Paul Holmes: Spectacle knocks me for six

Lake Pukaki, one of the links in the Upper Waitaki Power Development. Photo / Supplied

We can look at our child abuse rate and our babies dying at their parents' hands and we can read these confounding and terrifying stories about massed, brawling high school kids and pretty near convince ourselves that the country is falling apart. Certainly we are a violent little place.

It is hard to know why. We have so much space, we are a pretty friendly people and we are not crowded in on each other, even in the poorer areas. We have mild winters that do not make us crazy and in our temperate summers our brains do not get fried by a violent sun. But we can get terribly down on ourselves and down on each other in New Zealand.

Nevertheless, it is not all bad. It can't be. New Zealand has just been named the second favourite country to visit in the world by people polled in Conde Nast Traveller magazine. In fact, incredibly, we were only just beaten by Italy. Out of a maximum score of 100, Italy came in with a score of 95.55 to beat New Zealand with 95.18. That is hardly a thrashing. Considering the historic and legendary charms of Italy, its magnificent food and wine and culture, its gorgeous, sweeping landscapes and its wonderful climate, New Zealand did brilliantly. We came in ahead of Turkey, Australia and France. Not bad at all.

If I needed a reminder of the spectacular beauty of New Zealand, I got it in spades when I went to Mt Cook, the Mackenzie country and the Upper Waitaki for a quick couple of days on a bit of business this week.

We stayed a night at The Hermitage, which has had a refit in recent years. It was a dreadful, dowdy old place when I last went there in the late 1980s when it was run by the old Tourist Hotel Corporation. It was ghastly. Quite depressing. It remains a curiosity, I have to say, a slightly bizarre rabbit warren of place and I don't think my business partner and I ever found our way to or from our rooms the same way twice.

Mt Cook was clouded and misty when we arrived. In the morning, I was knocked for six by the magnificent sight of Aoraki thrusting its ruthless, powerful way to a sky that Clive James might describe as powdered sapphire. I had never seen the mountain close up before. It is unforgettable.

But what was also a revelation to me was the way those great sprawling lakes, Tekapo, Pukaki and Ohau, are linked by a great engineering project to supply Benmore with water for electricity generation. Call me thick, but I had never been to this region before and I had no idea of the Upper Waitaki Power Development, a vast engineering project begun in 1968 and completed in 1984. In this scheme, the lakes are linked by a series of long, wide and deep canals which transport the water from one lake to another and eventually to Benmore.

Millions of litres of the freshest, purest water drains from Lake Tekapo, the highest of the three lakes, into Lake Pukaki, which drains it by canal into Lake Ohau and thence by another canal to Benmore. The canals stretch for miles across that sprawling flat countryside, gleaming snow-covered mountains of immense majesty in the distance everywhere you look. It was a huge engineering project, so large and, ultimately, so simple. Water moves downhill. It was all they needed to know. That, and how to work a bulldozer. It was Kiwi ingenuity on a magnificent scale.

I cannot for the life of me understand how I knew nothing about those lake linkages and the Upper Waitaki Power Development. Against the relentless lion-skin brown of the landscape, you see nothing but endless blue sky, gleaming blue-white mountains and Aoraki screaming above them all. You see nothing but blue, snow-melt lakes whose colour could make you weep, with the same blue water, pristine in its cleanliness, flowing steadily along the endless canals with their high, brown embankments on each side.

The water we take each winter from Lake Pukaki alone, I was told, is greater than the amount of water in Wellington Harbour. The Waitaki Power Development has provided most of our electricity for nearly 30 years. It has been the backbone of our sustained development and it sits comfortably and cleanly, an engineering wonder, in one of the loveliest regions of the world.

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On Friday, back in Auckland, the television and film industries celebrated the Qantas Craft Awards for the technicians in the field. The person awarded Best Current Affairs Camera has, for many years now, received the Joe Von Dinklage trophy and this year, TVNZ asked me to present it. Von Dinklage was, of course, the cameraman who was lost the night our helicopter crashed north of Gisborne, on a cold and filthy night in late June 1989. TVNZ initiated the trophy in Joe's honour the following year.

This year the attendees were offered a tribute to Joe with pictures of him at work, interviews with the survivors the day after and film of the helicopter after it washed ashore in the early hours of the Sunday morning after the crash. I had never really noticed when I saw those pictures of it back then just how wrecked the helicopter was, every panel buckled and smashed. It shook me badly as we stood on stage watching the screen. I could not also believe how young we survivors looked back then on the day after the seemingly endless saga of getting ashore.

And I still do not know how I survived in the water that night. Of course, it was not just a matter of getting ashore.

After making the beach, I was a gibbering, hypothermic wreck, my arms over the shoulders of my colleagues, virtually carried over a shingle track, muddy fields and barbed wire fences some 3km to the nearest house whose lights had been our beacon and given us hope from the moment we abandoned the broken, floating chopper and set out desperately for the shore. Through the French doors was a roaring open fire. It was a sight I shall never forget. We were given dry clothes and love and hospitality and began to come to terms with the loss of Joe.

After the ceremony, back at TVNZ, I ran into my colleague Hunter Wells, himself freshly back from the awards. Hunter produced Holmes at the time of the accident. Hunter had also been affected by the old pictures and he reminded me that it was he who, later that night 20 years ago, as we sat shivering round the open fire, at Anaura Bay, was given the job of driving across Auckland to a party being attended by Joe's girlfriend to tell her Joe would not be making the party. And that it was likely Joe might never be back.

And, to worsen the abject grief of his mother and father and his 10 brothers and sisters, Joe's body was never found.