On Thursday night, a post started blowing up on the New Zealand forum of the social media website Reddit: “Small town feud sees NZ Post packages hoarded, Te Araroa hikers left stranded in Southern Alps”.
The post claimed a “rogue agent” working for NZ Post was holding food resupply parcels hostage intended for through-hikers on Te Araroa – ‘The Long Pathway’ – a 3000 kilometre track from Cape Reinga in the north to Bluff in the south.
The woman who wrote the post expected her husband to pass through Arthur’s Pass any day now. Speaking to Newsroom, she didn’t want to give her name, because she worried the consequences would somehow fall on her husband as he passed through the village of 30 people.
Her guess was this all came down to “a nasty feud between two individuals, and the Te Araroa walkers are kind of collateral damage that have been squeezed in the middle of it.”
She said her husband – one of 2000 walkers who registered this year to complete the trail – was expecting a new pair of shoes and some food, but the parcel had somehow gotten lost. Only, it wasn’t lost – the woman said the parcel had joined a growing pile of resupply boxes locked inside the local depot, run by contracted NZ Post agent Sean Moran.
Through-hikers fill these boxes with everything from instant noodles to personal medication. The woman said a photo of the inside of the depot showed dozens of boxes held behind Moran’s key. Locals in Arthur’s Pass say it’s more complicated than that, with the blame put not on Moran’s shoulders, but on the NZ Post system itself.
But on Friday, December 19, this came to a head when Tash De Goldi left the township to seek help. De Goldi runs the Mountain House, a common stop for hikers, which is the neighbouring property to Moran’s café.
When Newsroom called her, she was en route to the Rolleston police station to file a report.
Critical resupply point depends on postal system
For a community of only 30 people, Arthur’s Pass boasts one of the highest tourist-to-local ratios in the entire country. It’s impossible to avoid on the route from Christchurch to the West Coast, and for anyone walking Te Araroa, it’s the only collection point along a particularly gruelling section of trail.
Arthur’s Pass receives hundreds of resupply boxes a year; all of these are delivered to Moran, from whom De Goldi collects up to 20 a week to distribute via her own network.
To set up a resupply box (or ‘bounce box’, as they’re called) many people address their parcels to De Goldi’s place. If they’re staying with her, there’s no fee for the service. If not, De Goldi charges $10 per collection.
De Goldi said her motivation wasn’t financial. She nearly stopped offering the service this year, but decided it would “lose a lot of stress on my shoulders, but it’s a good service that we need to offer”. Moran also makes a small amount of money per parcel managed.
“At the moment, I probably get anywhere between three to 10 phone calls or emails daily from walkers who are trying to send bounce boxes,” she said.
The Arthur’s Pass Café & Store is the village hub, where Moran can be found, and where the parcel system is centred. When Newsroom briefly spoke to Moran, he declined to comment, and said it was a matter to be handled through NZ Post.
NZ Post spokesperson Greta Parker told Newsroom “NZ Post is aware of the issue regarding the use of PO boxes and resulting challenges in Arthurs Pass, and are actively working on a solution,” but nothing more.
For locals and hikers, communicating with the post has been a point of contention, but nobody had seen anything like the current problem.
A lost key and ‘snowballing’ neighbourhood dispute
De Goldi said the current situation could be traced back to a neighbourly dispute three months ago, when she called Environment Canterbury to report septic waste seeping onto her property from Moran’s café.
“This started a bit of a snowball,” she said.
Three weeks later, De Goldi went to pick up a parcel. The system under Moran works by depositing a key into someone’s PO box; the key has an entry code for a locker room Moran set up and fits the locker where the parcel has been kept. But De Goldi said the key she was given didn’t fit the locker.
De Goldi sent a staff member over to Moran to return the key – the two were not communicating following her septic report. Returned keys are placed inside the NZ Post box outside the building, which De Goldi says she did around November 11, with a note saying it didn’t fit the lock.
But De Goldi said Moran claimed he never received the key. She insisted she returned it weeks ago, but thought maybe it got mixed up in the mail system and was accidentally collected as a parcel. She said she offered money to replace the key and the locks, but was turned down.
She said Moran then refused to replace her key, which meant parcels started filling up that she couldn’t collect. Not just bounce boxes, but stuff for her business.
Her last opportunity to collect parcels was November 21st, when De Goldi waited at night for the postman to arrive and asked him for help. He rang his boss, the boss gave the okay, and De Goldi was able to collect 27 boxes: eight personal, 19 for hikers.
De Goldi said since the 21st, she hasn’t been able to collect any mail at all, and the room has gotten so full that the delivery driver has been forced to return boxes to Christchurch rather than deliver them.
De Goldi told Newsroom she was about to enter the height of the through-hiker season. She’d contacted her local MP for help and had been making daily calls to NZ post, but with the Christmas shutdown looming, and all the pressure that put on the postal system, she wasn’t sure what else to do.
“I think that I realistically only have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of next week, possibly, for New Zealand Post to do something,” she said. She has a wave of walkers arriving on Christmas and the following days, and hasn’t been able to get the boxes they paid her to sort out.
So De Goldi decided it was time to involve the police. She was on her way when she took the call from Newsroom, and pulled over to recount the story.
“I’m annoyed at myself that I’m going to drive to a police station because I think it’s a waste of resources that should be used elsewhere. But it’s my last resort. I don’t know how else to get these boxes, and it’s beyond ridiculous,” she said.
A kea prepares to take off from an umbrella in Arthur’s Pass, a popular sight for tourists. Photo: Fox Meyer
Down the road from De Goldi and Moran’s operations is the Arthur’s Pass Alpine Motel, run by Pete and Fiona Neale.
Pete Neale spoke to Newsroom as someone who’d watched the local debacle unfold, but also as someone who saw longstanding problems with the way Arthur’s Pass received mail.
He used to work at the Department of Conservation visitor centre, “just to fill the time, not because I needed to”. By his reckoning, community volunteer work kept much of the town ticking along. And Moran played an important part in that.
Bounce boxes used to be collected from the visitor centre, but that changed years ago after “a lot of toing and froing”, said Neale. The visitor centre “decided they can’t really have random parcels delivered to the Department of Conservation because it’s a safety risk, someone might send a bomb in or something”, he said.
As the local postmaster, Moran might receive 20 or 30 boxes a day. “If they’re not collected straight away – it’s a very small, little post office – then over two or three days, it can suddenly turn into a massive pile of stuff. And then locals who are trying to get parcels delivered or pick up parcels, all their parcels have been compromised or delayed as well. It’s just impossible to sort them all,” he said.
Neale remembered De Goldi stepped up to help manage the load – and Moran isn’t there between Thursday and Sunday – but the pressure remained.
Neale said the local bread and milk delivery driver, Steve, decided to help out by bringing courier packages up from Christchurch. Previously, they’d sit in a depot until a palette load had amassed, meaning locals had to wait weeks for their parcels.
Now, with Steve dropping them off, Moran or one of his staff sort them out and use a WhatsApp group to notify locals of their delivery. “He doesn’t get anything from that,” said Neale. “It’s a goodwill thing.”
Neale said the postbox system had been working well for 45 years, and only in the past six months has anything been a problem.
“Just speaking on behalf of Arthur’s Pass, it’s generally a really good community, and this is a very unusual clash of personalities that’s going on at the moment,” he said.
“I would always say that there’s definitely two sides to every story, and this is a classic case. There’s potentially even three sides to the story, to be honest, if you kick in New Zealand Post as well, who aren’t really doing their part, I don’t think,” said Neale.
He wanted them to take a more active approach, but said getting in contact with them has been nigh impossible. “Everyone has tried to get hold of them to sort out the whole postbox system,” he said. Mail destined for the village often travels through it two or three times on the highway as it’s passed between Christchurch and Greymouth, where the regional distribution hub is, before finally arriving back in the central node of Arthur’s Pass.
“Trying to speak to someone up the chain about that is just impossible,” said Neale.
Seeking answers, people find an ‘impervious’ postal system
Neale wasn’t the only one who’d struggled to break through to NZ Post leadership. In fact, every person interviewed for this story had tried to get the message across, and found themselves waiting on a never-ending cycle of holds and referrals.
The hikers were no exception. The woman who wrote the original post said she’d spent hours trying to get through to someone who could help. She said it was a complete waste of time.
“I’ve had to make repeated calls to the call center, then I’ve had repeated email exchanges with the investigations team,” she said. It was a waste of her time, but also an “extra burden it’s put on New Zealand Post staff at a time when they’re really, really stretched”.
She said the investigations team told her they directed staff in Greymouth and Christchurch to search for her husband’s resupply box, but couldn’t find it. When that didn’t work, she said she was told “all depots in New Zealand – everywhere – were being asked to search for it”.
“I wonder how long that took. Meanwhile, we are certain that that parcel – at the time that all of those well-meaning, overworked people were searching for it – was sitting in the lockup at Arthur’s Pass,” said the woman.
“There’s this level of imperviousness at New Zealand Post, it’s just really hard to get through as an individual, and also really hard to get through as an organisation,” she said.
And she wasn’t sure why the problem existed at all, because “the post needs to recognise that there’s plenty of money in it. I mean, it cost $160 for me to send two resupply boxes to Arthur’s Pass,” she said.
“We’re actually part of a whole cluster and part of a much bigger issue.”
Tramper wellbeing at the heart of the issue
Matt Claridge is the executive director of Te Araroa Trust. He told Newsroom in all his time at the trust, he hadn’t seen anything like this: “We haven’t had such an issue of this scale before.”
“At the end of the day, if you pay for a service, you deserve to get that service. And in this particular instance, we’ve got a large number – at least 30, possibly as many as 50 – affected,” said Claridge.
Many of these hikers were international visitors, unfamiliar with the New Zealand system and without local connections to lean on for support. Bounce boxes were an essential part of any Te Araroa journey.
“There’ll be hundreds – if not thousands – of dollars’ worth of gear and food in there. Shoes, for example: they’ll strategically locate them when they’re going to need a new pair. And these shoes that they wear can be in the order of $500, and then they may have their resupply food for anywhere from seven to 14 days,” he said.
He was worried for the future reputation of the trail, but also for current walkers. Claridge said at some point it became a health and safety issue.
“They’re going to be left with very little alternative to replace that if that’s what their alternative is. Because the exact reason why they send those supply boxes is there’s not the option to resupply at Arthur’s Pass,” he said.
“There’ll be walkers who have timed their walk so well that they’re hungry when they get there to pick it up, because there’s dinner in that box. And so, yeah, that’s hard. There’ll be an emotional reaction to that,” said Claridge.
All he could tell them was that the trust had taken this up with the executive complaints process at NZ Post, “but we’re waiting as well”.
“These walkers are desperate to access what’s rightfully their belongings, the service that they paid for. We need New Zealand Post to deliver,” he said.