Revisiting the West Coast - A three day roadie in our trusty campervan, Queenie.
As a child, I thought of myself as a West Coaster. It wasn’t until later in life that I realised Murchison, where I was born and spent the first nine years of my life, isn’t either physically or officially part of the West Coast Region, instead being located inland and within the Tasman District.
The reason I considered myself a ‘Coaster’, was because my late father, Peter, was born and raised in Reefton, another small town that is actually in the West Coast Region, and I was tacking myself onto that association. Despite the fact Dad had moved away from Reefton in the late 1960s while still a young man and then from Murchison to the North Island in the late 1970s, where he lived for 25+ years, the West Coast was where he was from and the place he loved more than anywhere else in the world.
Having left Murchison in 1979 though, I never imagined that I would end up settling down, after 30+ years as something of a nomad, in a small rural village that is only 140km from where I was born and had spent the first part of my childhood. Life has a funny cyclic pattern to it, and I must have had something drawing me back to Te Tauihu (the top of the South Island) that was buried so deep in my subconscious I didn’t even know it was there. On both my paternal and maternal sides of my family, I am the fifth generation to be born in that area so my ties to the place run fairly deep.
Shortly after we moved back to New Zealand at the end of 2010 with our young family, we did a driving trip down to Reefton and the scene of what I think were Dad’s fondest memories of his youth and early adulthood. 
I grew up listening to his stories of deer hunting, coal mining, and the mischief he and his mates would get up to, so it was wonderful to have Dad as our tour guide as I attempted to connect the dots of what his early life was like.
On that first trip down the coast we were traveling in two vehicles with me driving one and Dad driving the other. Even back then, his mobility wasn’t terribly good so we would drive around and every now and again he would pullover beside the road. We would pull in behind in our own car and I would talk to him through his open driver’s window. Dad would point to a certain part of the road, or a landmark like the remnants of our old building and tell me a story about its significance. For example, at Inangahua junction, he showed me the site for where the Alborn Hotel stood in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We even found the gravestones of my paternal great grandparents in the cemetery at the same location.
"However, the most common anecdotes Dad talked about were fatal car accidents and other disastrous events"
However, the most common anecdotes Dad talked about were fatal car accidents and other disastrous events. We would pull the cars over, I would approach the driver’s side window and Dad would say something like “You see that slight bend in the road there? Well, in 1964, on a cold and foggy night me and three of my mates got a flat tire. My mate Jimmy Smith was changing the tire when a truck came out of nowhere and cleaned him!” After we’d driven a bit further down the road we’d repeat the same process to the point at which I asked Dad if this was actually going to be a tour of the West Coast’s road deaths from 1955 to 1968 or if we could potentially expand the scope to some less grizzly stories. Of course, we did visit all of the old haunts including both of the coal mines formerly owned by our family, Alborns and Boatmans, as well as many of the places I could remember visiting as a child. Since that time, we’ve been drawn back to the area time and again, and those trips have done nothing but make me fall further in love with the place.
In January of this year we took our trusty campervan, Queenie, on a road trip down the coast. For our first night we stopped at Lyell in the Buller Gorge, arriving in the early evening to be greeted by a family of three feral goats who emerged from the bush to munch on the long grass. Nowadays a DOC campsite and the trailhead for the Old Ghost Road cycle and tramping track, but once a major gold-mining area and thriving town. The west coast has a number of sites that were once substantial settlements during the gold-mining heydays of the late 1800s and were once a community of thousands, but are now nothing more than a few building foundations, a dilapidated cemetery and some metal objects that haven’t quite rusted into oblivion. Walking around these locations always reminds me how temporary many things that seem substantial at the time actually are. If we went back to 1880 and told any of the 2,000 residents of Lyell that within 20 years the shops, hotels, churches, the newspaper (The Lyell Argus) would all be closed and everybody would have moved away, I reckon they would have deemed us mad.
On our second day we continued on State Highway 6, through the Lower Buller Gorge and then drove down what is my favourite route in the entire country and the most spectacular coastline I have ever seen. I love how varied the terrain is once you hit the coast with thick, impenetrable native bush on the inland side of the road and then rugged coastline that seems to go forever on the other side. We drove in bright sunshine and the ocean was flat-calm, which is not the default condition for this part of Aotearoa. We stopped just short of Punakaiki to take in the view and to capture some photos. The previous year we had driven from Melbourne to Adelaide on the Great Ocean Road, and while that is another lovely road, and our version doesn’t have any official tourism name, I think it is more majestic as its Aussie cousin. A bit like Australian Stephen Larkin being a world class first five eighth but All Black Dan Carter being the best first five eighth to have ever played the game. Larkin was great, but Carter was the greatest.
When we did arrive in Punakaiki, we discovered a brand new Paparoa National Park Visitor Centre had opened only a few months earlier. Located directly across the road from the Pancake Rocks and Blowholes at Dolomite Point, this is now one of the best visitor centres in the country. It includes the wonderfully interactive Punangairi Visitor Experience Centre which does a great job of combining storytelling on Māori creation narratives, geology, the local biodiversity while making connections between nature and culture. The gift shop in the entrance of the building is a nice open retail space selling wonderful Ngāti Waewae crafts, jewellery, and artworks.
We spent the night at the tiny freedom camping site just to the south of Punakaiki, right on the beach from which we watched the sunset whilst drinking a tasty beverage. The next morning we drove back up the road about 1km back to the north to the roadhead of the Paparoa National Park for a ride on our mountain bikes. The weather was still perfect so we finished off with a swim in the river.
On our way south we stopped for lunch at the end of Cargills Road, an absolutely delightful little spot right on the beach in Barrytown. The rear door of our campervan opens right up so we were able to reverse the van right up to the edge of the beach and have the best view in town. The other wonderful thing about the vanlife is that we have everything onboard to make a hot drink, prepare a hot lunch and even tuck into a cold beer if it’s a special occasion, and by special occasion, I mean; lunch time.
"The resurgence and revitalisation of Reefton over the past couple of decades has been a wonderful thing for the town."
We stopped in Greymouth just long enough to use the campervan dump station before driving straight through to Reefton for the night. The resurgence and revitalisation of Reefton over the past couple of decades has been a wonderful thing for the town. There is a definite buzz about the place with a number of nice cafes, galleries and quirky secondhand stores and antique shops. My personal favourite is the privately owned Reefton Sports Centre selling fishing, hunting and outdoor gear. In this new world of online shopping it is so refreshing to talk to somebody with authentic and valuable knowledge of their specialist field. I think it took 30 seconds of conversation for the owner and I to work out that she was once my late paternal grandmother’s neighbour. Our campsite for the night was Reefton Motor Camp, located right in the centre of town and beside the river. We swam in the river, walked along some of the trails and put the BBQ to good use again for dinner.
The next day we made the obligatory pilgrimage to Alborns Mine, in Victoria Forest Park just outside of Reefton, the site of my great grandfather, Victor, and grandfather, Norman’s mine back in the day. Even without the family connection, this is a wonderful short walk with plenty to see in terms of the old mine workings and relics including a rusting Leyland truck that was part of the winch system to transport coal bins. We finished our walk with enough time to make the drive through to Murchison in time for the marvelous Tutaki Bakery to still have a pie available.
The temperature in Murchison would have been in the high twenties when we arrived which reminded me how, after we moved to Featherston in 1979, we seemed to receive a phone call from my Great Aunt whenever Murch topped the temperature chart on any given day in the year. I believe the conversation would be along the lines of “What’s the temperature up there? Well it was 32 degrees here today with not one cloud in the sky!”
Our camping spot for the evening was the NZMCA (NZ Motor Caravan Association) park over property located just off State Highway 6 in the middle of town. We have been members of this wonderful association for years as it provides us with a network of private and NZMCA properties around the country to stay at for a minimal fee as well as other membership benefits. On occasions, as it did when we pulled into the site at Murchison, it can provide some entertainment. We pulled our van into a spot only to be dully informed by one of the other guests, that it wasn’t an official site and could we please move our van. Because I’m basically a horrible person I simply moved our van so it sat directly across from their site in the hope they might wish they had left us where we were.
We walked the short distance to the river, down the bank to the point where the Buller and Mātakitaki Rivers merge where I attempted to catch a trout for our dinner. This futile attempt proved yet again that even with the solid local intel and purchase of the perfect lure back in Reefton, I am still rubbish at trout fishing. After I lost my third lure, I cut my losses and went for a refreshing swim before extracting some protein from the fridge back in Queenie for our dinner.
On the way out of Murchison we stopped just north of the town at the point where the Buller meets the Mangles River where the trout, once again, were totally unwilling to play my game. I spent an enjoyable but ultimately unsuccessful hour or so scrambling over rocks and then blind casting through deep blue pools and sparkling rapids feeling like our trip had been much longer than only the three days we had available.
Words by Brendan Alborn (Owner Operator)
Images: Stan Mariette and Brendan Alborn
Brendan has a long association with the Abel Tasman, visiting it for the first time when his parents moved to Marahau in 1997. After spending much of his life overseas, Brendan and his family moved to the area at the end of 2010. When Brendan is not spending his time in the outdoors he seems to spend much of his time creating even flimsier justifications for spending more time in the outdoors.
