Heading south to Middle Earth

New Zealand provided the stunning locations for Peter Jackson’s Movie trilogy, Lord of the Rings, boasts the longest place name in the world and is home to 40 million sheep

My argument to my wife was that if we were travelling literally to the other side of the world (I’d been booked as a speaker and workshop leader at “Momentum ’09”, New Zealand’s prestigious Auckland Disability Arts Festival), we couldn’t possible return without having explored New Zealand’s South Island. I’d heard that the scenery was dramatic and the action dangerous. Besides, it was the nearest we were ever going to get to Antarctica! So we packed thermal underwear, a sensible wheelchair and doubled my medical insurance. Sadly Momentum’09 fell victim to the Credit Crunch three days after we’d paid up front for our holidays. And you know what? I don’t regret a penny of it!

If you are planning to visit New Zealand it’s best to get your head into tumbling calculator mode as these Islands (physically larger than Japan or the UK), throw up a mass of extraordinary facts and figures. First of all, topographically it’s the world’s youngest landmass, having only begun to emerge from the Pacific Ocean 23 million years ago. Next it was the last to be populated, around 1,000 years ago by the Polynesians – the Southern Hemisphere’s equivalent of the northern Vikings. The British claimed it as colonial property by the Treaty of Waitaki in 1840. Then sent for droves of missionaries to stop the inter-clan Maori warring. So to find this was the first country ever to give women the vote in 1895 shook up my perceptions. After all, today it only has a population of four million compared to a sheep force of 40 million.

We flew into Auckland airport, gateway to a dozen internal airports, and home to more than a third of New Zealand’s entire population, who also have a higher sailing boat ratio per capita than any other port. So we transferred straight onto a flight to Christchurch, the largest city in South Island. Usually described as more English than Oxford – you can even punt on its River Avon – though it was currently heavily polluted. And on a Sunday afternoon its neat squares around the Cathedral with statues of Queen Victoria were packed with Scottish pipe bands blowing away pre-competition cobwebs, on a diet of fish and chips.

Also on a diet of fish, as well as four metre long squid, were the pod of six bachelor sperm whales resident a mere mile or two off the old whaling town of Kaikoura, three scenic hours drive north of Christchurch. Elsewhere in the Pacific you have to hope for an occasional glimpse of migratory pregnant whales, searching for warmer waters during the UK’s summer months, on account of their thinner layers of blubber. The Sperm whale has the largest head and brain of any animal. Up to 50 tons in weight it can remain submerged for over two hours and dive up to 3 kms deep – all made possible by the extremely rare coincidence of a 3 kms deep trench (the Hikorangi) in the ocean floor so close to land. We see five whales inhaling air on the surface, before it’s “flukes up” for the photographer, a large group of dusky dolphins play boisterously around our boat, fur seals spread themselves on the rocks below a local winery and the world’s largest bird, the albatross, gives us a fly-past. I’m in seventh heaven, adoring all things maritime.

In fact the earliest white settlers in New Zealand believed they had found the Garden of Eden, so bountiful was its soil and so breathtaking its landscape. We put this to the test next day by taking the TranzAlpine train from East Coast to West Coast. This entails crossing the Southern Alps, the result of a tectonic plate crunch so long it can be seen from space. Eighty per cent of South Island is covered in mountains, with the narrow plains of the East Coast pouring out such rich dairy produce that before the UK joined the EU, its guaranteed imports made New Zealand one of the richest countries worldwide.

Also in search of wealth were the 5,000 gold prospectors who blazed the trail for the train tracks in the 1860s. It’s rated one of the world’s most beautiful rides, and for me the wealth of New Zealand lies in the spectacular transitions from plains to canyons hundreds of feet below us that wait to be flushed with melt water from the surrounding snow capped peaks every spring and draining out of high mountain lakes. Without warning this landscape transforms into almost pre-historic beech forests, floored with New Zealand ferns, as we reach Greymouth bordering the Tasman Sea.

Here we hire a car. This independence and slower pace has to be the best part of the journey southward. We’re on National Route 6 but only see another car every five minutes. Even towns marked on my road map can consist of a single farm and an improbable school; while every 50-house settlement has its own golf-course and race-horse track. I presume the numerous rugby grounds are legally compulsory! It feels like a countryside still waiting to be discovered. The flora and human fauna are equally healthy. We pass serious hikers, surfers, frivolous 1960s hippy camper vans and back pack cyclists on tandems. Our destination is Franz Josef township, a mere 270 inhabitants and a one industry service town. Here they fly helicopters for non-walkers such as myself and we fly around Mount Cook, the Island’s highest peak, and then land on snow, ice-hardened by the sunlight. (Our warm winter wear is totally unnecessary as South Island has a temperate climate and we’re in the warmth of the first official day of autumn.) We’re also in one of three UNESCO world heritage sites on the Island. I’ve never seen a glacier before and am awed by Fox Glacier’s ability to throw up great ice blocks and crevasses on its 13 mile steep descent to the coast – being one of only three glaciers globally to end among lush rainforest a mere 200 metres above sea level – sadly Fox’s Glacier Mints were not named in its honour; but its dangers were underlined by the deaths of two Australian tourists a month before we visited. South Island has 367 surviving glaciers and amazingly those on the west coast are growing at a rate of a metre a year!

We drive further south. The road forces us to turn inland, and we circumnavigate three sides of a remote mountain area guarded by broad lakes, tumbling waterfalls and boulder strewn river beds carved out by earlier glaciers. This is the remote quarter where the dramatic scenes from Lord of the Rings were filmed. We drive past six ski resorts awaiting the winter snows and look down onto the awesome valley that is Queenstown – the self-styled “Adventure Capital of the World”. Here, at the world home of bungee jumping, you can Jag Air fly upside down, embrace the fear of tandem skydiving, endure the heart-stopping momentum of the Shotover River Jet as it navigates the shallow braided channels (in sometimes as little as 5 cms of water, but at 85 kms per hour), or simply white water raft through the total darkness of canyon tunnels.

We opt for a three hour coach drive! Passing South Island’s largest lake – Te Anau – and the Remarkable Mountains (it’s their name, honestly). We’re headed for Milford Sound. A fjord declared by Rudyard Kipling to be the eighth Wonder of the World. To reach it we travel on one of the five most avalanche prone public highways in the world and through the Homer road tunnel, only built long after New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary had stood atop the summit of Mount Everest. We transfer to a vessel named The Pride of Milford Sound and head seawards. The scenery is fjordly stunning (though I suspect Kipling had never experienced Norway’s somewhat longer and deeper fjords). On disembarking we’re booked on one final helicopter return flight to Queenstown. Wow! This pilot’s watched too many Vietnam films. We’re slammed up against granite faces where surely the blades must strike rock; then dramatically fall 500 metres into a ravine, before soaring up above the snowline for one last open air glacier experience. It’s fine unless you’re sat upfront with only a thin perspex bowl between your shoes and certain death. Only later do I learn that when not transporting tourists, these pilots become New Zealand’s “Cowboys of the Sky” firing nets over mountain deer to swing them down to the plains to add to the 3.5 million already being farmed.

Disability Now readers are used to images of wheelchair skiers and blind British drivers setting world records on motor racing tracks. Nonetheless, South Island would have remained inaccessible to me had it not been for Burt Bacharach’s “Trains and Boats and Planes” – plus some pleasantly accessible hotels, and an ethos of ever-improving disability equality. Our best coach driver/tour guide was both Maori and a disabled person. So please, despite all the implications of a massive carbon flight footprint, don’t leave your travelling too late, until you’re too old to enjoy and learn from the experience. Travel provides such an amazing sense of ownership of our world. That’s ownership as in responsibility for the whole world of which we’re citizens, and not just our own irritating little patch called home. And I offer you one last fact. Disabled people now amount to one third of the global population. So take a look at what one day we’re going to take over.

• A single return flight to Auckland currently costs around £750