I’d been in New Zealand for six weeks, both hitchhiking and, when I deemed there to be insufficient traffic, travelling aboard public buses. It was via the latter that on the morning of the 8th March, 1975, I arrived at Milford Sound, having departed from Te Anau, in the far south of the country’s South Island.
After lunch, I wandered down to the port, hoping to board a boat, as the weather, as well as the scenery, certainly warranted it. I asked a gentleman as to how such a cruise could be achieved and was informed that I should look for a man who wore a captain’s hat and board his boat. I couldn’t actually see a gentleman who fitted this description and so I decided to board the boat of the one who appeared to be most closely aligned to it.
Initially, I was virtually on my own. However, quite suddenly this began to change as a horde of tourists filled the vessel to near capacity and seating was at a premium. So much so that the knees of the young woman seated opposite me were all but touching mine.
She was seated next a gentleman who’d not only placed his coat around her shoulders, but his left arm as well! A number of minutes passed, as I did my best to gaze from side to side, when, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, she remarked on the modernity of my camera. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d owned it since the second half of the previous decade and, instead, showed her the dial around its lens that could be rotated in order to correspond to the prevailing weather.
We continued to converse freely until I suddenly realised that the chivalrous gentleman, who’d been seated beside her, had disappeared, along with his coat! When I enquired as to his whereabouts, I was told that he was on another tour to her and that every time their respective buses would stop at the same attraction, he would centre his unwanted attentions upon her.
It was only then that I realised that I had boarded a chartered vessel for tourists who were travelling on pre-paid fares and that I had inadvertently returned to hitchhiking, again, only this time I was doing so on water!
We strolled about the vessel as it cruised the sound. I gazed in awe at the sheerness of Mitre Peak and during the journey back to the dock, the magnificent sight of the almost juxtaposed, tall waterfalls.
Once our feet had returned to terra firma I asked the young lady for her telephone number, as we had already established the fact that we were both Sydneysiders. She freely wrote it on a small piece of paper, as she stood in an upright position. It was accompanied by her christian name, which she said wouldn’t have been the one she would have chosen. This led me to quip that as we had met in New Zealand, I would nickname her ‘Tiki’.
Bruce, her bus driver, had noticed that we had grown close and, totally unexpectedly, instructed me, as there was one spare seat on the bus, to place my rucksack underneath the rear of his vehicle and that once his tourists had partaken of a meal at the ‘Lobster Pot’, I could travel the seventy-four miles back to Te Anau, with them. Meanwhile, I ventured off in search of a cheese sandwich.
I must admit that I felt a little concerned for Bruce’s job, for I had imagined that it would only have taken a complaint from a disgruntled passenger at having to share a part of their tour with a long-haired scruffy individual with thongs on his feet, to potentially place his position in jeopardy. Nevertheless, I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to spend more time with ‘Tiki’ and when we travelled through the lengthy, pitch black Homer Tunnel I was sorely tempted to give her a kiss. Later, she confessed that she was hoping that I had.
Upon our arrival we agreed to meet later, at a local pub. I, therefore, advised my landlord for the night that my return was likely to be at a late hour and he stressed to me that I was not to disturb his other guests.
As we danced, ‘Tiki’ questioned as to why I hadn’t removed my zipped plastic jacket. This led me to confess to her that my t-shirt possessed too many holes and to do so would only serve to embarrass her.
Nonetheless, she still invited me to her accommodation at one of the town’s motels, but only on the proviso that her unit’s front door remained fully open for the duration of my visit. She prepared a cup of coffee for each of us, as we continued to converse. We appeared to have so much in common, not the least of which was the fact that we’d both circumnavigated our country, she with her parents and younger sister, in a caravan, over a period of five months, and I, on a tour by bus that took nine weeks.
It was so late when I turned to leave that I explained of how my accommodation was a kilometre or two outside of the town and, therefore, as she was travelling on her own, expressed the wish that I might be allowed to occupy the spare single bed. This request, however, was firmly denied.
There was no moon that night and if the totally deserted road out of town hadn’t had the broken white lines along its centre, I wouldn’t have found my way back to my accommodation. I could hear the waters of Lake Te Anau off to my right and it was then that I remembered Bruce had informed us that it possessed a depth of a thousand feet. It’s silly, I know, but all of the while I was near to it I kept envisaging ‘The Creature From The Black Lagoon’ suddenly emerging from it.
Eventually, I reached my lodgings, only to have the front door begin to creak so loudly that I instantly remembered the landlord’s earlier ultimatum and decided that, without a torch, the rightful thing to do was to walk back into town and spend what was probably the next six hours hanging about its abandoned main street.
The temperature by this time must have been somewhere close to freezing point, for I certainly was! I was so fortunate that I’d been asked to a dance, for I had at least replaced my thongs with shoes. Each hour just dragged, even allowing for the fact that I’d found a discarded newspaper on a seat and, just for something to do, read some of its more relevant articles as I stood beneath a light in the street. This was replaced by a seemingly endless period of window shopping, as I tried to stay active.
I was never more please to witness a sunrise, in my life!