Edward Gibbon (English politician in NZ in 1862): "Wakefield's settlers (One of the first European settlements on South Island) They took an unpleasant surprise. New Zealand was not what they expected. There were no green and flat fields. Instead, steep hills covered with dense shrubs pierced the sky ».
From Fox Glacier to the city of Queenstown The path bursts in beauty. It is fucked not to release topics to describe those hundreds of kilometers we did with the car, But especially from Ship Creek Beach, When you tour in Haast on the right, And even Wanaka, The landscape until Agobia by Bello.
I have searched on the Internet the types of blue that exist. In Pinterest I have seen that there are many more than I imagined: Capri, Bondi, Royal, Maya, Indigo, Azur ... were all right to the other on the road. First you leave the Haast River to the left, And the water there is a rope that leaves the mountain of an ice blue, that Pure blue that hides in the weathering under the surface.
Blue is a rare color in nature. The sky is blue, The sea is blue, But there are not so many blue plants or animals. Those waters were as if someone had faded the gaznate feathers, One of my favorite birds, Between white stone songs. The channel had that tone, And after stopping in some waterfalls that are on the road we discovered that the same thing happened with the lakes.
Lake Wanaka and Lake Hawea had the color of the agave when the clouds came out, and from the doors of Sidi Bou Said, In Tunisia, When the sun illuminated everything. The peaks were snowy, the background, As if winter is anchored to the skull of those mountains. And we stopped, And we got out of the car, And we got into a Van Gogh box to dry our nails and bite our belly. I have seen few roads as beautiful as that wandering for this planet.
Finally, We arrive at Queenstown, The city of leisure, Of the stores, Ski and Chupitos stations. From there we leave to you Anau. We take that afternoon to visit the call Gloworm cave. You take a boat, With other tourists, and they take you to some caves where in small boats You enter dark in the cavities and see these strange blue fireflies that only exist there and in Australia.
The next morning we left at dawn from Teu and we circulate between a landscape still covered in part by the fog. The 120 kilometers that are even the famous Fjords of Milford Sound are a succession of postcards that end up in a port where the ships await tourists. The cruise starts and wanders between high green rocks through which the water of the thaw collings In long veils against the sea. We liked it a lot, because it can't like, But less than we would have liked we liked.
From there we went back to the south, To touch that point where there are no way. A long road on which you stop on the headlights of the end of the world, For a serrada coast where the waves that may come from Antarctica. Stirling Point, Waterpapers Point, Nugget Point y el Slope Point, The most southern point in the country. We got off the curiosity of the explorer. Sloped There was a sign that indicated that the South Pole was 4803 km. And I wanted to see him being an Irish sailor, A Malay pirate or an albatros who cared a fuck the cold.
And it was just that day, junto a las Mc Lean Falls, that we saw a sign that caught our attention: Heathfield Cemetery, said, Next to a narrow mud road with a fence attached to a wire. I love cemeteries because I like the story, And in that place, Chaslands, The history of the first Europeans who arrived on this island in the 18th century lay.
Those buried in that abandoned holy field were British. Those first residents who traveled to their antipodes to improve their lives and what worsened were their deaths. There was a plaque with dates and names of all those buried there. Almost all were from the first years of the twentieth century. Children with two hours of life, three days, four months, eleven years ... Babies die in places where adults are very poor. I felt strange. I thought about their erased lives, In its diffuse trail between those eaten tombs and broken herbal covers. No one will cry those people, Maybe nobody did, Since no one will cry us at some point because death also dies when no one reminds you anymore.
I saw a poster that moved me from 13 October 1899. They were a dance, With free admission for women, that they did in that community to raise funds for the cemetery. I always move that human need to honor their dead. I remember in the Peruvian Amazon, about Iquitos, A stone and marble cemetery surrounded by poor houses of reeds.
Chaslands was a land of lost pilgrims among those lands irrigated by icy winds. They died of syphilis, tuberculosis, flu and hunger. Babies died, Because threatened and fragile were born. Then I noticed the great poster with the names of all those buried there and put: “Chaslands, A place of nature and tranquility ". Around the fields were green. After those skinny tombs, Many shattered, Nothing was heard. What would those people who clear that wild earth to machetes think if they saw me there now? Did you imagine that a tourist who "annoy her" that the country is too perfect one day would lodge among his graves? Will they twight?
Some days after, A little further north, I stopped in the small town of Oamaru, which deserves a visit for its antique stores and their penguins. I entered a small second -hand book bookstore, Slightly Foxed, which did not shake the crusts of their wood shelves. It was a hypnotic place, smelling, in which I found an old book from 1939 that tells the story of those pioneers: “Samuel Mardsen. Greatheart of Maoriland ", de A.H Reed.
Mardsen was a priest born in Yorshire in 1765. He went to Australia at the beginning of the 19th century, And from there he made various trips to evangelize New Zealand. And 1819, introduced viniculture on the island. Those years lived with the Maori. The book I bought narrates its passage through both islands. The last two paragraphs, translated from English, They say so:
"He 18 February 1838, He wrote to the Ecclesiastical Missionary Society of London: ‘My eyes are very weak for age. I have been forty -five years as a chaplain in Nueva Wales del Sur and I have gone through many hardships and difficulties, And I have often had to deal with irrational and evil men. I have crossed many dangers by land and by sea, And I have suffered shipwrecks and robberies; But the Lord, In his mercy, has always fought me ’. The 12 May of the same year, Your last day on Earth, His thoughts were with his duties, His family and the Maori, For those who had spent so many days of hard work. While caregivers gathered around their bed, The last words that heard from his lips were ‘New Zealand‘. Great heart, (Mardsen appealing) had reached the end of his pilgrimage, He had crossed the river and entered through the doors of the heavenly city ”.
Rest in peace the missionary Mardsen, And all those buried in the forgotten cemetery of Chaslands. Humans, better and worse, With its virtues and its meanness, But with sufficient value, Anyone were their reasons, to Go to the end of the world to be buried in an empty hill where not even crows, nonexistent on the island, They dared to arrive.
