To-day's ride was not lacking in excitement. The previous night there had been a high gale, the telephone wire was down at the fords; and in the forest, trees had been blown across road and wire, one tree so big that it completely blocked the way, and we had to get off our horses. The guide rapidly cut off straggling branches with an axe, which he had brought in case of accidents; we then climbed the trunk, and the horses easily jumped over.
We came safely to our journey's end at Waiho Gorge, by the Franz Josef glacier, at nightfall, greeted cheerily by the light streaming through the open door of the hotel, and by the kindly welcome of my last year's friends.
[Illustration: GLACIER HOTEL, WAIHO GORGE. _To face page 143._]
I was back at Waiho Gorge and content--seventy miles from the nearest train, and with a mail once a week.
At Waiho, there are a few small huts, three cottages and the hotel. The Glacier Hotel is a two-storied wooden building, with verandah and balcony, and accommodation for between thirty and forty; it has a dining-room, smoking-room and two sitting-rooms, in one of which is an excellent piano; there are two bathrooms with a good supply of hot and cold water, and soon the house will be lighted by electricity--the power to be brought from a convenient waterfall close by. Under the same roof is a store, where you can buy groceries, boot-laces and tobacco, and in the same store you find a post-office with a telephone--that indispensable luxury of the back blocks. It is in the parish of Ross, and four times a year the Anglican clergyman drives seventy miles to hold a service. While I was staying here, the Bishop of Christchurch took a journey of two hundred miles to conduct a Confirmation in the smoking-room: there were nine candidates, some of whom had come more than forty miles. The Presbyterian minister also comes from Ross and holds a service, and sometimes the Roman Catholic priest spends a night at the hotel.
At this hotel, tourists may feel that they are visitors and friends, so kindly is their welcome, and so homelike and pleasant are the arrangements made for them. No one need be dull--something is always happening--a draper comes through with his pack of goods for sale; a farmer rides up with his daughters from a homestead thirty miles south, on their way to a dance held in a hall twenty miles further on; news too continually filters through--for the settlers all know one another, and take the keenest interest in each other's welfare. Catering is sometimes difficult. There are cows for milk, chickens and a kitchen garden, sheep too, in paddocks not far off; but all other provisions must either come in the weekly coach or by steamer to the small township of Okarito, seventeen miles away. Okarito is like other west coast harbours, in having a bar, which, in stormy weather, makes it impossible for even a small steamer to enter or leave the port. Often, for weeks at a time, the inhabitants of Waiho Gorge must depend on the mail coach for their supplies.