On the road: Hanging out boldly in Gore

By TONY WALL

My knees shake uncontrollably as I am led out of The Howl at the Moon pub in Gore by three local lads with knowing grins on their sun-burned faces.

The first night of our road trip and I am about to be taught how to "possum scull," whatever that is.

Two blokes with arms the size of thick tree branches grab my legs and hang me upside down over a balcony.

The third stands underneath me and hands me a glass of Speights.

There's a fine art to this possum sculling, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I made a mess of it. The trick, apparently, is to pour in the opposite direction to how you normally would, and to drink from the opposite side of the glass.

I do it all wrong and the beer goes up my nose and out my mouth, to the delight of my new friends.

Then one, Robert Grant, shows how it's done. He hangs upside down from a 2.5m fence and slugs back the beer without spilling a drop. He usually does it from the woolshed rafters, he boasts.

This attempt at male bonding is partly motivated by the fact that minutes earlier, the boys were threatening to "smash my head in" because they were convinced I was here to take the Mikey out of their beloved town.

Gore's relationship with the media has been rocky lately.

There was that infamous telly programme where a shaggy-headed bloke who looks like a Jenny Craig "before" photo, and his side-kick, who resembles Beaker from the Muppets, sat under the town's giant trout and declared Gore the gay capital of New Zealand.

Then a television news show and an Auckland magazine did items on the town's legion of drunken hoons.

Once we gained the trust of the hard-case young people at the pub, they told us they laughed at the Havoc programme as loudly as the rest of the country, but it is clear the joke has worn a bit thin.

They're sick of being a laughing stock.

But Gore's redneck image, is, to some extent, true. When we asked one young buck if he would pose for a photo under the trout, his reply was "nah, that'd be gay."

And there are not too many openly homosexual people around, not in this bar at least.

"I know one girrrl (who's gay)," a barwoman says in her lovely southern drawl, "but she's more boy than girrrl."

What Havoc didn't realise was that Gore can be a great place to hang out.

Did he know that in summer the sun shines long and bright, not setting until 10 pm?

Did he know that the town is full of young women with names like Ray-Ellen, with the looks of the Parnell girl and the roll-up-your sleeves practicality of the Westie?

And did he know that 5km out of town, farmer Jono Townsend would be more than happy to show him how to crutch a sheep at his 100-year-old woolshed?

There is a happy mood in Southland. The region's green, undulating hills are baking under a hot sun and farmers are enjoying strong lamb prices, while others are switching to even more lucrative dairy operations.

After a night and day of Southern Hospitality it was time to move on to Otago.

We stayed in tiny Milton, where not a lot happens on a Saturday night.

As we came over the hill to Dunedin, the sun disappeared and we were enveloped in a thick mist that had blanketed the city. It was freezing and the people did not seem as friendly as their southern cousins.

After a while, the words of an old Willie Nelson song got stuck in my brain: "On the road again, I can't wait to get on the road again ... "

Feature: On the road with Tony and Mark