Of characters and cobwebs

When you start a conversation with a random local at the bar of the South Sea Hotel, you need your conversational A-game in place to match them for interesting anecdotes. Illustration / NZ Herald

It's the people you meet - not just the places you go - that make the best travel tales, says Winston Aldworth.

In my first job, as a junior reporter working on the Southland Times, I found myself covering the Stewart Island beat.

The advice to a newbie reporter heading to Rakiura was clear: "Every single person you'll meet on the island is a walking news story."

Yeah right, I said to myself. No doubt there'll be a couple of lively characters, but everyone? That's got to be a bit of an overstatement.

Nope. It was no overstatement, I thought to myself, as I had a beer at the local pub with a shipping captain who'd once been kidnapped by the Russian mafia. When you start a conversation with a random local at the bar of the South Sea Hotel, you'll need to have your conversational A-game in place to match them for interesting anecdotes. Many of these people routinely see great white sharks at their place of work. And then go diving for fun.

There are fewer than 400 people living on the island and for generations they've made a living from the waters that surround them. There's muttonbirding, bringing in shellfish and hauling up fin fish. You'll find few better places on Earth to get a good feed of cod, crayfish and paua. Tourism is a relatively small player, but - like everywhere - one that's getting bigger.

The other bit of advice they gave to newbie reporters heading to the island was: "Watch out for the Cobweb Club."

While New Zealand's man-drought was starting to register on the Mainland, it was pretty much scripture on Stewart Island. The first rule of Cobweb Club: If you've gone for at least one year without having sex, you qualify for membership of the club.

The second rule seemed to be: Feel free to talk to anyone at all about Cobweb Club. Particularly young men visiting from the Mainland.

Geographical isolation always hones the most interesting characters. Back on the Mainland, in Bluff - a relatively urbane and sophisticated metropolis compared with Stewart Island's Oban - Fred and Myrtle Flutey of Paua House fame were true one-of-a-kind characters. Yes, people would pay a couple of bucks to walk around the legendary paua house and the paua shells were pretty enough to look at. But mainly you'd pay your money and enter just so that you could walk about muttering to yourself: "What kind of characters build a place like this?"

If you met Fred, probably sitting in his armchair in the lounge, or caught Myrtle pottering about then the whole house-full-of-seashells thing suddenly made sense.

No tourism marketing board in the world has ever really figured out how to sell the story of its local characters. They can promote scenery, physical geography and great food - all of which, incidentally, are fine things to promote. But the memories of a place that are the best to share are personal encounters with local characters.

Like the saying goes: It is people, it is people, it is people.

If the anecdotes you share about those locals when you're home include the word "bonkers", they'll be all the richer for it.