The ‘artist', interrupted

Otago Daily Times

21-07-2025

Christchurch writer Paul Gorman plays hide-and-seek with tourists at Mt Cook while rediscovering a long-forgotten hobby.
"It's not even as if they're any good," I muttered to myself, hiding in a thicket of matagouri that blocked me from the view of the people chasing me along the path.
It was truly a Victor Meldrew moment. I fully expected a school party to pass on the other side of the bushes, behind me, and start laughing at the sight of a middle-aged man crouching down uncomfortably.
What one does for one's (terrible attempts at) art!
It was my first time in Aoraki Mount Cook village and the national park for more than 30 years. InterCity had offered a trip to any location they ran services to and, not long after, I found myself on a comfy leather seat in a Great Sights coach trundling across the Canterbury Plains and through the Mackenzie Country, bound for Mount Cook settlement.
On the last morning of my two-night stay at the Mt Cook Lodge & Motels — the far less expensive cousin of The Hermitage Hotel up the hill — the frost was twinkling like a disco ball as first light threw back the curtains of night.
In those intervening decades I had forgotten how the tallest peaks here loom perilously overhead. It feels like they are pressing down on you, intruding on your personal space in some major breach of health and safety regulations.
Aoraki/Mt Cook is of course the main event. At first the mountain is a touch shy, hiding behind the intervening Kirikirikatata Range on the right-hand side of the Hooker Valley until you move far enough to the west.
But it is Mt Sefton which really gets the pulse racing. It's just there, right there, almost in the backyard — so big it seems to menace the village. The rock bluffs, the blue-tinged ice falls and the tumbling glaciers make it seem alive, and The Footstool at its eastern end punctuates the mountain like an exclamation mark.
I'd long been wanting to leave deadlines behind, get out into the fresh air and drag out the drying-up watercolour paints to produce another load of absolute shockers. The InterCity invite to travel to Mount Cook was the excuse I'd been waiting for.
All of which leads me back to my lurkings in a matagouri bush that frosty morning.
Crunching the ice crystals satisfyingly underfoot, I'd ventured out into the -3°C morning doing my utmost to summon up the inner artiste, sans the beret but with an old broken satchel full of paints, brushes, watercolour paper, pencils and sponges.
The air was so sharp it might shatter, the mountains other-worldly clear in the intense light. I wandered up the Hooker Valley, through the tussock along the edges of the Kea Point Track, crossed Kitchener Creek and turned right towards Foliage Hill, a more than 6000-year-old glacial moraine.
Scattered among the grass on the outwash plain are dozens of erratics, table-sized lumps of greywacke and semi-schist rock which had been dumped there back in the day by the glacier.
I chose one I could comfortably lean against, with a flattish top, and got out my sketch pad. "Just draw what you see," I helpfully advised myself, and started on a not-too-bad rendition of Aoraki/Mt Cook, thinking I could always paint it later.
The peace was so absolute it was almost invasive. There was no sound at all, apart from the scratch of pencil on paper. And then ...
Were those distant voices? Yes. And slowly getting nearer. Then I could see puffs of breath. Four of them. They made a beeline for me off the track, wearing expensive designer clothes and waving their arms excitedly while they shouted. I put my pad down.
The only word we both understood was "Shanghai". I tried talking politely, as they grabbed my sketch book off the rock and riffled through it, picked up and played with my pencils, filmed me doing this, photographed me doing that, posed with their arms round my shoulders.
The assault lasted for at least five minutes. At one stage they were about to sashay away, and it was then I made the mistake of starting to draw in front of them. Back they came, with cameras and GoPro, to get some action shots presumably.
In the end, I'd had enough. I packed up quickly, and ran off ahead of them along the track. They were waving and shouting out to me as I extended the gap.
And that's how I ended up crouching in the bushes, watching them coming, hoping they wouldn't see me as they passed by.
If there is now a TikTok clip of me sketching the mountains, I can just imagine the comments: "He's rubbish, why is he promoting himself like that?"
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I've travelled on hundreds of InterCity bus trips in the past decade or so, the vast majority between Christchurch and Dunedin.
The service is generally a good one, but a few have been far from pleasant, with drivers running behind schedule refusing to stop for toilet breaks.
This one was different — and it also had a toilet on board.
Driver Stuart Alpe kept up the commentary about the landscape and the landforms all the way across the Plains and up to the Hermitage. There were only nine passengers through to Lake Tekapo/Takapō township, and 14 from there.
I met Mark and Kathy from Saginaw, Michigan at the Christchurch Bus Interchange about 6.45am on a Monday. They too were somewhat flummoxed at the lack of signs showing where the InterCity services departed from, but we figured we were in the right place, and fortunately we were.
The coach left on time and Stuart made plenty of stops on the way, including at Geraldine for coffee, overlooking Fairlie, at Lake Tekapo for pickups and at sightseeing locations along Lake Pukaki.
The summit of Aoraki teased us for hours before we arrived in the village, a reminder of just how small the South Island is and how close together things are if you travel in a straight line. If you knew where to look, you could see it peeking above and between the foothills all the way from the Plains through the Mackenzie Basin.
The InterCity drivers are happy to drop passengers at their accommodation in the village. However, driver Stuart cautioned against booking hotels via apps based on distance rather than topography. In one case, he had to advise visitors their rooms booked in Franz Josef were actually a seven-hour drive away, even though they were only 30km distant.
The bus depot is at the back of the venerable and vibing Hermitage, perched at the top of the village. The hotel is such a bustling place — even if you aren't staying there, you could easily spend a day in the shops and cafe, bookended by breakfast and dinner. It's like an international airport terminal.
Dozens of people constantly coming and going, sightseeing vans emptying and filling. Tourists of all nationalities, groups bound for walking tracks, some people carrying umbrellas against the drizzling rain, others with plastic bags over their boots.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Cafe & Bar upstairs has breathtaking views of the valley up to Aoraki. But why are so many people playing on their phones rather than drinking it all in?
This day there were long queues to get lunch, with counter staff working hard to serve everyone but not issuing out many smiles. My cup of mushroom soup and pastrami sandwich cost $20.
If you're planning to eat meals at The Hermitage — and there are only a couple of other options in the village, when they're open — make sure you have plenty of money. The buffet breakfast will set you back $42, though the choice of foods is pretty amazing. The smorgasbord dinner costs $84, and personally I found it less impressive than the breakfast.
You might want to take it easy when it comes to alcoholic drinks. Sure, the Snowline Bar is warm and cosy, and a great place to hang out by the fire with your new holiday pals. But my double gin and tonic cost $28 and I was asked if I also wanted ice and lemon with it. I resisted saying I wanted the kitchen sink and the Crown jewels too for that price.
You can't put a price on everything, though. Such as the mountains standing out in the dark of night in the full moon's light. Or my first-ever sighting of a karearea, flying into the gale-force gusts blowing down the valley.
Or sitting on my balcony, painting Mt Sefton as the sun slowly starts to sink in the west and the shadows gather on its grizzled face.
That's one piece of "art" the chasers in the Hooker Valley never got to see.