THE SECRET SIDE OF NEW ZEALAND

Author: By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 4, 1998

Page: M14

Section: Travel

For years, New Zealand has been promoted as some kind of extreme sport capital of the world. After all, Edmund Hillary, a Kiwi, was the first man to climb Mount Everest, along with his Sherpa companion, Tenzing Norgay. The latest thing to make New Zealand ``hot,'' as a teenage neighbor remarked, was that it's the ``mountain biking capital of the world.'' Ah, mountain biking, the sport guaranteed to fill the pockets of orthodontists and orthopedists. The average tourist brochure begins with bungee jumping and ends with mentions of the glorious 14-day hikes you can take through the Southern Alps.

Even the trout fishing, if you pick it up on one of those Saturday morning cable fishing shows, always involves getting into a helicopter and landing on a 45-degree slope with your trusty guide. Personally, the only helicopter I'd ever ride in would be a medevac, and only if I was unconscious.

Guess what? New Zealand is perfect for the non-adventurous, perfectly ordinary, office-working, or retired human being. After all, if it weren't for people like us, who would stand around and watch people bungee-jump? You don't think this rubber-band roulette would last a month without an audience, do you?

On a December 1997 trip to New Zealand, the only causes of elevated pulses were an airplane flight to Stewart Island (brilliantly piloted through crosswind, fog, and twilight to a dirt strip in the bush) and a series of S-curves on the highway over Arthur's Pass (viewed from the passenger seat in a brief moment when the eyes were open).

Stewart Island, as conveniently reached by ferry as airplane, is about 60 miles long, 40 miles wide, and all of its few hundred residents live within two miles of one anothernear the hamlet of Halfmoon Bay. It is the perfect spot for hiking through impenetrable bush and miry bogs, if you like that sort of thing. Or you can sit out on the porch of Doug and Margaret Wright's Stewart Island Lodge and watch several Kakas, one of the world's rarest parrots, bounce along the railing and give you the evil eye. After the parrots get sated with Margaret's sugar water, smaller songbirds drop in for liquid brunch.

Mild exercise is encouraged in and around Halfmoon Bay, with several department of conservation trails cut through native forest and along seaside cliffs. The near-town trails are graded, graveled in many places, and boardwalks, wooden steps, and bridges cover tricky terrain and also keep visitors from tearing up the landscape with waffle-stomping boots. I walked everywhere around Halfmoon Bay and along nearby island and peninsula trails (easily reached by water taxi) in street shoes.

Guests with tastes for adventure would return cheerfully mud-covered from more distant rain-forest destinations.

Halfmoon Bay (and, therefore, Stewart Island) has varied accommodations, including hiker's hostels, if you like the wet-socks camaraderie. But Wright's lodge, surely the southernmost first-class lodge in the world, is really the only choice. It is not just the food (Margaret is a formidable and inventive cook) or the location (high above the harbor at Halfmoon Bay). It is the attention to detail. The Wrights know who gives the best wildlife tours, where the best gift shop is (rather well hidden off a side road), when the ferry leaves, how long it takes to stroll from here to there and back again.

If Stewart Island can be kept tame despite itself, there are whole towns in New Zealand worth visiting just because they are so, well, so tame. In Oamaru, at about the midpoint of the South Island's eastern coastline, you will find one of the few places in the world where you can drive, park, walk a few steps, and look at penguins. Here is this remarkably Victorian town (Oamaru was the main port for New Zealand's 19th-century gold rush) with blue penguins nesting in the riprap along the waterfront and on the hillside above the shipyard. A few miles out of town, via paved road and walkway, you can see one of the world's rarest birds, the yellow-eyed penguin. It is as if you could go to Boston and look at the great auks and the Labrador ducks.

Oamaru has motels, but it would not make sense to go that far and not stop at the Pen-y-Bryn Lodge, where Roy and Bernice Vannini, new owners, are building a reputation based on native New Zealand friendliness dispensed inside a Victorian grand house with enough leaded glass and polished woodwork to make Sherlock Holmes feel he'd stopped at the right spot before plodding on to the Baskervilles. Just across the street and down the hill (``Pen-y-Bryn'' means ``Top of the Hill'' in Welsh) is the Oamaru lawn bowling and croquet club. Visitors are welcome, I was told by a couple of lawn bowlers. Just a few miles away is the local golf course where not only are visitors welcome but greens fees for the day are less than $10 in US currency.

Like many New Zealand towns, Oamaru is just one flower garden after another. Every householder in New Zealand seems to have been born with an urge to grow roses. For serious moderate exercise, walking from Pen-y-Bryn downtown and back is a day of heady scents and bright colors.

Situated about halfway between Christchurch and the attractions of southernmost South Island, the Pen-y-Bryn Lodge is already a popular way-stop, but the area is so varied within an hour's drive that it deserves to be a hub. The Waitaki River, flowing eastward from the Southern Alps, is a fine trout and salmon stream, and the whole Otago Province sportfishery is available on day-trips from Oamaru. The Vanninis have located a reliable fishing guide (something not always reliably found by browsing the advertisements in fishing magazines or the local yellow pages). Roy Vannini puts it this way: ``Tell us what you would like to do, what you would like to see. We can help.''