by Josie Dew
By the time I arrived back at my tent I was in need of not much more than a shower and sleep. As it turned out, the shower was a lot easier to come by than the sleep. This is because when I flopped on to my sleeping bag it was still light and the campground still noisy. Things clattered and clunked. People barbecued and banged car doors. Dogs yapped, barked and growled. Children played and laughed, shouted and cried. Others screamed. Especially the babies. Because it was so hot, I had left the outer flap of my tent open with just the mosquito door between me and the night. Propping myself up on my elbows I watched a little girl lugging a squalling baby about by the armpits. Close by another baby with a screwed-up face was having something of a fit. The young mother jiggled the baby boy sharply against her shoulder. The baby’s face was puce red. Spikes of damp hair lay plastered to his forehead. The baby’s crying had reached the stage where he had to fight to breathe, pausing frequently for deep, hiccupping breaths.
The woman walked off with the baby and her space was filled by a man on a mobile. Or cell phone, as they call them in these parts. The man positioned himself about ten feet from my door. On his head he had a thatch of hair that stood up in thick tufts, like wind-tossed grass.
‘Hiya bud,’ he said in a shout, verging on a yell, ‘I got yer missage. I giss you were pissed when you sint it! Yeeah, bist I done is a five pounder. Bit Conner caught a tin pounder. Yeeah, that’s good for round here, mate!’
The one-sided conversation of various sizeable landed fish continued in a strong Kiwi accent for several more minutes. At last the man rounded off the phone call by saying, ‘Yeeah, bist I git bick to the tint. Just thought I’d touch base. Talk agin soon. Yeeah. Good on yer, bud. Be seeing yer.’
When he came off the phone, he turned to his mates sitting around the barbie and multiple chilly bins throwing back the piss (local parlance for beer) outside their ‘tint’, and shouted, ‘Hey guys! Rob sizz he caught a twinty-five-ind-a-half pound snipper in Doubtless Bay. Jeez, that’s some big fish!’
Finally I fell in to a dreamless sleep punctuated with the noisy goings-on of campground life. Later in the night I found the crescent of a tangerine moon suspended in a clear sky upside down. It’s hanging upside down again tonight. Either I’m just very tired and am seeing things not as they really are, or else something strange happens to the moon by the time it reaches New Zealand.
Something else that’s strange about the night is a haunted call that emanates from the surrounding forest of bush. At first I wondered if it was the Hairy Man of the woods, or possibly even my mother out on the search for me, but then I discovered it was nothing more sinister than an owl. Though a bit of an odd-sounding owl both in name and in call. The Maori term for this owl is the ruru, whereas the Pakeha (non-Maori) know it as the morepork. ‘More-pork, more-pork’ is the repeated and sometimes prolonged call of the morepork (with a little serving of crackling on the side), though in truth it actually sounds less like ‘morepork’ and more like a curdled ‘quark-quark’. It’s a lovely sound to hear, though not a patch on our horror-film whoop-de-whoo tawnies.
On my way back through Coromandel township, I stopped up the road from the Four Square to eat some food in the same park that I had stopped in on my way north. This time the person to come and sit down at my picnic table was a German student from Münster studying business studies for a year in Auckland. He wore a silver polished bicycle chain as a bracelet and a skull and crossbones T-shirt. He pulled the T-shirt on in my presence, covering up the body of a light-starved tulip. He told me he thought New Zealand was not a good country for cycling. ‘I ride my bike a lot in Germany,’ he said, ‘but I would never ride here. The country has too many hills and mountains. But even worse than the mountains are the drivers. They are very terrible and dangerous and there are no cycle paths. I have travelled around New Zealand by car but I think by bicycle would be too frightening.’
This evening I am camping just outside the township in an orchard of oranges and lemons and plums belonging to the Tui Lodge backpacker hostel. Earlier on I was leafing through a copy of the New Zealand Herald when I spotted an advert warning readers that:
THERE’S ANOTHER OFFENDER YOU SHOULD BE AFRAID OF. You’re more likely to be killed by a speeding driver than any criminal. Last year they took the lives of more women than rapists, more of the elderly than home invaders and more children than paedophiles. Yet we seem to largely accept the speeding driver’s behaviour – some of us even oppose measures proven to curb it. And although the driver does not have the intent of the other offenders, the end result is just the same.
Kuaotunu, Coromandel Peninsula, 4 January
New Zealand appears to be doing quite a good job at killing its citizens (and visitors) in two ways. One, as I’m discovering, is by vehicle. The other is in the water. New Zealand, being a country of islands (about 700 in all), has a lot of water. This means it also has a lot of coastline (15,811 km). As no part of the country is more than 130 km from the sea and as it is also crammed full of lakes and rivers and fjords and waterfalls, the water plays a huge part in most people’s lives. Sailing, boating, fishing, swimming, surfing, diving, canoeing, kayaking, water-skiing and jet-skiing, plus a whole host of other aqua-filled occupations, are all watery activities that come as second nature to most New Zealanders. Whereas the British may spend an inordinate amount of time standing in a queue or caught up in a motorway snarl-up (both pursuits having become something of a national pastime), New Zealanders prefer to pass most of their time if not on the water, then beside it or in it. The only drawback to this is that every year sees a disproportionate number of people being unintentionally drowned (on average 130) in comparison with the size of the population (4 million). This death rate is about double the rates for Australia and the United States. In New Zealand, the leading circumstances of drowning are swimming, followed by fishing and boating. I’ve only been in New Zealand ten days, but already I’ve noticed that the media here cover boating accidents and beach mishaps the way British newspapers cover floods and hosepipe bans and leaves on the line – as a seasonal event involving lots of comparative statistics. In the news today, I heard on my radio how twenty-four people have already drowned this summer.
Talking of summer, the last few days have been sunny and hot with temperatures stuck in the mid-thirties. But that’s just here on the North Island. The South Island, which logically should be colder seeing as it’s further from the equator and closer to the South Pole (it’s only a mere 2,000 or so miles away), has been sweltering at a record 40°C. Christchurch has just had its driest December since records began in 1864. This drought might be all very well for the pursuit of water sports but isn’t such good news for the country’s hills, where wildfires have been burning out of control. So the papers are not only full of the latest drowning, but also pictures of leaping flames, scorched land and blackened hills.
From the Tui Lodge I cycled out on to State Highway 25, also known as the tourist-themed Pacific Coast Highway. Even though I was nowhere near the Pacific Coast. Actually I was; it’s just that it felt like a very long way away due to a large hurdle lying in my path before I reached it: 370-metre Whangapoua Hill. As I cycled towards the foot of this sizeable mound on legs not yet feeling completely at home with life a-wheel, Whangapoua Hill looked a lot more mountain than hill – a fact not helped by my coming away from my tent spot with several kilos of windfallen plums and oranges crammed into my already weighty panniers.
But as mountainous curvy-bended hills go, it was a fun one for cycling. It might have been only about a thousand feet up in the air but the temperature had plummeted by the time I arrived at the top, though after my perspiring efforts I was far from cold in T-shirt and shorts. Motorists, on the other hand, who were climbing out of their vehicles at the scenic outlook to take some scenic snaps, looked decidedly chilly.
‘You look hot!’ said a multi-clothed couple as they wandered past. Turned out they were from Reading (Berks).
‘Ah, Gateway to Basingstoke!’ I
said. They asked if I knew Reading.
‘I’ve cycled in and out of it a few times,’ I said. ‘But it’s not a very nice place on a bike as it seems to be constructed entirely of roundabouts.’
The man laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Reading can be a very confusing place. Even now when I drive somewhere I have to stop and think and work out which way to go!’
The Reading couple wandered off to take some pictures, leaving me to ponder how you can travel 15,000 miles across the world to a wild hilltop in New Zealand only to find yourself talking about the roundabout blight of Reading.
The downhill swoop was tremendous – despite the fact that it suddenly decided to start raining – and I skimmed past blurred hillsides of pink-ochre earth.
The rain had stopped by the time I arrived in Matarangi so I went for a swim in the Pacific. Matarangi was a good example of a fine stretch of beach ruined by a dull complex of expensive holiday homes. A number of suntanned blokes in shades were driving their big city surfboard-topped 4WDs across the sand. Some just sat in them going nowhere, engine burning, staring moodily out to sea.
It’s funny to think how development changes things. Quite a few hundred years ago, the first wave of Polynesians (ancestors of the Maori) arrived by outrigger canoes on the Coromandel and eventually lived peacefully in coastal encampments, fishing and hunting moa. These big wingless birds became a major food source for those early settlers, who used their skin and feathers in clothing, the leg bones for making fish hooks and harpoon heads and the eggshells as water containers, until they finally hunted them to extinction. By the time the Yorkshire-born navigator Captain James Cook appeared on the scene in the Endeavour on his grand voyage of exploration in 1769, there were no more moas and the Maori tribes were well established all over. Cook sailed right around the peninsula and wrote that the land on the west coast, close to the area that he called ‘the River Thames’, was the best he had seen for colonisation. Soon after Cook came the loggers with their two-man cross-cut saws to fell the colossal forests of kauri. Hot on the loggers’ heels were the kauri gum-diggers and the gold-seeking miners. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly all of the area’s natural resources had been plundered. Today you get the hordes of holidaymakers following the NZTB (New Zealand Tourist Board) themed coastlines and heritage trails. And you get the surfers parading their bodies of sheet muscle or showing off their wheels on the sand.
Tonight I’m camping beside a sluggish river at Black Jack backpackers in Kuaotunu. Kuaotunu is a big improvement on Matarangi. It’s got cliffs, hills, bush, beach and hardly any people. There’s just a small store across the bridge called Kuaotunu Store and Liquor and a ramshackle garage that runs guided quad-bike safaris for those who like that sort of thing.
Up near the river I came across an information history board. Until this point I had been vaguely wondering the meaning of the name of this place – Kuaotunu – and now I discovered it actually had several meanings, though this particular information board, being a bit guarded with its information, was only giving one of them away: the one that translated as ‘roasted young eel’. But the board did reveal that in pre-European times the Ngati Karaua people cultivated the land and fished the surrounding waters and that in 1889 gold was discovered in the area of the roasted young eel. As a consequence, the tangata whenua (‘people of the land’) departed from their ancient kainga (‘the places my feet have trod’) and left the area.
One of the reasons I decided to camp here at Black Jack was that there were free kayaks for use by Black Jack residents. I’ve only kayaked once in my life (cycling around Hawaii I met a man who put me to sea in his kayak, resulting in my nearly being knocked for six by a breaching whale) so I thought it was about time I gave it another go. Black Jack’s owner, a friendly man called Carl, handed me a life jacket and a paddle and then left me to my own devices. He said I couldn’t go too far wrong. Oh no?
Before tackling the surf crashing on to the beach (certain capsizing monsters of waves if ever I saw any) I thought I’d first test the paddling waters by heading up river. All went well for the first fifteen minutes. Lots of shade-dappled water. Lots of busy birdsong. All very peaceful. All very lovely.
Then I went aground. Just like that. A large shingle bank had reared up suddenly beneath my hull. No warning, no nothing. Not even a lighthouse. I tried shoving myself off with the end of my paddle. I moved, but not enough to get underway again. I tried wobbling from side to side. This caused a mini flurry of wavelets but not enough to free me. So I half stood up, lifted a leg over the side, stepped on something sharp and fell in. All this was watched by a handful of cows who had stuck their heads through a hole in the hedge. They didn’t look overly impressed. But then cows never do.
Soon after this a dog got wind of me and charged along the riverbank barking and yowling. Then it turned into an aqua-dog and swam with menacing intent towards me. I paddled furiously away, but the dog kept coming for me, swimming as fast as if it were attached to its own inbuilt outboard motor. In the commotion I became ensnared in the branches of a fallen tree, resulting in a momentary power struggle between the tree, my paddle and the webbing of my lifejacket. The snarling hound lunged towards my arm with bared teeth but I managed to ward it off with the paddle. This was more excitement than I needed so I took myself off to sea instead. Apart from being swamped by a wave all went well and I spent many hours happily paddling up and down the coast.
Hahei, Coromandel Peninsula, 7 January
Today I heard on the news that the Met Service had registered a record-blistering high of 41°C in the South Island town of Darfield. Things weren’t looking quite as hot up here this morning. When I stuck my head out of the tent I found that a dark, slaty grey day had descended and a light drizzle was falling. Carl told me they don’t call drizzle drizzle, but pizzle. ‘We don’t usually get this sort of rain,’ he said, looking disgruntled at the sky in his shorts and wellies. ‘When it rains it usually hammers down!’
The road from Kuaotunu climbed up a winding and heavily bushed hillside for several twisting and turning kilometres. Despite the gloom, I would have thoroughly enjoyed the ride had I not had 50-tonne logging trucks thundering around the tight corners on top of me. These huge trucks are scary brutes to hear careening around a bend from the rear. The drivers don’t take kindly to cyclists. You don’t want to be in their way, which I usually am as the Coromandel roads are mountainous and narrow with nowhere to pull over to let the trucks pass; you have either a sheer drop on one side of the road or a steep wall of cliff on the other. Blind corners or not, logging trucks won’t drop down a gear or two to wait behind, no matter what might be coming the other way. Their method of tackling a mountain with so much weighty wood on board is to take a running leap, hitting the lower slopes at full whack in the hope that the log-swaying momentum will take them up and over. Cyclists are treated like possums: it’s up to you to get out of the way or else you’re pummelled into the tarmac.
Descending the mist-shrouded mountains, the pizzle turned into a fine rain that felt like pins sticking in my eyeballs as I squinted ahead into the rushing headwind. But by the time I was rolling alongside Buffalo beach and into Whitianga township the sun was beating down again. Whitianga looked like a very busy palm-tree-lined resort. Like the township of Coromandel, its normally small population had swelled to mammoth proportions, popping the 40,000 mark. Because Whitianga sits bang on the shores of Mercury Bay, the town is a big game-fishing base for tuna, marlin, mako (blue pointer shark), thresher shark and kingfish. I’ve no idea what a thresher or a blue pointer shark looks like (apart from maybe blue and pointy), but the thought of this area being a magnet for sharks was good enough reason to steer clear of the water.
I cycled around the town for a while, passing watery and fishy-themed eateries with names like On the Rocks, Reel ’Em Inn and Snapper Jack’s. After topping up food supplies at New World supermarket, I rode down to the Narrows to join a queue of tourists waiting to board the p
assenger ferry (a small launch) for the five-minute crossing over to Ferry Landing. As this ferry would shave off 30 km of logging truck road, I hoped there would be room for my bike among the crowds cramming on to the boat. There wasn’t, but the boatman and the packed passengers took it upon themselves to treat it as a challenge to haul me on board anyway. During this tightly squeezed encounter I learnt a new word to add to my Kiwi vocabulary. A shirtless male passenger, rammed up against the bulbous aft end of my bike said, ‘What a lot of striiitcheees you’ve got!’
‘What a lot of what?’ I said.
‘Striiitcheees.’
None the wiser, I tried to think what he meant by ‘striiitcheees’. Strict teas. Stripped knees. Striped cheese. Striptease. Ah, that must be it. He obviously thought I had the potential to perform a handful of stripteases for dramatic effect. What, here? Now? In front of all these compressed boating folk? Oh, all right. If you insist.
I was about to start seductively removing my bike helmet with a kinky little twist of my head when I thought I’d best check one more time on my striptease striiitcheees. ‘What is a striiitcheee?’ I asked.
‘These things,’ he said, twanging one of the many bungee cords tethering a mountain of kit to my rear rack.
I have now added striiitcheee, or stretchy, to my Antipodean list of confusing words.
In the car park on the Ferry Landing side, a number of coaches pulled to a pneumatic halt. Ferry tourists climbed on board to be carted off to wherever tourists go. Talking of tourists, the first and the most famous tourists to visit Mercury Bay were the Polynesian explorer Kupe and Britain’s Captain Cook – both fine navigators. Kupe got here first by some 900 years, all the way in his canoe from an island near Tahiti just to take a look (the exploratory skills mastered by these early voyaging Polynesians were so fine that they have been described as the Vikings of the Sunrise). When Cook reached these parts he anchored in Mercury Bay (which takes its name from the planet whose transit Captain Cook and his party of scientists observed during their anchorage here on board the Endeavour) and was so taken with the place that, in the name of King George III, he declared New Zealand a British Colony. What days those must have been when you could turn up in a new land and think: Nice here, isn’t it? Let’s be having it then.