Ohakune is a barbell-shaped skiing and cottage town. At the tracks, there's an old station that never opens and a cluster of restaurants and silly nightclubs, all closed until the skiing season. The rest of the town is about 2.5km away, and the strip in between holds The Hobbit Motor Lodge and turnings for rows of A-frame cottages. I borrow a heavy women's mountain bike from the lodge and ride into town, which has the pharmacy, the grocery store, the post office, the restaurants, and a takeout place evocatively called "Food". In the grocery store, a wall of ads: Free pigeons; roommate, $50 a week; lost lamb, black collar, $300 reward. The implied labour-to-rent ratio is attractive. An efficient lamb kidnapper need work only once every six weeks to be sheltered in Ohakune. Despite being a holiday town, it, like Waiheke, mostly lacks the gimcrack crappiness of tourist towns elsewhere.
Outside my door is a road, a post with a "Danger 25,000 volts" sign, railroad tracks, a strip of small houses, two rows of trees, a ridge, and the gigantic snow-capped mountain of Ruapehu. In the morning, there are unfamiliar birdcalls, two women eating cereal in the middle of the road -- personal idiosyncrasy? Local custom? Core part of the national culture? -- and a rabbit that hops away nervously. Why, rabbit? We're both invasive species; surely we should be joining forces to finish off the local fauna.
The main part of the hostel is in a separate building guarded by a nervous toy poodle. It's a good example of why people need to stop making dogs smaller; it just concentrates the same anxiety into a smaller volume. The poodle also hates me. Everyone else it mistrusts but accepts, but it somehow identifies me, out of all the people arriving and departing every day, as the principal threat to the homestead. When I get close, it barks and barks. Until I get too close; then it runs away.
I rent a mountain bike and do the Old Coach Road ride, which is tiring and beautiful. It starts between two sheep pastures, plunges into native brush for a while, comes out for a view of an abandoned viaduct, then the brush again, then another viaduct, brush, and then a sweeping view of the surrounding pastureland, and then a bridge over a lush little river valley, and on and on. It turns out that I'm in horrible shape and have the bike-handling skills of a donkey.
To leave Ohakune, I wait around on the empty platform by the permanently-closed station. An older man comes onto the platform, walks down to the other end, walks past me again, and then turns and talks to me for fifteen minutes about the coffee shop that sometimes opens in the station, his smartphone, the economic prospects of the town, how its true population has been misstated by the idiots who conduct the census, whether the pharmacy is struggling, where I stayed, and what it was like there. Then he explains that he has a pressing engagement and can't stop. After him, a mother and a little girl appear, and then another family with small children. One of the mothers asks me when the train is arriving, and then sits to wait on the row of folding theatre seats salvaged from some building or other and set down on the platform in lieu of a bench. Neither family seems to have any luggage, which seems strange. When the train comes, only I board it. The kids just wanted to come and look at it. The entertainment options in Ohakune may be limited.
Two rows away on the train was a red-faced youth from Wyoming with a voice like a kazoo, twenty thousand stories beginning with "my buddy", and an appraisal of the public's interest in Wyoming that lay on the fuzzy border between "optimistic" and "delusional". Over the next five hours, his unpunched face grew into a living monument to the patience of the people of New Zealand. There were moustachioed old rancher types around, and I thought they might have taken steps. Nothing violent, but they might have stopped the train and gently lowered him down among the sheep with a map and a gallon of water.
The train has an open-air observation car, which is a great thing to have if your climate and system of tort law allow it. The scenery continues where the first half of the trip left off. Viaducts over canyons carved by narrow green rivers. A cafe with a collection of rusted junk out front -- baffling offerings to the weird gods of Tourism. Bald yellow hills like those of northern Scotland, grazed by the sheep that are responsible for the resemblance -- Scots, Maori, forest, and farms have all made way for them. We see ten thousand sheep, and then a horse thinking "am I supposed to be here?", and then ten thousand sheep more. And then a herd of black cattle trying to crowd into the shade (maybe a lower-albedo breed would have been more sensible).
Sometimes the sheep stand and watch the train impassively. Sometimes, one of them bolts, and then the nearby sheep look up and stand still for about two and a half beats while they puzzle over the situation as if over a tricky chess problem. Then they gallop off, too. Millennia of breeding for docility and efficiency at turning grass into wool has had an effect on sheep's ability to think tactically.
I pause in Wellington station and a huge crowd of young women in prom dresses surges past me and takes all the taxis.
Outside my door is a road, a post with a "Danger 25,000 volts" sign, railroad tracks, a strip of small houses, two rows of trees, a ridge, and the gigantic snow-capped mountain of Ruapehu. In the morning, there are unfamiliar birdcalls, two women eating cereal in the middle of the road -- personal idiosyncrasy? Local custom? Core part of the national culture? -- and a rabbit that hops away nervously. Why, rabbit? We're both invasive species; surely we should be joining forces to finish off the local fauna.
The main part of the hostel is in a separate building guarded by a nervous toy poodle. It's a good example of why people need to stop making dogs smaller; it just concentrates the same anxiety into a smaller volume. The poodle also hates me. Everyone else it mistrusts but accepts, but it somehow identifies me, out of all the people arriving and departing every day, as the principal threat to the homestead. When I get close, it barks and barks. Until I get too close; then it runs away.
I rent a mountain bike and do the Old Coach Road ride, which is tiring and beautiful. It starts between two sheep pastures, plunges into native brush for a while, comes out for a view of an abandoned viaduct, then the brush again, then another viaduct, brush, and then a sweeping view of the surrounding pastureland, and then a bridge over a lush little river valley, and on and on. It turns out that I'm in horrible shape and have the bike-handling skills of a donkey.
To leave Ohakune, I wait around on the empty platform by the permanently-closed station. An older man comes onto the platform, walks down to the other end, walks past me again, and then turns and talks to me for fifteen minutes about the coffee shop that sometimes opens in the station, his smartphone, the economic prospects of the town, how its true population has been misstated by the idiots who conduct the census, whether the pharmacy is struggling, where I stayed, and what it was like there. Then he explains that he has a pressing engagement and can't stop. After him, a mother and a little girl appear, and then another family with small children. One of the mothers asks me when the train is arriving, and then sits to wait on the row of folding theatre seats salvaged from some building or other and set down on the platform in lieu of a bench. Neither family seems to have any luggage, which seems strange. When the train comes, only I board it. The kids just wanted to come and look at it. The entertainment options in Ohakune may be limited.
Two rows away on the train was a red-faced youth from Wyoming with a voice like a kazoo, twenty thousand stories beginning with "my buddy", and an appraisal of the public's interest in Wyoming that lay on the fuzzy border between "optimistic" and "delusional". Over the next five hours, his unpunched face grew into a living monument to the patience of the people of New Zealand. There were moustachioed old rancher types around, and I thought they might have taken steps. Nothing violent, but they might have stopped the train and gently lowered him down among the sheep with a map and a gallon of water.
The train has an open-air observation car, which is a great thing to have if your climate and system of tort law allow it. The scenery continues where the first half of the trip left off. Viaducts over canyons carved by narrow green rivers. A cafe with a collection of rusted junk out front -- baffling offerings to the weird gods of Tourism. Bald yellow hills like those of northern Scotland, grazed by the sheep that are responsible for the resemblance -- Scots, Maori, forest, and farms have all made way for them. We see ten thousand sheep, and then a horse thinking "am I supposed to be here?", and then ten thousand sheep more. And then a herd of black cattle trying to crowd into the shade (maybe a lower-albedo breed would have been more sensible).
Sometimes the sheep stand and watch the train impassively. Sometimes, one of them bolts, and then the nearby sheep look up and stand still for about two and a half beats while they puzzle over the situation as if over a tricky chess problem. Then they gallop off, too. Millennia of breeding for docility and efficiency at turning grass into wool has had an effect on sheep's ability to think tactically.
I pause in Wellington station and a huge crowd of young women in prom dresses surges past me and takes all the taxis.
