Giveaways
BETWEEN Queenstown, where I live, and Dunedin, there’s an aridly picturesque region called Central Otago.
Central Otago is a rain-shadow region, kept dry by the blocking effect of the high mountains around Queenstown. It looks a lot like Outback Australia or parts of the Middle East that I’ve been to. Some call it a desert, though there are a few too many trees and shrubs for that to be literally true.
Though the average year-round temperature isn’t high in Otago as compared to Outback Australia or the Middle East, it gets pretty hot under a blue summer sky in Central all the same — and in Queenstown too, once it has been summer for a while.
Here are a couple of photos I’ve taken in the Bannockburn area, which is the part of Central Otago closest to Queenstown.
Look up 'Bannockburn area' on the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) website for a list of things to do in and around Bannockburn, including the Bannockburn Sluicings Track.
Update: On October 28, 2021, I went for a ramble past the local Bannockburn Domain campground and village onto the Sluicings Track. Here is a video made up of scenes I filmed and photographed that day, plus a couple of collages from still photos that I also took on the same day!
Bannockburn area video, including a slideshow
Central Otago towns are mostly quite historic by New Zealand standards, with whole streets of stone buildings erected in the 1860s and 1870s for want of timber; buildings that nobody has ever had the heart to demolish.
From Queenstown, if you are headed east to Dunedin, you drive past Cromwell and Clyde (which is below a large modern 1980s dam, the Clyde High Dam) and through Alexandra, before going either via a northern route or a southern route to Dunedin. It’s a good idea not to drive past Clyde and Cromwell but actually to turn into them as the older precincts of these towns, off the modern highway, are really historic and picturesque.
Such towns are open-air museums of the early settler’s way of life.There are lots of books about Otago history by the way, such as this one, of which the cover depicts a historic bridge in Alexandra (the stone piers are still there).
A long stretch of the northern road bears the colourful name of ‘thePigroot’. One theory is that in the 1860s and 70s, the stagecoaches and bullock-carts transporting gold and miners to and from the diggings near Queenstown chopped up the then-unsealed road so much that it looked like it had been rooted by pigs!
Here’s a more detailed map of the areas of northern Otago served by the Pigroot Trail.
If you are feeling energetic, you can cycle from Middlemarch through to Clyde by way of the Otago Central Rail Trail, 152 km of disused railway line. This involves cycling along the western half of the Pigroot after you reach Kyeburn, till Clyde.
Here is the web page of the Otago Central Rail Trail: otagocentralrailtrail.co.nz.
As elsewhere in Otago, there’s a Scots bias to the placenames here. But there are still plenty of Māori placenames, all the same. For instance, the Māori name for much of northern Otago is Maniototo, which means ‘plains of blood’. Not actual blood, but rather the red tussock that’s native to this semi-arid land and which normally gave it a rather red appearance overall, though in the following photo the sign is in reddish tones while the land has greened up from recent rains.
If you are driving between Queenstown and Dunedin and not on a cycling holiday, the slowest but most scenic way is to take the Pigroot right through to Palmerston and come down the coast through Waikouaiti.
Heading east on the Pigroot, I turned left up a side road to St Bathans. It was November, but there was still snow on the mountains. A sign prominently advertised the Vulcan Hotel, est. 1863.
The Vulcan looked a lot like the more famous Cardrona Hotel, established in the same year.
Clearly, this was the standard look for miners’ inns at the time.
It was pretty quiet when I was there, but a lot of these places really swell in the summertime, when they cater to rail trail tourists. Who are thirsty, obviously enough.
St Bathans is an old gold-mining town. There are a couple of lakes, Blue Lake and Grey Lake, which didn’t exist prior to the 1860s but were created by the activities of the gold miners.
The chief method of mining in this district was to aggressively sluice the easily-eroded hillsides with jets of high-pressure water.
And that’s basically how the lakes were carved out. You can go boating and swimming on the lakes, and there’s quite a nice campsite.
There are a number of other old buildings and halls in the township, apart from the Vulcan Hotel.
St Bathans would probably be a ghost town, if it weren't for the fact that the accidentally-created lakes now bring in quite a bit of tourism. All the same, only a literal handful of people live there all year round.
There is a heap of interesting places around this area, including the Ida Valley (on the rail trail), Drybread, where a colonial cemetery is being excavated, and Cambrians, a little settlement where the handful of people who live there are restoring the native forest.
A little further on down the Pigroot I turned up a side road to the town of Naseby, where there used to be twenty pubs, of which the Ancient Briton and the Royal are the only two survivors now.
The town also has other historic buildings and generally tons of charm.
Like St Bathans, Naseby’s also some way off the Pigroot. But it seems to have a bit more critical mass.
(By the way,what’s with names like Cromwell and Naseby? The latter bears the same name as the site of the greatest victory of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army against the cavaliers of King Charles I. Do names like this imply that some of the miners were less than fulsomely loyal to Queen Victoria? Come to think of it, down by Ophir there’s the Daniel O’Connell Bridge, after the Irish nationalist of the same name. I wonder if any royal tour’s ever gone through these parts.)
You can continue up the side road from Naseby to Kyeburn Diggings where there are no longer any miners but still a surprisingly large pub, hotel and restaurant called the Danseys Pass Hotel (est. 1862), also known as the Danseys Pass Coach Inn, and then on to Danseys Pass via a road that is, from the Inn onward, simply a bedrock ledge in places. The road’s very scenic, but whoever’s driving is advised not to look at the scenery. A bit like the Skippers in other words, though not quite as bad. Heavy vehicles, campervans and caravans are not allowed because they cause problems for people coming the other way on narrow sections. And according to the international Dangerous Roads website, “if there’s any hint of bad weather, you should not be up here.” On the other hand,there are a great many trails that lead off the road into a rocky wilderness on both sides, the Oteake Conservation Park, a paradise for mountain bikers. And to reiterate, it is scenic.
Through Danseys Pass you travel on to Duntroon on the Waitaki River, an area that's the subject of another of my blog posts.
The Dunstan Heritage Trail runs through the middle of Central Otago from Dunedin to Alexandra, in an almost straight line for 175 kilometres. It was the preferred route of the gold-miners from roughly 1862 onwards, though it is rough and exposed. The remains of old inns exist along the way.
Also known as the Dunstan Trail for short, the Dunstan Heritage Trail is more elevated and adventurous than the Otago Central Rail Trail and leads through a real wilderness of tussock grass and weird rocky outcrops sculpted by the wind. Because of its elevation and exposure, it’s closed from the first Tuesday in June till the end of September.
The trail leads past the Poolburn Reservoir, one of several reservoirs on a barren, rocky plateau southeast of the Ida Valley. The Poolburn Reservoir is accessible by a road from Moa Creek and the Ida Valley that is drivable in an ordinary vehicle provided it has good ground clearance, but the road is pretty rough, being another one of the ones that’s just a bedrock slab in places. Past the Poolburn Reservoir, heading east, the road takes the form of a four-wheel-drive road, and it has gates.
The Dunstan Trail is also known as the Old Dunstan Road for much of its length (today’s road diverges slightly from the original trail in places). It doesn’t get much publicity, because the whole route runs through the middle of nowhere in exposed and dangerous locations, and it has got just about zero commercial potential.
It’s strictly for the hardcore adventure cyclist, basically.
The Dunstan Trail should not be confused with the Lake Dunstan Trail, which runs for 52 kilometres up the sideof Lake Dunstan from Cromwell. These two trails have almost the same name, yet they are completely different!
Here are acouple of websites on the Dunstan Heritage Trail, and the Lake Dunstan Trail,respectively:
kennett.co.nz/archives/ride/dunstan-trail
centralotagonz.com/tracks-and-trails/lake-dunstan-trail
Between Alexandra and Dunedin, you have the choice of the Pigroot route or a southern route, through Roxburgh. Both skirt around a vast semi-desert through which the Dunstan Trail passes, but which has never been pierced by a road of the kind that’s suitable for all vehicles.
The further south you go in Otago, the less barren the landscape tends to become, until you are in the fertile plains of Southland, north of Invercargill. All the same, the southern route through central Otago, from Alexandra to Dunedin via Roxburgh, following the Clutha or Mata-Au River most of the way, still goes through some pretty bony terrain itself.
From Alexandra as far as the Roxburgh Dam, the highway is paralleled by trails in the Roxburgh Gorge (flooded by the dam) and on the adjacent Flat Top Hill Conservation Area, where there are more weird stone outcrops shaped by the wind, a common sight in many parts of central Otago, but seldom so visible from a main road as here.
To the west, the Flat Top Hill Conservation Area overlooks a locality called Fruitlands, through which the main road passes and which was an area of early settlement and gold mining. There are lots of relics in that area including the old stone buildings of Mitchell’s Cottage in the hills further west, and, just to the east of the main road, a number of ruined stone cottages that look like they belong in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands.
Below the Roxburgh Dam, the valley of the Clutha / Mata-Au is flat and fertile. Along with Fruitlands this is a major fruit-growing area, yet the orchards in the river valley just serve to remind us how much of the area really is a wilderness. When you zoom out on the map, the river valley just looks like a thread. Driving up and down it actually conveys a misleading impression of fertility.
Past Beaumont, the main road (SH 8) leaves the river valley and heads toward a town called Lawrence, next to the famous Gabriel’s Gully. This was one of the first places where gold was discovered in New Zealand, in 1861, and soon led to an internationally significant gold rush, a worthy successor to the then-recent strikes in California and Australia and a forerunner to South Africa and the Yukon.
The winnings of Gabriel’s Gully, and others like it, paid for a lot of fancy architecture in a hitherto wooden and ramshackle colony, and also helped to locate New Zealand more firmly on people’s mental maps of the world. Before the gold rush the response to any mention of New Zealand was likely to be “Where’s that?” Admittedly that is still a fairly common response, but not as common as it used to be.
From Lawrence, you reach the town of Milton and then head north on State Highway 1 past Lake Waihola and Mosgiel, to Dunedin.
And no, Waihola is not a misprint. It’s another of those Hawai‘ian-sounding names, a local variant of the more standard Waihora, meaning shallow waters; a name which is also one of the Māori names of Lake Ellesmere, further north, in Canterbury.
a-maverick.com/blog/xmas-in-new-zealand
a-maverick.com/blog/the-old-gold-road-dawdling-dunedin-pigroot-trail
https://www.a-maverick.com/blog/looking-behind-the-scenery-striking-historical-gold-in-new-zealand
a-maverick.com/blog/amazing-arrowtown-new-zealands-colonial-time-capsule
If you liked the post above, check out my new book about the South Island! It's available for purchase from this website.
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