Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

  Paengaroa, Bay of Plenty, 18 January

  New Zealand seems to be doing strange things to me. I drop by a place to have a quick look around and the next thing I know several days have passed. Sally’s field was like that. I used it as a base to go on exploratory missions. One of these was to the long thin island of Matakana – an elongated strip of mostly Maori land of dusty tracks, dense forests of radiata pine, plantations of kiwis, avocados and corn, battered cars with no licence plates, a 24-kilometre stretch of pristine beach overlooking, at the time, a froth of clouds on the horizon, and a small store called Tubby’s. The wharf on the ferry side was also busy with young Maori boys, as supple as whips, leaping off the piles into the water.

  To reach the island I cycled down to the end of the road from Sally’s where a sign said, ‘Welcome to Omokoroa – A Lifestyle Village for the Over 55s’. But the small store down by the jetty in Omokoroa wasn’t so much filled with over 55s as with suntanned boys in baggy swimming shorts. Outside the store an estate agent board belonging to Rex Harrigan Real Estate had an unusual approach for trying to win interest in its properties. For a west-facing house the details were headed: ‘LOOK AT THAT SUNSET!’ Then there was ‘PEACE AND PROSPERITY ’ for a house situated in the back of beyond; ‘TIMBERRRRR!!!!’ for a house made of logs; ‘LET’S GET PHYSICAL!’ for a gym for sale and ‘GO NUTTY!’ for a house set among an acre of pecan trees. Enough to put anyone off, I’d have thought.

  Today has been another hot clammy day in the thirties but compared with what’s going on in Australia it’s positively cold. Queensland is currently trapped in such a heatwave (yesterday the mercury rose to 49°C) that goldfish are apparently exploding by sizzling to death in their tanks. I read in the paper about a man who worked at the Birdsville Hotel in the state’s southwest, commenting how the goldfish died when air-conditioning at the home of a local resident broke down. ‘The house got so hot,’ he said, ‘that the water heated up and the two fish in there just blew right up.’

  I’ve been back on Death Highway 2 today. I’ve also been to Bethlehem. No stars or wise men in this one, just a non-descript huddle of homes with a dangerous junction and a convenience store inconveniently situated on the opposite side of a road busy with mean-looking logging trucks that would stop for nothing.

  Further along I stopped at a country market to buy a kilo of bananas for a dollar. Opposite the store three white crosses sprouted from the verge. Each was a miniature shrine shrouded with plastic windmills of flowers and toys. All the names on the crosses were girls. The woman in the market told me the girls had stopped here to buy some fruit and ice cream. They had just set off again when their car suddenly veered into the path of a logging truck. ‘The log truck steamrolled the car,’ said the woman. ‘It was a terrible mess.’

  Next came the sign: WELCOME TO TAURANGA ‘SIMPLY SUPERB’. Simply superb for what? Bottlenecks? Traffic jams? Dangerous junctions? Superbly unattractive buildings? All of these, from my observations, would qualify nicely for the city’s motto. Tauranga District is the second-fastest-growing local authority area (after Queenstown) in New Zealand. It was busy with traffic and busy with building. Nothing about the place made me want to stay so I beat a hasty exit down a long American-style strip of commercial buildings – garages, auto shops and car showrooms. Hundreds of acres of fields at the Papamoa Beach end of Tauranga were marked out with pegs and strings into ‘exclusive sections’. Close by, large ‘exclusive’ homes and vast gated communities were mushrooming out of the land. The road slicing through this building frenzy acted as a racetrack for hoons. They accelerated past in their souped-up cars adorned with spoilers, aerofoils, fat wide wheels, expensive paint jobs and private plates written with things like: O HONEY; 2 B SURE; LESURE; GAYE; SKI TOY; LUVV IT.

  After filling up on food supplies in Bayfair’s Countdown supermarket, I burst back out on to Death Highway (to heaven) 2. If I’d thought there were a lot of logging trucks north of Tauranga, there were even more now. For the second time in two days a truck ran me clean off the road, an experience that made my heart feel as if it was marching in jackboots. Today’s Herald had a letter in it written by Derek Rudge of that mural-overload town Katikati. He wrote:

  We are an English couple spending a few months of each year in your beautiful country. We love nearly everything about New Zealand, except for the appalling driving standards, particularly by some truckers. It is no wonder so many people are killed on your roads when drivers insist on ‘tailgating’ – hovering a few metres from your rear bumper, looking as if they are going to overtake but rarely doing so. As a professional truck-driver for some twenty years, I am particularly ashamed by the dangerous and intimidating tactics employed by some of your truckers. As an example, on Wednesday at about 10 a.m., on State Highway 2 driving from Katikati to Tauranga, my wife and I were nearly forced off the road by one such menace, who evidently didn’t think 100 km/h was fast enough so sat about 2 m away from our rear bumper. One day he’s going to kill somebody and, unfortunately, it probably won’t be himself.

  Trying to look as big and visible as possible, I passed through the slightly stomach-unsettlingly named town of Te Puke, which actually means nothing more harmful than ‘the hill’. I can’t say I saw much of a hill at Te Puke, but what was impossible to miss was the shockingly large cross-section model of a sliced kiwi. It was at least two storeys high and looked like an enlarged version of a cat’s bottom. Apart from the fact that it was green. Te Puke is home to this giant kiwi, officially known as the Kiwifruit Slice Viewing Tower (for those who feel so inclined, it’s possible to stick your head out of the top), because Te Puke is ‘Kiwi Capital of the World’. This title seemed to have been nicked from China, because the furry kiwi used to reign solely in China. In 1906 Chinese gooseberries, as they were then known, were introduced to New Zealand. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a handful of New Zealand’s horticulturalists experimented with the Chinese gooseberry and developed an international market for it under a new name – kiwifruit. This area of the Bay of Plenty provides the perfect growing conditions for kiwis and in the 1970s and early 1980s, boosted by strong demand and high prices, many of Te Puke’s farmers became millionaires from a harvest of only a few hectares.

  The giant Kiwifruit Slice Viewing Tower dominated Te Puke as well as Kiwifruit Country, an information centre-cum-theme park where you could pay good money to go on a guided tour of the extensive kiwi orchards (both gold and green varieties!) and game park by riding in a ‘kiwikart’ – a sort of golf cart pulling a train of kiwi-shaped carts. Further punishment was on offer in the shop and restaurant where you could sample kiwi wine and kiwi chocolate.

  I was more anxious to rattle me dags and battled onwards into the knifing wind. Perhaps this was the wind euphemistically known as the Kamai Breeze. This understatement refers to the strong winds that blow over the Kamai Ranges (a large ridge of inland mountains seen from Te Puke) and was blamed for bringing down an airliner in 1963, killing twenty-three passengers and crew.

  The shores of the Bay of Plenty were one of the first landing sites of the long-ago Polynesians, but the place was given its present name by Captain Cook. His description proved prophetic because, apart from all the acres of kiwi, the sunny climate is just the ticket for growing avocados, passionfruit, tamarillos, citrus and other subtropical fruit. Pumpkins also seem to flourish in the area and as I cycled southwards I passed a line of pick-ups parked along the hard shoulder, their rears overflowing with pumpkins. The sellers didn’t appear too concerned with making money from their rotund produce. One sign propped up against a rear wheel arch said: ‘PUMPKINS – ALL YOU CAN CARRY ’.

  Being such a prolific fruit-growing area means that there are vast quantities of fruit to pick. This means that armies of fruit-pickers are needed. The majority of these fruit-pickers are from the Philippines, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia. The campground on the outskirts of Te Puke was like a refugee camp – squalid and dirty and crammed with decrepit
moss-stained caravans housing a scrum of exhausted bodies. A wild medley of washing lay draped across every surface: chain-link fences, caravan doors, car doors, roofs and windscreens. Much of it had been blown off its original perch and was flapping about on the ground among the litter.

  Ten kilometres south down Death Highway 2, the campground (with motel attached) at Paengaroa junction where I had found a little space to put my tent was similarly full of fruit-pickers but marginally cleaner. This was because Robert, the owner of the site, spent half the day cleaning up after them. ‘They’re a filthy lot these Asians,’ he said. ‘I advise you to get in the shower and the kitchen before they all come back from work. They don’t seem to realise that you put toilet paper in the toilet, not throw it all over the floor. And I’m not quite sure what they get up to in the shower but it’s definitely not just showering! As for the kitchen – strewth! The whole place looks like a bombsite after they’ve finished cooking their dinner!’

  The pickers may not have been the tidiest lot on the planet, but that didn’t mean to say they weren’t kind. One woman retrieved a pair of my cycling shorts for me, blown for six off my makeshift bike-brake-cable washing-line, while a man gave me half a pot-load of cooked rice.

  Over the last few years there’d been an influx of immigrants from Asia. Walk down Queen Street in central Auckland: English language schools springing up all over the shop and Pakeha faces well in the minority. I found all this mixture of people very interesting, but many New Zealanders were not happy about it. Every night talkback radio was full of die-hard Kiwis ranting about the ‘invasion of Asians’. On Christmas Eve, the day I arrived, the New Zealand Herald had devoted half a page to ‘AUCKLAND’S CHANGING FACE’. ‘God save our filthy Queen St’ read the headline. A photograph at the top of the article, showing a basement area in Queen Street with a bright neon sign lit up with the words ‘EAT ASIAN – 9 SPECIALIST FOOD SHOPS’, was captioned: ‘ALIENATED: Readers feel intimidated by the Asian presence downtown and decry the lack of parking.’

  The previous day the paper had invited readers to write in with their thoughts of Queen Street. Here’s a small selection of their responding letters:

  My thoughts on Queen St today? After being born and bred in Auckland, I, like many hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, decided that the changing face of the country, and more so Auckland, was an insult on the Government’s behalf and decided to move to Perth.

  I once thought my hometown Auckland was the best spot on Earth, and used to love heading into Queen St, but over the last five to ten years, I couldn’t think of anything worse.

  If I wanted to live in China, I would emigrate there. I am not alone in my thinking – although there are a lot of gutless people out there who say the reason they leave New Zealand is to pursue further opportunities abroad. Yeah, right.

  So, due to the Government’s open-door immigration policy, expect to see a tide of ‘True Blue’ Kiwis leave our shores as they search for a place where they can live and raise their kids without being beaten up by Islanders or being caught in gunfire from Asian triad gangs.

  Brent Becroft

  Queen St is appalling. Instead of creating an international-destination city, our idle local body planning and Government policy have left Queen St a destitute hub of cheap and tacky Asian crap.

  What do we want in Queen St? Some decisions, mainly. A policy to limit the number of kitsch Asian stores selling junk would be a good start.

  Phil Coop

  In a word – crap. It is turning into a mini-Asia with crap clothing and gadget shops everywhere purely catering to the students … What about the rest of Auckland? No wonder everyone heads to the suburbs.

  Lyndal Kelly

  I agree about the Asians. I don’t want to appear racist, but I have become increasingly reluctant to venture out at lunchtime because of them. They hog the footpaths, congregating in large groups outside doorways and entrances of the countless English language schools, and do not seem to have the courtesy to move aside and let people past.

  Some of these groups can be quite intimidating, and I’m no chicken. I have travelled in densely populated countries such as India.

  Margaret Howe

  That phrase ‘I don’t want to be racist, but …’ is the beginning of a sentence I’ve already heard a lot in New Zealand. But like anywhere, these ‘racist, but …’ people tend only to surface in newspapers and on the radio. I think people who don’t rant on about their ‘racist, but …’ views tend not to be too bothered by the changes.

  Whakatane, Bay of Plenty, 19 January

  This morning as I was packing up my tent, Robert asked which direction I was heading. I said East Cape.

  ‘East Cape?’ he said. ‘I’d give the place a miss if I were you. Especially on a bike. You need a four-wheel-drive for the place. I drove around it in my SUV. The place is awful. There’s nothing there. No stores. Nothing. The roads are bloody terrible too!’

  East Cape is the North Island’s easternmost extremity, an out-on-a-limb lump of land that protrudes into the Pacific. On my map this protuberance looks lovely for cycling. It’s full of coves and steep coastal winding roads and mountains. There are no cities, not even any major towns. Just small communities. I think I’ll ignore Robert’s advice.

  More roadside crosses and shrines decorated the verge. More dead teenagers. In New Zealand you can legally start driving at fifteen. Schoolchildren behind the wheel. It’s not a reassuring sight when you’re cycling along with no other protection around you but air to be overtaken by a driver who looks like they should be in double maths. Although 15–24-year-olds make up only 16 per cent of the driving population, they account for around 30 per cent of crashes.

  Unusually for New Zealand, the ride from Paengaroa to Whakatane was hill-free. Most of the way it was as good as flat. A few kilometres past Pukehina (‘unwell hyena’?), Death Highway 2 slapped itself against the coast. For some reason the traffic levels petered off even though this was still the main drag down the coast. What’s more, I had a tailwind. First wind yet to strike me from the rear. What joy a tailwind can bring! It gladdens the heart and lightens the head and powers the load. I powered along past clumps of flowering fennel six feet high as the waves crashed on to Kohioawa Beach. Overlooking the road on the other side stood craggy sand-hardened cliffs topped with ancient pohutukawa trees clinging on with a knotty entanglement of tortuous roots.

  Further along, Death Highway 2 suddenly veered inland at Matata (‘motherly potato’) leaving me to continue whipping along the coast on Route 30. Just because it was no longer State Highway 2 didn’t mean that all dangerous driving came to an end. Roadside billboards warned passers-by of the hazards of drinking and driving. ‘STAY ALIVE, SOBER DRIVE,’ said one. Another had a photograph of a smashed car complete with dead body. Only the car and body were made up of broken bottles. The caption read: ‘DON’T GET SMASHED THIS SUMMER’.

  Near the Rangitaiki River, I stopped at another roadside stall situated outside a house. I bought four stubby cucumbers that were more the shape of conch shells. I was standing beside the stall, simultaneously admiring the view of the distinctive volcanic cone of Mount Edgecumbe as well as the truncated shape of my cucumbers, when the cucumber-producing woman spotted me from her house and invited me in for a cup of tea that came in a mug on which was written: ‘DANGEROUS WORK CAN BE SAFE IF RISK-MANAGED’. Best not to, if you ask me, otherwise you’d do nothing and go nowhere. Anyway, the woman wanted to know all about me and where I was going. So I told her. To everything I said she replied with the expression, ‘That’s for real!’

  Further on up the road (but not a lot further, mind) I stopped again, this time at R&B Berry Fruit Farm. As its name suggested, R&B Berry Fruit Farm grew berries. Strawberries, raspberries, bilberries, blueberries. I bought a fruit smoothie and a one-kilo mixed punnet of berries for $5 and ate the lot sitting at a picnic table outside their shop. As I ate, a disgruntled man pulled up in a Toyota Starlet Glanza and got o
ut to buy one of R&B’s fruit smoothies. Then he got back into his car to eat it, staring straight ahead. He wore a baseball cap that told me to BE WARE.

  R&B Berry Fruit Farm was run by Richard Manktelow and his wife Barb. Unlike the Be Ware man, they were both very friendly. I said I had never heard the name Manktelow before.

  ‘It’s an East European name,’ said Richard, ‘though Barb and I are actually from Kent. The Gillingham and Gravesend area. But we’ve been here forty years.’

  It seemed their berry farm was very successful. Most of the fruit was exported to America. There was another cheerful woman who worked in the packing shop. She had purple hands. ‘This is my summer job,’ she said. ‘In winter I decorate cakes. I like to have a finger in every pie.’

  Using the toilet in the warehouse I found a sign on the back of the door that said in both English and Maori: ‘PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS. HOROI O RINGA RINGA’. Amazing how the Maoris could make a mundane pastime sound so enjoyably musical, like a campanologist’s bonanza.

  I’m now in Whakatane. I’ve noticed in New Zealand that something strange happens to places whose names start with a ‘Wh’ as they come out as a ‘Fff’. On the Coromandel when I told people I was heading for Whangamata they looked at me a bit oddly before saying, ‘Oh, you mean Fahng-a-ma-ta?’ I wasn’t so sure that I did, but sometimes it’s best to agree that yes, you think you were meaning something that they thought you meant, even when you didn’t mean anything of the sort.