Down South by Bruce Ansley

Author:Bruce Ansley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

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In the beginning there was the OE, the overseas journey young New Zealanders took to gain experience: around two years of scraping, saving, living in dumps and waiting on tables. You went, you saw, you marvelled and you came home again.

Then came the guided tour. You climbed on a plane, then a bus, and you followed a prescribed route, which usually had little to do with the country you were visiting. In Rome you saw the Vatican, in London the Tower, in Rome the Colosseum.

Cruise ships were the logical development. You saw fewer sights and more sea. The journey itself became the reward. Better to travel hopefully than to arrive, especially when you hoped for a big dinner. So they invented the floating city, with cafés, restaurants, bars, swimming pools, gymnasiums, cinemas, shopping malls. The places you stopped at — the towns, cities, sights and wonders — all became incidental to the main event, the Ship. You got off it rarely and when you did you wondered where you were and what was for lunch. Welcome to Akaroa.

The cruise ships, if not their passengers, were growing ever more adventurous. The Marlborough Sounds had become a regular destination, despite the Mikhail Lermontov’s fate in 1986. The Russian cruise ship, carrying mainly elderly Australians, hit rocks and sank near the Tory Channel, the entrance to Queen Charlotte Sound, in circumstances that are still mysterious. One crew member died. The ship lay in thirty-eight metres of water, safely out of sight from the decks of its much bigger successors, although it had created a tourist industry of its own: it was popular with visiting scuba divers. Disaster tourism was an international phenomenon, but the South Island of New Zealand had produced a new twist, tourism feeding on its own disasters.

Another cruise ship, the Azamara Quest, also hit a rock near Tory Channel, in 2016. It stayed afloat and all 652 passengers lived to tell the tale, undoubtedly over and over again. Including a shipwreck in the price could become a star attraction for Marlborough Sounds cruises. Picton and nearby Blenheim counted the revenue. The costs could always be totted up later.

Even Stewart Island joined the queue. Its tourist industry had been, well, cosy, served by a smallish ferry and light aircraft. Now it had squeezed into cruise ship schedules. These ships could increase the island’s 400-odd population ten-fold, and did very little for the peaceful ambience valued by natives such as myself (well, I once worked down there), but these were tiny places where dollars were hard to come by and horror stories were not appreciated.

Overtourism, too many tourists in other words, was easy for people in larger urban areas to decry. By the standards of very small town New Zealand, city folk were flush. Small towns were lean, and quite capable of becoming mean. But could you look at the juxtaposition of the deep, cool green Milford Sound or peaceful Akaroa Harbour or the remote (even for Aucklanders) Great Barrier Island, and

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