Photoessay: The Moria Gate Arch Walk, Buller, New Zealand

The bush enclosing the Karamea valley area in the northwest of NZ's South Island includes the kind of heart-of-darkness old growth that tweaks the primate brain a certain way.  Gazing at its undulant, pea-green enormity from the road that skirts the limestone bluffs opens the mental portal; it is not until you have stood, dwarfed and dampened, in its midst that your ancestral monkey chatters uneasily and begins scanning the middle distance for glimpses of movement.  

It's deeply ironic that the only predators one really faces in this country wear trainers and clutch smartphones, but that's another story.  

The drive winds for an unexpected distance through increasingly emphatic mixed podocarp coastal forest that seems to at once condense and amplify as you progress, both invoking and assiduously retaining the kind of downpours that are always imminent in this infamously pluvial district.

Arrival at the dedicated carpark with its strangely prosaic tourist shelter and prosy signage is a bit of a jolt.  On exiting their vehicles, the extraneous arseholes of all nations blink at each other in the sunlight admitted by the arbitrary clearing, checking for reception, tightening their laces, picking at their peeling tans.  Ambient humanity has soaked sideways even into this once obscure destination in a slightly greasy, sunscreen-scented tide.  

​I wish we'd started at 4.30am on foot, but I'm um... with a bunch of other people.

​If the focus is slightly off in some of these images, I apologise on behalf of the virus that was just starting to balloon my damn eyelids and swell every last one of my cranial membranes.

Luckily the forest isn't here for us and takes the edge off company, swallowing the sight and smell of proximate strangers.  The underlying Oparara Basin karst exhales magic through that heavy green pelt, redolent of hard, tepid, tea-brown water and the coarse moss that tongues the boles to knee-depth and drapes the pendant limbs fanning obliquely overhead.  

While the track is relatively easy going for anyone with moderate mobility, there's no seating or shelter once you're in the thick of it, so have a thought for any less able companions.  At the time the walk was heavily studded with bait stations and mustelid traps designed to mitigate the heavy mortality inflicted on native species by exotic pests; warnings were posted everywhere. Children seem attracted to these and I was forced to dissuade a couple of juvenile randoms from tampering with them along the way, so on behalf of New Zealand's remaining fauna, please do supervise your damn brats.  

​Annoying, I know, but you had to have the bloody things.

​Petroica australis strikes again.  

​These slightly creepy little smoky bandits relish heavy-footed intrusion and jump out onto the path in expectation of the insects stirred by your passage.  And well, to fuck with you, since they are highly territorial.  

​All South Island Robins sort of look exactly the same and after encountering their simulacra in a dozen different places, one starts to formulate subconscious notions about that material equivalence.

Kahikatea spread their fluted buttresses into the welcoming mould.  Their branches soar away into the distant daylight but those of Rimu and other mossy podocarps remain in lime-drenched shade, proliferating into venous silhouette. 

They do not pulse in any visual sense but it takes a few extended glances to establish this.  These same patterns snake unseen through your own flesh, feeding your brain, irrigating your organs.  Blood-warm sweat beads upon your neck and forehead; some of it is yours, some theirs.

Behold the Moria Arch, a cavern tongued out of the fundamental limestone by the deceptively quiescent Oparara river.  The track ends in an abrupt descent into its darkness via a pretty undignified scramble over dodgy rocks aided only by a wall-hung chain, so brace yourself for a few short downward slides and a muddied arse if it's been raining (and it probably has).

The really claustrophobic amongst you might want to look away and think about something
else for a moment.  The arch opens out to regard the river in two directions.  I'm not sure if
these are totally legit stalactites and not just calcified root intrusions, but I was cool with
​whatever was happening here.

​A skirt of uprooted and forsaken trees downstream spoke for the water in a worse mood.

I'm not going to lie; all that stone overhead in a seriously geologically-active area was not my favourite thing in the whole world.  I kept a discreet tally of the likely time it would take to bolt from wherever the hell I was standing toward open daylight at the first hint of P-wave.

The river sand is bone-white and talc-like with a curious scent that might have benefited from visual suggestion but reminded me of clean skin anyway.

All you phobics look away again.  

​This is how you exit- the same way you came in; slowly and cumbrously, no matter what.  It's always easier going uphill than down, but my inner calamity-ruminator pictured getting stuck behind a logjam of sunburnt Germans while the place stoved in around me.

Looking up helps get you through the worst of it; one could always repurpose those moiling strangers and use their static mass to vault to freedom through this handy aperture.  

​Just sayin.

Back out into some truly titan vegetation.  Shamilla is but a passing mote to these two ancient Rimu, or perhaps they were Matai; once the moss and knobliness sets in, it's hard to tell between them.

It may not be especially difficult or obscure, but the remote-ish Oparara Valley still possibly isn't for the faint of heart or those expecting a highly accessible, curated experience.  Tree-fanciers, hardcore environment peeps and geology fetishists will get the most bang out of its baroque verdure.  If you're one of us, don't miss it.

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