Murchison

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Before leaving Nelson two different guides put together lists of suggested rivers to try on our way through. Both had the Mangles River on their list. The Mangles River crosses the highway a couple miles before Murchison where we were planning to turn south for the trip over the hills. When we got there, it didn’t look like it had rained much. We decided to drive up the river to have a look at the water before we decided whether or not to stay the night.

In New Zealand the rivers themselves come in two ownership classes. The socialist class of river is called the “Queen’s Chain”. This means that the river is owned by the crown, and once you gain access to it, you may travel up and down the river with no regard to the private land that adjoins it. However, if you have to cross private land to get to the river, you have to have permission of the land owner. The other class is “Riparian Rights” which means that the land owner also owns the river that runs through his land. The land owners will rarely refuse access across their land unless they don’t like you, or they have livestock issues where you want to fish.

We found a likely looking stretch of river and found a farm house near by. The dogs announced our arrival, so by the time we got to the end of the drive, the farmer was already standing on his porch (in his stocking feet). He stepped off the porch. I started asking him about getting permission to fish his water. He started telling me about how his family originally came from Russia, and he had been on that farm since 1944. He told me how his father had fished it, and how many people would approach him a season to fish there. He hadn’t seen many yet this year, and with the economic situation in the world, he didn’t expect to. It started to rain.

He asked me about how our trip was going, where we had been and where we were going. I told him about some of the places we had been on the North Island, and how nervous we had gotten about going too far into the bush. I made a joke about how because no one knows where we are at any time here, if anything happened to us, no one would start looking until we didn’t show up at the airport back in Seattle. He told me how his brother had gone back to Kamchatka to visit family and was never seen or heard from again.

We spent about an hour talking in the rain and the merciless sand flies; he in his stocking feet. Cynthia was sitting in the car in the driveway. I guess I was being interviewed. Then he said “Let’s go say hi to your missus”. At the end of it all, he told me that I was welcome to fish anywhere on his land, (and he owned about 15k of river) and if I ever came through again, I would be welcome. I thought that he was going to invite us for dinner, but in the end, he didn’t. “I’ll see you tomorrow” he said.

For the majority of our trip, we have not had much opportunity to interface with anyone outside the tourism industry. Most of these people were polite at least; but then they have to be, don’t they? Without exception, outside the city the genuine people have been friendly and generous. We then headed into Murchison to find a shack for the night.

About an hour after we checked into our nightly hovel it began to rain…and rain, and rain. It poured all night long, and the wind blew something fierce. I feared the worst for the river. The next day the rain let up, but the rivers were swollen and dark. We drove the 20 some odd miles back up the river, and I left a note in the farmer’s mailbox thanking him for his generosity, and hoped to see him on our way back up.

Our shack for the night: