by Josie Dew
The man laughed. ‘No, I mean the hoons. The yobs, the louts, the delinquent boy-racers. They’re the hoons. No respect for anyone.’
After buying a bagful of food at the Four Square I pushed my bike around the corner to a park and sat at a shady picnic table. Someone had left a local paper on the table so I flapped it open and read the headline:
RECORD NUMBERS OF POLICE ON PENINSULA
More police than ever before are patrolling the peninsula this summer and new legislation will allow them to better manage the crowds. Operation CoroMass kicked off this week and Acting Eastern Area Commander John Kelly says the new laws should make their job easier. New ‘boy racer’ legislation and the inaugural 24-hour liquor ban mean more police will be out during the day. ‘What we’re saying is, come and have a good time, drink your alcohol but don’t be out on the streets with it.’
The new ‘boy racer’ law allows police to impound cars for 28 days if drivers are charged with sustained loss of traction, more commonly known as doing ‘burnouts’ or ‘donuts’.
Mr Kelly says many of the police have been through refresher courses including practising with riot equipment. ‘Touch wood we don’t have to use it.’
Operation CoroMass and riot equipment were not quite what I was expecting of New Zealand. I was banking more on a surplus of sheep (a reputed 48 million of them in all, compared with 4 million people) than something akin to an inner city battleground.
While I was contemplating this thought a man in his fifties and a sunhat came up to my table and said, ‘Glad to see you’ve got the right idea by sitting in the shade. You can’t be too careful of our sun. Most dangerous in the world. See this …’ and he rolled up his sleeve to point at a darkened speckled splotch mark on his forearm. ‘The makings of melonoma. No doubt about it.’
A woman called across to him from beside the toilet block.
‘That’ll be my wife,’ he said. ‘She’s always after me to rattle my dags!’
‘Rattle your what?’ I said.
‘Dags. Means get a bloody move on! At least it does when you rattle them!’
Jandals, hoons and rattling dags. Not to mention another word I seem to have learnt: grundies – not a family in The Archers, but a pair of underpants. Men’s, I believe.
I was pushing my bike across the grass and back on to Kapanga Road when a man stopped me in my tracks and said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to ride that thing across the mountains?’
From where we stood in the street, you could see a huge mound of Coromandel’s great catapulting hills rising up behind the town. A road was just visible snaking its tortured way up the side of one of the inclines. Occasionally a toy-sized vehicle could be seen crawling upwards, advancing in slow motion. This was the continuation of State Highway 25 and led across the hills to the east coast. On my map the road was marked as ‘minor road unsealed’. After telling the man that yes, I was, but not quite yet, as I was heading north first, I asked him if he knew what the condition of the road was like.
‘Good as gold,’ he said. ‘It was metalled only six to nine months ago. My son worked as a foreman on it. Doesn’t mean to say the gradient has got any easier, though. Just the thought of driving up there exhausts me!’
The road north out of Coromandel Town towards Colville was busy with hoons in noisy cars with exhaust pipes the size of the Mersey Tunnel. There was also a whole procession of big four-wheel drives, most of them pulling a boat behind them containing fishing-rod holders in the cockpit. None of the drivers appeared to have any idea how to pass a cyclist, or else they just didn’t care, overtaking me on blind corners of narrow uphill winding roads. This inevitably led to me having overly close encounters with the sides of their trailers as the owners erratically slewed their tail-ends in towards me when they met another vehicle travelling in the opposite direction, trapping me up tight against the steep and unforgiving hillsides.
Every campsite I passed was packed with tents and boats and 4WDs and motorhomes and rowdy clumps of guffawing lads. I didn’t fancy spending New Year’s Eve among such a hullabaloo so after riding through Papaaroha and Amodeo Bay I dived into the roadside jungle (or ‘bush’ as they call it in local tongue). Here I put up my tent among a forest of enormous tree ferns with feathery umbrellas at least two storeys high with fat trunks that looked as if they were made of giant pineapple skins. It was a top spot for slumber, surrounded by extravagant foliage and tropical-looking birds and jungle noises. And at the bottom of the cliff came the swash and slap of the sea as it collided with the shore.
Coromandel, 3 January 2004
The last few days have sent my legs into wobbly shock syndrome. Instead of reacquainting my muscles gently back into the cycling swing of things, I stormed north up the winding and hilly and corrugated gravel dirt road to Fletcher Bay. Fletcher Bay is within catapulting distance of Cape Colville, the Land’s End of the Coromandel Peninsula. Studying my map back in Amodeo Bay, I had pondered on my two options: cycle the fifty-odd kilometres to Fletcher Bay fully loaded with kit, or leave everything except survival rations of food and water and tools and clothes in my tent and do a commando-style raid on the area – in and out in a day.
I opted for the commando raid. But not before I had moved from my secluded camp spot and cycled down the hill to the Anglers Lodge Motel and Holiday Park. Here I found a little space for my tent up the tiered hillside overlooking the sea. I decided if I was going to ride a hundred unconditioned kilometres through the heat of the day along what was certain to be a hard and dusty track, then I could at least treat myself to a shower when I got back.
The ride from Amodeo to Colville was all tarmac but not without its severe ups and downs. One hill fell away so steep and straight that by tucking in my elbows and hunching down on my drops I notched up an eye-streaming 46 mph. On the approach to Colville everything looked lush and vibrant with fields an Irish green. Road kill seemed to comprise mostly splattered possums and some comical-looking birds that my pocket bird book told me were pukeko, or purple swamp hens. These were goose-sized birds with large clownish scarlet bills. They were not really purple at all but mostly a deep iridescent indigo blue with a coating of greenish gloss on the back and the wings and undertail coverts of pure white. Their downfall was that they looked like they went in the wrong queue for the legs, standing as they did on fragile orange-red twigs of stilts that were out of all proportional length and strength to the rest of their body. Their feet resembled huge clawed starfish. The alive pukeko I’d seen walked very awkwardly, as if they were drunk or suffering from a severe bout of haemorrhoids. I think they were perhaps suicidal. They certainly didn’t appear overly gifted when it came to road sense. I’d watch them on the side of the road, dithering, then darting uncertainly backwards and forwards as if summoning up courage for an opportunity to cross. After a long gap in the traffic, they would see a vehicle coming and decide to play chicken with it before embarking on an untimely skaddling across to the other side. Most of course never made it.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of Colville, but I was expecting to find more than I found: a boxy-roofed general store. Apart from the odd house dotted here and there, plus a Buddhist retreat complete with stupa, that was it – the sole sum of bustling Colville.
Colville used to be known as Cabbage Bay. Some say this was because Captain Cook came this way and insisted his crew eat the young leaves of the cabbage tree as protection against scurvy. Others say that it wasn’t the cabbage tree (ti kouka in Maori) that the crew ate, but the nikau palm, parts of which can also be eaten. Whatever the truth or half-truth of the matter, the cabbage name stuck (to the tree, not the bay) even though the cabbage tree looks nothing like a cabbage but more a spiky palm tree clump.
Sitting in a time warp on a shaded bench outside the store perched two old men, one in worn denim dungarees, the other in overalls, having a smoke and a chat in between chewing the cud. They looked like part of the furniture, though more like the sort of sight you’d expe
ct to find at an isolated roadhouse out of 1930s dustbowl America.
Meanwhile, all around continued the thrust of modern life. Fat, aggressive 4WDs, some spanking new, pulled up in the dust outside the store. Colville store may be small, but its status lies in being the Last Store before Cape Colville and the northernmost tip of the peninsula, and the tills within were humming. Apart from an ageing hippie bloke in sandals with a long silvery ponytail and wearing something jangly and loose-fitting, most of the male customers were shirtless and shoeless. Though the women tended to keep what little tops they had on (it was hot outside, topping 35ºC) they too didn’t seem to favour shoes. But then, even back in the township of Coromandel, shod feet were thin on the ground. Maybe it’s a back-to-nature peninsula thing. There again, I did notice a number of shoeless people wandering the upmarket streets of downtown Devonport. At this barefoot rate, I felt New Zealand was going to give birth to a whole generation of horny pads.
The store wasn’t big, but was one of those places that manage to sell everything from fencing wire to bulk-bin health foods and fish bait to homeopathic remedies, plus all the everyday essential groceries in between. A sign on the wall informed the customers that: EVERYTHING IN THIS SHOP IS FOR SALE – EXCEPT THE STAFF (ALTHOUGH EVEN THAT’S NEGOTIABLE).
On the wall outside the store was a much-used noticeboard. Here’s a selection of the local happenings of note or services on offer. One was a request to keep your eyes open for the rare Coromandel striped gecko. ‘You can help solve the mystery of one of our least known lizards,’ said the DoC (Department of Conservation) leaflet. ‘Only three have ever been found.’ Next to this was pinned a business card from someone called Catherine Hill, ‘Marriage Celebrant’. I can’t say I’m too sure what a marriage celebrant is. Could it be someone who chivvies up a celebratory mood for a newly wedded couple when one or both of them realise they should have acted on impulse and done a runner rather than walk down the aisle? Or could a celebrant simply be some sort of advocate for celibacy, and what Catherine Hill was really championing was a connubial shag-free fest? All this was probably what came as part of the package anyway when you booked in for a stay at the Mahamudra Buddhist Retreat Centre, which its advert recommended as a boon ‘For Universal Unity’.
If arboreal matters were more your cup of tea and you were after a little tree-lopping, planting or surgery, then look no further than The Green Commandos for ‘All Tree Services’. Made the task of branch-trimming or tree-felling sound positively exciting. I wondered if the Commandos arrived on the scene by parachute or approached your premises by taking you by surprise after running zigzag fashion close to the ground through thick undergrowth while dressed in Desert Storm army fatigues. And what about when they commenced their limb-slaughtering mission – was there much maiming and collateral damage to neighbouring foliage?
On an entirely different tack was the card appealing to (presumably) women to reduce consumption and waste by using ‘Washable Menstrual Cloths’. Apparently these menstrual cloths were all about ‘Positive Menstrual Education’. The advert invited you to acknowledge that it was ‘Your Blood Your Planet Your Choice’. To which some might say, ‘Right on, sisters!’
Attached to the end of Colville store I found a little open-sided porch containing a small bank of red mailboxes numbered with the locals’ PO Box numbers. Stencilled on the wall of this porch, and to let you know in no uncertain terms what the country stood for, was the word: ECONATION.
The dirt road began shortly after leaving Colville. A woman in her twenties and a sundress was walking along the road and stopped me to ask how far away the store was. She looked very hot. Her deeply suntanned skin glistened with sweat. She kept making little plucking motions at the front of her dress where the material was stuck to her chest. I told her the store was about a kilometre up the road and asked where she’d walked from. ‘Oh, not far,’ she said. ‘I’m staying at a friend’s batch. I need some smokes so thought I’d walk.’
‘A batch?’ I said. ‘What’s a batch?’
‘Oh, you know. A holiday home. A place to chill.’
Since this little encounter I have investigated the word ‘bach’, pronounced ‘batch’. A man in the campsite in Amodeo Bay told me that a bach was sometimes no more than a wooden shack that had been in the family for a good generation or two. On the other hand you could get a bach that resembled more a palatial waterside residence – big buck-costing second homes that city dwellers tended to snap up. Apparently a bach was originally a bachelor’s pad at a work camp but had since become something of a Kiwi institution. Just to complicate matters further, in the South Island a bach was known as a ‘crib’.
All this explained a slightly mystifying programme that I’d heard on National Radio called Rainy Day at the Batch. It was a sort of Desert Island Discs with a famous person (at least in New Zealand) being interviewed. But instead of the interviewee’s ten top tunes being played, there were only two on Rainy Day at the Batch. Which I now know was really Rainy Day at the Bach.
The narrow dirt road was hard work for cycling, being an almost continuous rumble-strip of skull-rattling corrugations. On the bursts of steep hills the gravel and stones were so loose and deep that it was impossible to turn the front wheel. If you didn’t hit these patches at the right angle or in the right gear you would simply slide off the edge. Sometimes the drops were not the sort of drops you would want to drop off.
The sun beat down. Bike and body became caked in dust. It stuck thick to my skin. It stuck thick to my chain. The day became so hot that the heat flowed through my helmet like melted butter. The coast soon became rocky and rugged and fringed with ancient pohutukawa trees clinging to the inhospitable rocky coastline by way of gnarly long twisted roots and a tangle of fibrous aerial roots. These trees, their leafy canopies ablaze with magnificent crimson flowers, had turned the sea blood red by sending garlands of the windblown flowers swashing upon the eastern tides. Jacquie had told me that because pohutukawa trees burst into their fiery red blooms around December, they were known as Christmas trees. Even though they looked nothing like Christmas trees. More like a contortion of multi-limbed old men with a thick coiffured barnet of red. Cycling up this coast might have been perfect timing to catch these trees at their flamboyant best, but it wasn’t so good for the holidaying traffic. Wave upon wave of 4WDs charged past my elbow – Isuzu Bighorns, Mitsubishi Pajeros , Nissan Safaris, Nissan Patrols, Nissan Pathfinders, Toyota RAV4s, Toyota Highlanders, Toyota Land Cruisers and Lexus V8s. Most of them sported private licence plates: IN D MUD; OH 4 MUD; I HOOK (below which was printed in small capital letters: ONLY THE BIG ONES). Some towed fishing boats, or ‘tinnies’ as I overheard someone calling them, with names like Bandit and Hookie 1. Each vehicle kicked up a storm of dust and a fusillade of stones and gravel. Not one driver slowed their pace to pass me. Whenever a vehicle bore down on me in its cloud of dust I had to dismount and heave my bike over to the edge of the road, turn my head away and screw up my eyes to prevent them getting filled with grit. Each driver peppered my body with a painful shrapnel of sharp stones zinging off my skin. Oh the joys of doing battle with people’s domestic air-conditioned tanks!
Apart from this, the rest of the ride passed fairly uneventfully. The scenery remained spectacular, becoming even more dramatic the closer I got to the top with Mount Moehau, Coromandel’s highest mountain, soaring towards the sun at the peninsula’s narrowest point. According to Maori legend, this nigh-on 3,000-foot peak is home of Turehu, a short, fair-skinned being, though they say that not so much as Turehu’s footprint has ever been found. But I’ve spotted something akin to this description, albeit sealed in surfing gear while climbing out of a Bighorn with a glazed expression.
At one point I passed an old wharf and old quarry and an old building. Actually, this building wasn’t so much old as ‘olde’ as it was called Ye Olde Stone Jug. That means that both ye wharf and ye quarry were olde too as they were obviously all part of ye olde same era. (I have since
learnt that this area was famous – in New Zealand – for its quarrying of granite at the turn of the twentieth century. This granite, which faces a fair few prominent buildings around the country, is considered to be as good as Aberdeen stone, though I think many an Aberdonian may beg to differ.)
I continued onwards and upwards over Fantail Creek with its shingly beach, before the road clutched at straws as well as the steep coastline past Goat Bay. Another big climb was the order of the day as I veered inland until I popped out at Port Jackson where the ragged hills rose straight from the shore. Much as there was nothing goat-like about Goat Bay, there was nothing port-like about Jackson. No ships, no docks, no cranes, no containers, no straddle-carriers. Just an open crescent of sandy beach and, at most, two houses. I heaved myself over the hills for about another five kilometres to Fletcher Bay, where the road dribbled itself to near extinction. The only way to continue round the eastern flank of the peninsula was to join the Coromandel Walkway, a track that would take me through to Poley Bay and Stony Bay. For this I would need either a pair of sturdy hiking legs or a lightweight mountaineering steed. As I was in possession of neither I did an about-turn to head back the way I’d come. But not before eating the contents of my front left pannier and having a quick rest in the shade.
Before leaving I went on a wander and came across a handwritten sign that someone had propped against a rock. In big colourful capitals and alongside an arrow that pointed in a skywards direction, it said: CAPE COLVILLE. STOP: WE’VE RUN OUT OF LAND AND SUPERLATIVES!! Another sign alongside warned: WATCH OUT FOR THE HAIRY MAN! And there I was thinking I was supposed to be looking out for short fair-skinned legends and rare lesser-striped geckos. It was all getting a bit confusing.