Rugby Country

As trips go, nothing beats a footy tour. As Footy tours go, nothing beats a lap around En-Zed, your 2011 Rugby World Cup host. 

photos courtesy of Tourism New Zealand

Now, as you know, to the right of our large lump of red earth is the rugby country of New Zealand ‒ a jagged, volcanic land of snow-capped massifs, glacial juggernauts and light-blue lakes only slightly less beautiful than Jessica Alba piloting a 50-1 shot you’ve backed to win the Golden Slipper. And in September New Zealand, world’s greatest rugby nation, is hosting the Rugby World Cup, perhaps the greatest rugby tour in the history of man.

New Zealand is being transformed. There’s a giant “cloud” venue that will host massive parties in Auckland. There’s a brewery on an island off Auckland that has a shooting range – a long-overdue initiative. The locals – often humble, provincial types who empathise with a “Southern Man” who chills beer in high-country streams and carries a fat feral sheep under each arm – will party like happy clappers in rapture. And if they win, they’ll be drunk for a hundred years.

Anyway, the Kiwis want you to visit and spend your muscular Australian roubles watching rugby and doing fun stuff. Which is why, a short time after clearing New Zealand Customs (a fellow called Nevin who lifts his eyebrows, “Cheers, bro”), I’m attached to a long steel cable and shuffling out towards the edge of Auckland’s Sky Tower dressed in a daggy superhero’s overalls.

“Don’t look down,” comes the advice, before I do just that and feel quite the jolt of incredible fear. Jesus. Too late to back out? No, but I’m all dressed up and out this far and surely the Kiwis aren’t going to kill visiting journalists. Are they? So I stand on the edge and hold in a brick and gaze down at Auckland, 192m below. And then I fall off.

After 20m of terror, I jolt to a halt and dangle like Spiderman with a dud web-thing, wriggling about in space as rictus-mouthed tourists take photos of the freak, the dingle-berry with arms. And then I’m dropped. “FAAAAA,” I roar, with about 30 more “A”s as I fall laughing, screaming, swearing like Richard Pryor, the video camera tracking my journey down. Some seconds later (9000?), I land on a bullseye and just about pash the earth. Hello again, Auckland, you magnificent she-bastard.

Next day we’re in the backwoods behind Piha Beach, 45 minutes from Auckland’s CBD, tucking our bits into full steaming wetsuits, helmets and rock-hopping joggers, and learning abseiling manoeuvres from our guide “Cam”, a dead-ringer for Kiwi opening bat John Wright. We hike up through a rainforest of silver ferns that Maoris from the olden days turned upside down to guide them at night. Then we jump in the river. This is canyoning. We navigate ravines and waterfalls and wade through crystal-pure waters; smiling like kids in on a secret. We pass through chutes, crevasses, moss-lined cold-rock corridors. The Biggest Loser took their show down here and spat those jolly chubsters through tubes of wet rock. Super television.Abseiling? Tricky early. But by the third one, a 40m sheer drop by a cascading torrent of white water, I’m pushing off the rock face and getting some air. It’s pretty cool fun, especially the last abseil down a tight shaft with the river pouring down upon your head, heavy, cold and wet. Fine adventure.

photos courtesy of Tourism New Zealand

And so to Nelson in the north of the South Island, where the Wallabies will beat the shit out of Russia on October 1. Good little town, Nelson. During the tournament they’ll block the main street, put out hundreds of trestle tables with white tablecloths and invite people to “long lunch”. Top initiative.

Twenty minutes from town is Happy Valley, where we meet “Fletch”, a sort of sandy-haired Wal Footrot who lives on a hill like a well-heeled hermit, shooting possums he sells to a local pub which pays a bounty of beer. Fletch can shoot 20 a night and is a popular man in a shout. Happy Valley has a paint-ball war-zone

and boasts a four-person gondola thing that does 100km/h forwards and backwards across a valley of 1000-year-old Matai pines that are full of 40 per-cent-proof-fermented starch upon which woodchoppers in the olden days

got really pissed. Good times.

Quad-biking? Great times, friend; muddy, messy manoeuvres through watery dips and bumpy humps followed by a few hot laps around a purpose-built track where, according to Fletch, “most accidents happen”.

After lunch of whitebait and beer, it’s off to Skydive Abel Tasman, where I’m suited up and meet my tandem man “Scruffy”. We board the airplane (a thin steel tube), become attached (I really hope) and serpentine up five kilometres, where the oxygen comes from masks. Scary? Not, strangely. Because it’s like nothing you’ve ever done. You have no concept of rock-hard earth and no notion of becoming an instant blood-n-bone omelette. It’s like being in space. Not to say I’m un-nervous as we bum-shuffle towards the door, perch in the doorway  and contemplate the long drop down.

And then we’re out and into it, and for 54 seconds, I laugh like a clan of hyena smoking powerful hydroponic skunk. We scream down at something like 180km/h, lips flapping like pancakes, Scruffy rotating us to catch views of the north island, the southern one spread out below like a surveyor’s map of the gods. It is unbelievable. Unreal. Roget’s Thesaurus doesn’t have the words.

photos courtesy of Tourism New Zealand

The fishing joint Stonefly Lodge, with its rocks from the river and Radiata pine, has the look of a Hemingway hunt-house. If you’re of a mind, you can fly out from here in a helicopter to shoot deer or fish rivers which would take days to find on foot. And you’ll feast like the Kings of Leon.

Next day it’s off to Abel Tasman National Park, where legend has it that Nelson Tourism hosted the girls of Vogue India, who drank beer from 9am and wore six-inch stilettos while kayaking. Top women. Aboard Rod Stewart’s (not that one) MV Taranui, we see baby New Zealand fur seals in a “creche”, rolling about cuter than Justin Bieber carrying a Justin Bieber doll carrying a bunny rabbit. We cruise and hike and cross a rope bridge, and eat salmon with sauv blanc while moored by a scimitar of sand. This isn’t a country, it’s Pleasure World.

And so to Dunedin and its excellent new rugby stadium on the banks of Otago Harbour; the one of white steel that’s wrapped in plastic. The locals have dubbed it “The Playstation”. England plays Argentina here on September 10, a chance to sing with Poms and gaze upon Argentine women hotter than lava-filled meat pies.

Our final stop is Sinclair Beach for Otago’s gift to the culinary universe, the cheese roll (cheese wrapped in white bread and grilled), where we watch local surfers in double-ply wetsuits ripping up some pretty nice waves. It’s on this beach that Otago University hosts the International Nude Rugby Sevens that’s perennially covered by New Zealand’s major news outlets. Streakers run on in clothes. One year the final was refereed by Josh Kronfeld, another year by a blind woman. True story.

Make your own in New Zealand.

‒ Matt Cleary