diverse land and seascapes in the Southern Hemisphere. With a population of about 30,000 the West Coast makes outback Australia seem positively crowded.
Here, there are none of the exclusive, overpriced five-star lodges for which the Kiwis have become famous, or infamous depending on your budget. The towns are locked in some sort of time-warp from which the rest of the country has fortunately found release, and there’s just a single restaurant that attracts any respect. To cap it off, the West Coast is the wettest place in all of New Zealand, receiving an astounding 10,000 millimetres of rain a year. The prospective visitor, therefore, could easily conclude that the West Coast, well, sucks.
Inside the cosy wall-to-wall timber main building of Rough and Tumble Bush Lodge we deposit ourselves on a sofa next to a handcrafted stone fireplace as we wait for dinner, which has been delayed by the latecomers (us). This unpretentious, yet comfortable, lodge is the property of a former Kiwi journalist, Susan Cook, and her American partner, Marion “Weasel” Boatwright, a former teacher.
The couple met more than a decade ago in North Carolina where Boatwright still owns a summer camp lodge.
After dinner, while we are sipping plunger coffee from the lodge’s extensive “ugly mug” collection, Boatwright suggests that we take a stroll down the road to meet some of Rough and Tumble’s prized inhabitants.
Out along the road under a pristine sky so starry it looks like it’s been attacked by a monumental salt-shaker, we find out Boatwright has neglected to bring a torch. I feel like a blind man as I tread carefully up the uneven path, guided only by the weakest rays of an incomplete moon. But then a magical discovery is made, and it all seems worth it, including the trek over here to the West Coast. Inside the thicket we can see a mini-constellation of tiny, twinkling bulbs of fluorescent blue against a black background: glow-worms. Who needs a torch?
It was five years ago that Boatwright and Cook, having tramped (that’s Kiwi-ese for hiking) along the Mokihinui River, which passes - nay, rages - through this part of the South Island, eventually identified a suitable location for their dream lodge. There were “volatile” creeks to ford, no power lines or telephone cables for two kilometres and scarcely any navigable roads. (The name the couple chose for their lodge refers to a tributary of the Mokihinui River which, on occasions, can flow so rapidly guests can dangle a fishing line over the generous veranda’s edge). Boatwright says he was drawn to this part of the world because “Americans have a love affair [with the notion of] ‘frontier’ and this northern corner of the West Coast remains precisely that. When we were just starting to build the lodge an 80-year-old native of the valley dropped by and started in on his stories of the good old days, the Gold Rush and such. Then he paused and said, ‘But that’s all gone; the bush has taken it all back. You’re the pioneers now’.”
True, the reality is that the majority of travellers who bother to visit the West Coast invariably turn south at the town of Greymouth, heading for the Glacier Country a few hundred kilometres south, thereby depriving themselves of the northernmost reaches of the South Island. Here at Rough and Tumble we’re starting to feel a little chuffed that we had the gumption to turn north. “Ninety per cent of travellers want a paint-by-numbers holiday,” says Boatwright. “We’ll gladly settle for the 10 per cent who want a more creative, interactive experience. When you go just that little bit further in, you come out with what most of us are actually after: the feeling that we’ve experienced something real and genuine.”
This quirky image by T+L reader Jackie Laws is the winner of the Travel + Leisure/Sony travel photography competition. More than 500 entries were received; a selection can be viewed in the Photoprize Gallery.