Along a Secret Path

Walking a wild coastline is challenging and triumphant

The wild West Coast of New Zealand is a little like the end of the world.

You can walk along a track and be the only person, seemingly, in the whole world. The Tasman sea pounds the boulders and the horizon is far, far away and you know that the next land is Australia.

I love meeting locals who tell you where the secret tracks are that get you to the places that only the locals know — the spectacular places where you’re the only person for miles around and you have to have a little bit of faith that you’re not going to end up lost or fall off a bluff and your broken body is found days later when someone (who?) notices you’re missing and sends out a search party.

So the kind local dude who pointed out the secret track down to the coastal walk seemed like a trustworthy type and off I strode.

‘Don’t forget to hang on to the flax because it’s a bit slippery,’ he exhorted as we parted company. Many inches of rain have fallen recently.

Cape Foulwind is where my holiday sojourn has brought me for a couple of days before I make the trip over the Southern Alps by train to Christchurch tomorrow. God willing, because today the main road south is closed owing to flooding.

Earlier, as the helpful local showed me the way, he said Cape Foulwind was named by Captain Cook, who was the first white man to discover New Zealand (the Maori people had been here for a while, of course). Cook, in his ship, had had a bit of trouble rounding the cape owing to the high winds. The year was 1679, so you can imagine his herculean effort.

Today the wind wasn’t up at all and I pondered this out loud to the helpful local.

‘No, it can get a bit blowy,’ he said with the typical understatement of a true West Coaster. They’re a breed apart, these ‘coasters’, as they’re known. Highly suspicious of anyone who isn’t from here, but polite enough to outsiders to show someone like me a secret track.

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