All's Well in Cromwell

    We drove through the coastal mountains, stopped at the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, then Knight’s Point, and finally turned inland at Haast.  We crossed the Haast Pass to Cromwell, a small city in an arid region similar to parts of inland British Columbia.  B.C., of course, has Oliver; New Zealand has Cromwell. 

    Cromwell grew rapidly during the building of the Clyde dam, which provides power to Dunedin and Christchurch. It has a large light-industrial area, and good stone-fruit orchards as a result of the water available from the dam – it’s called “the fruitbowl of the south”.  So we found it odd that we didn't see any roadside fruit stalls, and that the stone fruit in the supermarket is expensive; but so is everything else that matters to travellers, it seems – motel rooms, meals, internet, etc. 

    The dam provides recreational pleasure for vacationers, however. And there is “adventure tourism” nearby, including skiing in winter, river surfing, sky diving, fishing and many other choices. 

    The “Rosewood Accommodation Park” we are in was originally built as a residence for workers on the dam, but now it is a fairly tired little facility that serves backpackers and has some self-contained “chalêts” (little huts, basically). It has a dining hall, laundries and kitchens.  Each worker used to have a garage that went with his room, so those are rented out as storage units now. It’s the only “budget accommodation/backpackers lodge” in Cromwell. You’d think this might have worked as accommodation for tourists, but it didn’t, and the reasons why are a good case study for business school.

  Sandra (Sue's sister), Sue and Dave, and Jimmy the Springer Spaniel - Deb's new friend 

    Sue and Dave signed on for eight months to manage the place with an option to buy, but they’ve decided not to. The place is “tired”, so they can’t realistically charge much and still hope that customers will return or recommend the place to others. 

    The design of the dorms isn’t much of a draw for higher end travelers, and one couldn’t invest what it would take to change that with any guarantee of return – you’d pretty well have to tear down and build from scratch. In particular you’d have to tear out all the old “make-do” plumbing, old hot water tanks, rusty old valves, and so on, and redo that whole system. Floor tiles are coming loose, furniture is old and stained, some bed frames pretty rickety. Right now there isn’t enough regular business to maintain and improve the property or to keep full time staff, and when it is busy they are run ragged trying to do all the jobs themselves: laundry, front desk, room cleaning, repairs, yard maintenance, kitchen and dining room service for groups. Their option period ends this week, so they’ve invited us to stay for free, and they’re feeding us breakfast and dinner as well in return for putting in a few hours of “spring cleaning” each morning in preparation for the new couple who are going to give it a go (and probably learn the same lessons all over again). 

    There are downsides to the situation, for us: the dorms aren’t soundproof and truck traffic starts on the main road outside pretty early in the morning; and internet service is so expensive in Cromwell that there is no free wifi (unless we were to sneak around and steal signal in the neighbourhood). Fortunately there are a couple of cafés nearby who give you 30 mins of access when you buy a coffee, so we’ll stop there once a day. 

    We almost packed it in on the first evening – we both felt tired and depressed for some reason, and didn’t feel “lucky” about being here at all – but they turned out to be a very nice, easy-going, kind couple, and it’s a quiet place to recharge before we head to over Dunedin. We’re happy for the morning physical activity and we know that we’re appreciated – they really need any help they can get to shorten their own twelve hour days. The work is not heavy, and I can tell that the many positive Helpx references I’d read from previous helpers weren’t exaggerated. 

    We’re now 2/3rds of the way through our four and a half months away from home on this journey. When we leave here we’ll have two weeks to make the return trip to Auckland.  Then we'll spend a week in Fiji followed by two more weeks driving back across the southern U.S. (visiting Memphis, New Orleans, etc) and then turn north back to Toronto. 

    On Thursday we woke up to snow on the hills surrounding Cromwell, reminding us that we are pretty high up in spite of being the middle of summer here, and we are below the 45th parallel - almost as far south of the equator as Edmonton is north. 

    We did a day-trip in the afternoon to Queenstown through the Kawarau Gorge - steep V-shaped valleys with dramatic rocky outcroppings. Queenstown is, I have to say, larger and more beautiful than Banff, and sits on the edge of a large mountain lake called Wakatipu. It is a half-hour's drive from Cromwell, and we saw lots of vineyards along the way, just like Oliver B.C., and old gold-mining sites restored as tourist attractions. 

    On the way home we visited Arrowtown. The gold rush started here in Otago in 1865, before moving up to the West Coast (where a greater quantity of gold was actually extracted). Arrowtown has kept many of its original buildings, and even its newer ones have been built with a sense of charm and individuality that integrates well with the magnificent peaks – halfway between hills and outright mountains like the Rockies – that surround it. 

    One of the most interesting features of Arrowtown is its celebration of the earliest Chinese gold miners, mostly from Guangdong.  Their lives mirrored those who went to Canada for the same reason. 8,000 of them were part of the earliest settlers in New Zealand. They had no intention to stay permanently, and left new brides at home waiting for them to send money home, but about one in seven of them died here. It was much colder here than in Guangdong – the winters were a shock for them. 

    They lived in rudimentary stone shacks built of natural layered schist rock bricks, with galvanized metal chimneys and roofs. They came here because the average annual wage in Canton was about £14 to £17, and they could earn close to £77 in a year on the gold works.  They intended to live on a third of that income and send two thirds home. After about five years of that, they hoped to buy a tiny farm of their own and raise themselves from poverty to self-sufficiency. 

    At first they were welcome here, but eventually New Zealand imposed a head tax of £100 a person just like Canada did, and there were ugly editorial cartoons and comments about them. Only about fifty Chinese wives came over, so it was a lonely existence for most of the men; some succumbed to alcohol and opium, and never got home to their wives. Some switched to market gardening and eked out a living when the gold was exhausted. Many died here, and the Chinese community did fundraising to exhume and repatriate them, in the belief that they’d be more eternally happy in their ancestral burial grounds.  Sadly, a ship carrying 500 bodies home for reburial foundered in 1902 and they all had to settle for a watery grave. 

    Too bad.  It seems like a wasted effort, given that you couldn’t do much better for a home, eternal or otherwise, than beautiful Arrowtown - except, perhaps, for the unfriendly white neighbours.  The photo album includes a few shots of the drive to Cromwell, and Chinese goldminers shacks in Arrowtown, some roses, etc. 

    Here's a second photo album, focused on the stone mason's craft - there's lots of lovely natural building stone here, some with gold in it!

Next post: Last thoughts in Bendigo before heading to Dunedin