The urge to travel is always latent within me. When I am not travelling I feel restless and uncomfortable. I am conscious of how much of the world I have not seen, and of how little time left I have to see it, that I have at most another fifty different springs and fifty new autumns to discover. So when I am able to travel I go literally to extremes, seeking to travel as fully and as far as possible. The nearly antipodean New Zealand was therefore an inevitable choice. It offers a unique combination of great geographical isolation with a physical size that allows you to travel yet further within this distant world.
I decided to spend most of my time on the South Island, itself the more isolated and less populous of the two. I hired a car in Christchurch and drove north-west from there towards the Southern Alps, a great chain of mountains which lie along the western side of the southern island.
I decided to spend most of my time on the South Island, itself the more isolated and less populous of the two. I hired a car in Christchurch and drove north-west from there towards the Southern Alps, a great chain of mountains which lie along the western side of the southern island.
Christchurch itself is every picture postcard English country town you have ever seen; a neat gothic cathedral, a park full of cloudy cherry blossom in October, tiny Edwardian hotels smelling of paint and breakfast. The road from it looks like the perfect English country road except that it begins to rise and keeps on rising towards Arthur's Pass, the main gap in the Southern Alps. As you ascend, the countryside changes. It passes from Augustan pastoral to Wordsworthian fells, everything as harmonious and ordered as a poem. From there you descend to the plain and the coastal road, a long gently curving thread that hugs the seashore.
At Haast, a couple of hundred kilometres later, you turn inland again, Once more you rise through stunning lakelands, crossing the huge, slow mouths of rivers, their waters sparkling in the sunshine as they tumble over the granite stones and pebbles. And you continue to rise, until the Cumberland hills have become Nepalese mountains. You are surrounded by massive and majestic peaks, their sides indescribable combinations of greens, ochres and purples. In the distance you can see the misty outlines of great, placid lakes. All this while you are driving on a road without a blemish, and you have not seen another car, another person even, all day. You realise that you have travelled so far to the end of the island at the end of the world that you have driven into paradise.
When you stop and gaze at this paradise you hear nothing, not even the wind. If there are no clouds in the sky even time seems to be absent. Only one thing accompanies you in this heaven; the hell of sand-flies. These black, gnat-like insects have a bite like no other. Drinking in the landscape's beauties for a few minutes I was soon bitten. And once bitten I found myself scratching, uncontrollably. While I itched there was relief, but then, inevitably, the itch returned still more fiercely. Although rationally I knew it was madness, I had to scratch. I have never in my life been so helpless in the face of such an uncontrollable desire, such a physical necessity. And as I scratched and itched and suffered this purgatory, I began to understand something about real addiction, about the truly imperious urge that brooks no argument - and the immense distance between it and its pale brother that I had known so far on my travels.
(1.3.92)
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