A 'Zoom' With A View! - EcoZip Adventures

July 24, 2023

Rakanui Station is 15-minutes south of Kaikōura township. It’s a 3,000 acre working hill farm, or station, as they’re colloquially known in New Zealand. While it commands views of State Highway 1, the main north-south road artery for both people and freight, plus the scenic railway line that hugs the coastline in these parts, it tends to be quiet. The silence is broken only by birdsong and the occasional quiet, distant drone of a whale-watching plane taking-off from the nearby airstrip.

Today that quiet is fragmented when the radio crackles into life and the unmistakable voice of EcoZip’s project manager, Tim Callaghan, comes insistently on air. ‘You better get up to 2A’ he instructs. 2A is the location of the take-off deck for our second zipline, the landing deck area is referred to as 2B. ‘All okay?’ I ask nervously. ‘Yeah, nah’ replies Tim laconically, ‘just better get up here.’

I gun the engine of our recently purchased Polaris ATV, which will go just about anywhere I’ve learned, and drive to where the take-off deck is being cleared. I find Tim leaning on a fencepost, his grimy face beaming. He gestures up the incline to where the timber deck will be built. ‘You better look’ he says.

We’ve been working on this site since we were first introduced to it by Kaikōura’s former mayor, Winston Gray, in 2018. On paper, we’ve developed, evaluated and discarded dozens of potential zipline routes. By 2020 we’d decided on a series of 10 take-off and landing points, which appeared to offer potential for five spectacular, and varied, ziplines. Disappointingly, much of 2020 and 2021 was lost to lockdowns and restrictions. But recently, our surveyors had taken points marked on tightly contoured topographical maps and plotted them, with painstaking precision, on the ground.

Tim’s been working in the vicinity of the take-off deck for zip 2. He’s been hard at work, clearing bush to allow the assorted specialists we’ll need, from anchor contractors to steel installers and cable riggers to carpenters, to work. I scramble up and suddenly comprehend the reason for his urgency.

For the first time, I see the view our guests will get when they ride zip 2. We always knew these ziplines would be impressive, but the view that confronts me now is breathtaking and, briefly, I’m lost for words. I quickly grab my phone and take a series of pictures which I send to my business partner, and EcoZip’s co-founder, Chris Hollister. Fifteen seconds later my phone rings. By now Tim’s beside me, surveying the view. I press the green button to accept the incoming call and Chris’s voice comes through the speaker ‘That’s bloody epic’ he says. Tim and I agree, it is indeed bloody epic.

In the next couple of days further deck sites are opened up. We’ve deliberately chosen sites without established native trees, as EcoZip is about planting trees, not cutting them down, so opening up the decks is relatively easy. What becomes apparent during this process is that every deck will have a unique view – of mountains, the plains, the farm, the sea and the incredible vista presented by the Kaikōura peninsula. When this thing finally opens to our guests, we hope in September or early October, we think they too may be motivated to comment on the views, though possibly in terms more lyrical than that first day at 2A.