Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

  To my unconditioned mind Whakatane comes out either as Whack-a-tane or Whack-a-tar-knee. Judging from the local way with words, this is completely wrong. Pronounced correctly Whakatane comes out as Fuk-a-ta-ne. In similar vein this means that all the other places that begin with a ‘Whak’ (Whakarongo, Whakamara, Whakapourangi, Whakapapa and so on) come out as Fuk-a-something. How the early missionaries ever coped with such shocking pronunciation I can’t imagine.

  ‘I shall act like a man’ – that’s what Whakatane means. These words came about back in the fourteenth century on the arrival of the Mataatua, a lead canoe from Hawaiki (the Polynesian homeland whence what became the Maori tribes are said to have migrated at various times over the centuries by double-hulled canoe and thought most likely to be Ra’iatea in the Society Islands), at the local river mouth. Legend has it, in the legendary way that legends have things, that the men went ashore, leaving the women on board the canoe, which began to drift back out to sea. Touching the paddles was tapu (sacredly forbidden in a taboo sort of way – tapu is where the word taboo comes from) but Wairaka, the high-spirited daughter of the Chief Toroa, took the matter into her own hands by grabbing a paddle and shouting, ‘Kia whakatane au I ah au!’ (‘I will act as a man!’). A bit of ferocious paddling ensued as others followed her lead and the canoe was saved. What a relief.

  Whakatane, Bay of Plenty, 22 January

  There, it’s happened again. I turn up in a place to spend half an hour and next thing I know a few more days have been brushed under the carpet.

  Whakatane is where I’ve been and where I still am. Maybe because Whakatane is a base for big-game fishing, most of the private licence plates round here exhibit a piscine theme: FISHEZ; A FISHA; GO2 SEA. There’s no shortage of boy racers either with their wide exhausts and thick heads accelerating with a squeal of wrenched rubber between one set of traffic lights and another. One racing boy, whose licence plate read 2 FAST 4 U, turned out to be not too fast for me. I caught him up on my bike when he became marooned between two trucks at the lights, pointlessly revving.

  I’m spending every night camping beside the river at Whakatane Motor Camp and Caravan Park. The camp is half full of resident caravans that are home to a busy assortment of Maori, the other half given over to campers and motorhomes. On one side of me I have a game-fisherman in a 4WD stuck with a bumper sticker that declares: ‘Work is for those who can’t fish’. On the other side I have a Maori family in a big Wendy house-style tent. There are three gorgeous dark-haired children with big brown eyes: ten-year-old Elijah, eight-year-old Jesse and five-year-old Lily. They all seem intrigued with my compact tent and spend half their time clambering in and out. Lily keeps hugging my leg while the boys fire me with technical questions. Why do I have so many water bottles? What do I put in them? How many gears do I have? How do I know where to put everything? How many countries have I cycled in? What do I do when it rains?

  Their dad is a thickset Maori, a working bloke with a big smile, who told me, ‘I might get me a haircut, eh?’ and who likes to say ‘gidday’ and ‘bro’ (a Maori term of endearment) to me a lot. He’s a logger and goes off every morning at dawn to log in the forests. The family are from Rotorua though they want to move down here to Whakatane if they can find anywhere they can afford, as they say it is much nicer than Rotorua. I said it probably smelt better too. They agreed. Rotorua, sitting on a sulphurous pile of bubbling volcanoes, is famous for smelling of hard-boiled eggs. Talking of Rotorua, there was a bit in the New Zealand Herald about how the Grumpy Mole Saloon, a bar in Rotorua, was under scrutiny by its national franchise owner after complaints about jelly-wrestling. It seems a group of patrons walked out ‘horrified’ after a member of the audience was offered a $130 pair of sunglasses to strip off and join two women dressed only in bras and G-strings wrestling in a pool of jelly.

  The other day a Belgian man on a Canondale bike and carrying only fourteen kilos of kit turned up at the campground. He was cycling around parts of New Zealand for three months but was very disappointed with the country. He thought the drivers were terrible and he also found New Zealand to be a very boring place. He felt once you had seen one town you had seen them all. ‘After 6 p.m. they turn into ghost towns,’ he said. ‘Everyone is indoors watching TV. I have travelled in Cuba and Thailand and Spain where everything is alive for twenty-four hours a day. Also for scenery, you cannot beat Europe. For trees you have the Black Forest, for mountains the Jura, Carpathians or Alps. And everywhere has the ancient history.’

  Canondale Man was also disappointed because he had just arrived back from a boat trip out to White Island but had been unable to land for a guided tour as the seas were too rough to dock, though he said the boat ride was fun. White Island, which I could see when I stood on the bank behind the toilet block, is New Zealand’s most active (and only marine) volcano, smouldering 50 km off the coast. Around the beginning of last century, the volcano had a sulphur mine within its crater. At least it did until 1914, when an eruption killed all the miners on the island. Nowadays Whakatane is a busy hub for tour operators offering guided tours to, and on, the island by boat, plane or helicopter. Canondale Man was surprised I wasn’t willing to fork out between $100 and $400 to have an up-close encounter with this island, but I just couldn’t get excited about paying a lot of money to sit with a lot of excitable people while listening to the guide’s inevitable repertoire of stock jokes. Anyway, the postcards this side of the water gave me a good feel for the place, which saves having to fall into a fumarole.

  Sitting in the coastal heart of the eastern Bay of Plenty, Whakatane is supposed to be one of New Zealand’s sunniest locations, averaging 2,500 hours of sunshine a year. Can’t say I’ve seen much of this well-advertised sun – more like wind and rain. But then maybe this is an unusual glitch as a lot of the middle to lower North Island is currently having a burst of unseasonably bad weather, especially Napier and Wellington, with floods, tornados, uprooted trees and no sailings across the Cook Strait. Luckily I’ve put my tent on a slightly tussocky hummock, but my Maori neighbour’s tent has turned into a muddy quagmire. I saw a Maori man from the residential end of the caravan site, which is even more waterlogged than this end, walking about in canoes for shoes. They looked like extra large Moroccan slippers, curled up like sledge runners at the toes.

  The blowy weather doesn’t seem to be deterring the fishing folk. They’re all out in force. But then Whakatane is currently holding the Holden 2004 Open Tuna Tournament. The town’s streets are clogged with recreational fishing boats, some huge and squatting precariously on seemingly insubstantial trailers. The local papers are full of fishing talk. I’m not quite sure what it is about the people who fish around here, but most of them seem to have a fish theme in their names. I’ve been reading about Goose Haddock, president of the Whakatane Sportfishing Club, who talked about the first of the game fish caught by one of the club’s junior members – seventeen-year-old Cody Herdman. By all accounts, last year’s tournament was a poor affair as the tuna stayed away in their droves. But this year, day one alone has put paid to any worries about a repeat performance as twenty-two yellow-fin were weighed, with Ash Gordon’s huge 112.6 kg big-eye tuna (the record for Whakatane Sportfishing Club was a 133 kg tuna caught back in 1988, so this one is the second biggest) said to be ‘raising eyebrows’ around the country.

  This evening I walked along the riverfront to the weigh station on the wharf. Throngs of spectators crowded around the excitable weigh master (as he’s called) and the huge hook scales. This weigh-in event, where the fishing boats pull up at the wharf to unload their day’s catch, was an unbelievably popular affair. The event drew such a crowd of people that special tiered stands of seats had been erected to house them all. Children were as enthralled as the adults. One little girl with a small heart-shaped face, riding on her father’s shoulders, looked completely spellbound by the whole procedure. Being small I managed to wiggle my way forwards in the crowd to stand behind the row of children at the fr
ont. The fishermen all seemed to be in shorts and sunglasses and bare feet, walking about in all the scaly fishy gunk on the wharf. Each boat’s prize catch was hooked by the mouth and with much fanfare the weight was shouted out, to cheers from the crowd. The fisherman then stood beside his suspended catch to have his picture taken by the official photographer. It seemed smiling was not the thing to do. They just stood there in their shades besides their unbelievably huge fish (some were four foot long by two foot wide) looking mean and tough like a prize-fighter before he goes into the ring. It was all most amusing.

  While I was down at the weigh station Ash Gordon pulled up with his 112.6 kg big-eye tuna. It was the size of a shark. Talking of sharks, it wasn’t just tuna that were turning up on the scales; there were also marlin, yellowtail kingfish, albacore and mako sharks.

  All week the local radio station has been talking about nothing but fishing. One morning I was in my tent having breakfast and listening to the radio when I learnt how you can tell the difference between a big-eye and a yellow-fin tuna, something that up until now I have been able to get through life very nicely without knowing. From the outside a big-eye and a yellow-fin look much the same. So if you really want to know what you’ve got you need to dissect the fish, for it’s within the liver where the difference lies. One of the tuna has a smooth liver while the other tuna has a liver that comes with striations. But I can’t remember which type of liver belongs to which tuna. Sorry about that.

  Opotiki, Bay of Plenty, 24 January

  One morning in Whakatane I went for a walk up the bush-clad hillside to Kohi Point accompanied by the hovering flit of fantails performing their feats of flight in pursuit of insects and the clicks and croaks and grunts and rattles and wheezes and chuckles and honeyed tones of the tuis and bellbirds. Then the skies broke and a torrential rain fell so I ran back down the hill to town, where I went to have a look around the local District Museum and Gallery on Boon Street. As the rain drummed on the roof I peered at lots of Maori language prayer books, war belts and hatchets, loggers’ axes and saws. There were also lots of old typewriters, the type of things you find at car boot sales back home. More interesting were the ‘Woman GAY carefree home perm’ and the ‘HIP & SITZ bath’ and ‘The Veedee Vibratory Massage Device’. This latter exhibit came with a note typed by the museum: ‘The Veedee Vibratory Massage Device was unfortunately incomplete so the museum staff were unable to try it out’.

  Saucy devils. But then it’s probably a good thing that it was incomplete because, judging from the picture on the box, the vibratory device looked like a hand-operated eggbeater. There was another picture showing a woman egg-beating a man’s back as he held on tightly to the back of a chair, though I’m sure men’s backs were not the only part of the human anatomy that got whisked with vibrations.

  From Whakatane I hauled myself up and over the hill to Ohope (Maori for ‘place of main body of army’) and on to Ohiwa (apparently ‘place of watchfulness’ though it sounds more like greeting of surprise) Harbour, with a magnificent backdrop of native black beech trees and mangroves. On I went through Cheddar Valley (where on one fast descent an angry wasp became lodged in my helmet before reappearing on the inside of my sunglasses, resulting in the execution of an impressive emergency stop) and past the junction of Toone (‘Geordie for town’) Road. I’m now in Opotiki, easternmost town of the Bay of Plenty and ‘Gateway to the East Cape’. The town itself is full of the usual uninspiring boxy building architecture, the usual New World and Four Square stores, the usual Caltrex service stations and Star Mart convenience stores. I believe the most exciting thing to have happened in Opotiki was about 140 years ago when the Reverend Carl Sylvius Völkner was hanged and then decapitated by Maoris convinced he had passed information about their movements and fortifications to Governor George Grey. And that’s about the sum of the place.

  Yesterday and all of today I propelled my way by kayak up and down the Otara and Waioeka Rivers and out to sea. I’ve been camping at Opotiki Holiday Park where there are two motorhomes belonging to two retired couples, both of whom are spending several months driving around the country. I’ve noticed that many motorhome owners seem to have a custom whereby they paint their generally corny and ill-spelt travelling motto on to their vehicle’s bodywork just above the windscreen. The mottos of the motorhomes here say Good e-nuff! and Whatta Life!

  Until this evening, I was the only tent here, camped on a grassy patch beside a bank of trees that were blowing merry hell in the frisky wind. There are now another three tents, all belonging to cyclists. One of these is a lone American man who looks very vexed about something and spends all his time in the TV room. Another belongs to a middle-aged couple on Bike Fridays. They too are American and don’t seem to be very content with New Zealand. The woman keeps moaning to me about the wind. On a brighter note are John and Alison Rankin, the couple in the next-door tent. They are both Kiwis, in their mid-to-late forties, and feel wholly positive about all that lies before them. This is because they are just about to spend a few days cycling around East Cape (‘a test run’, they call it) before going home to Hamilton where within the next two months they will pack up their belongings, rent out their house and give up their jobs before heading to Nepal for a spot of trekking and then to London, where they plan to get jobs and save up some money to buy some good bikes before setting off on a long cycling expedition.

  Tonight I was lying in my tent tuning through the various radio stations when I came to rest for a moment or two on Radio Pacific (one of the talkback stations). I heard the woman presenter talking about having seen a trailer to a film, but instead of the word ‘trailer’ she used the word ‘shorts’. ‘I saw the shorts to that movie,’ she said. It took me a moment to work out what she was talking about. Then, to everyone who rang in she said, ‘Good on yer,’ followed by ‘Awesome!’ Even if what the callers were doing or saying wasn’t awesome at all. As she was signing off for the evening she said to her listeners, ‘You have a neat night now!’ A neat night! Well actually, I’m going to have a very untidy one, thank you. I’ve got my sheet sleeping bag in a right old twist and I’ve got food and panniers all over the tent. You should get over here – it’s an awesome sight.

  4

  Te Kaha, Eastland, 25 January

  On my way to Tirohanga (‘Lane Gyratory System’) I passed a sign that said ‘LITTER IS unlAWFUL’ and then another sign (handwritten this one) pointing down a track that said:

  PIG DOG

  TRAINING SCHOOL

  BOOKBINDER

  Could this mean that down the track there lay a pig-style dog, a training school and a bookbinder? Or did it mean that there was a training school for pig-dogs, or even dog-like pigs that were capable of a little bookbinding on the side? It was a job to know.

  I was now on the part of the Pacific Coast Highway that is State Highway 35. This meant that for the time being I had left Death Highway 2 to veer inland through Waioeka Gorge over the mountains to Gisborne while I followed the relatively quiet coast road around East Cape.

  I’m camping in the old whaling settlement of Te Kaha (‘to car hire’ – verb). These days the place is more a draw for fishermen. The campground is awash with rods and boats and fishing nuts with their tinnies called things like Aqua Holic and Y Knott? The licence plates of my two neighbours spell LAND EM and SQUIDZ.

  Tonight I was invited to eat some of the barbecued catch of the day by some people nearby who had a big tent and an even bigger 4WD (with a sun-visor motif on the cab roof saying: BORN LUCKY). A woman and three blokes. All loud and raucous and drunk on what looked like a mixture of whisky, vodka and beer. One of the blokes was called Jeff, pronounced Jiff. To his lift, I mean left, slouched a man with a buzz cut and a knocked-about face. He was liberally embellished with tattoos and was called something like Hunt or Hurt or Hiirt. He told me I was ‘fucking crazy, man’ to travel alone around New Zealand without a knife on me. By knife, he meant a big knife. I think we were almost talking machete. T
hen there was Monty, hunched over in his seat, noisily crunching on crayfish bones and hungrily sucking out their flesh and juices like Neanderthal man, his face covered with the remnants. He looked like he had used his face as a weapon while doing battle with a giant live pincer crayfish. But no, the blood was merely put down to a bad shave earlier in the evening.

  Monty told me that all Kiwis hate cyclists. ‘That’s because we’re always in a hurry to get places and cyclists slow us down. There’re a lot of crazy people out there who wouldn’t think twice about hitting a cyclist. If I was you, I’d keep right over to the lift, man.’

  Jiff told me that he had some friends who had always fancied cycling around New Zealand. ‘But after the second day they gave up and rented a car. They said cycling was too much hard work and the roads were too bloody dangerous.’

  Oruaiti Beach, Eastland, 26 January

  The past two days’ riding were a scenic delight. The weather behaved a treat and the sea sparkled as dazzling as crinkled foil. The road clinging to the rocky coastline was rugged and lined with flowering fennel and cloaked crimson with pohutukawa trees. Birds cackled and whooped from the bush-thick hillsides. It was an up-and-down ride full of narrow one-lane bridges painted green and white. At one point I passed the 110-year-old Raukokore Anglican Church jutting out from the road almost into the sea. With its distinctive small white-clapboard frame and stubby little steeple like a witch’s hat, it stood a lonely sentinel between the tarmac and the waves.

  Apart from the odd fisherman or farm or splash of Maori children leaping into a river, the area was empty of people. In fact, this East Cape region is one of the most sparsely populated areas in New Zealand, rarely visited and considered to be something of a backwater. SH35, which took decades to build, was a continuous sinuous mix of steep and twisting climbs up to headlands, dropping down across rivers to inlets and coves or beaches strewn with enormous chunks and trunks of driftwood bleached white from the sun. From a distance so much stricken wood, splayed limbs angled in tortuous positions of torment, looked like a fallen army, as though some terrible battle had taken place here on the sand. Most of the timber had come from the towering hills of the heavily forested hinterland and been washed down the many rivers along the coast.