by Josie Dew
Traffic was either 4WDs pulling boats or battered pick-ups and cars belonging to locals. Nearly every home I passed had an old sofa on the front porch and a pile of car corpses stacked in the backyard. Every now and then there was the skeleton of a vehicle, its bodywork an epidemic rash of rust and extensive blisters of coppery corrosion, left to rot on a plot of land or a riverbank. The few and far between communities were mostly tiny settlements, some with pubs advertising ‘LION RED – The Measure of a Man’s Thirst’. Others had an impressive carved marae (meeting house). The land is predominantly Maori and signs warned that if trespassers were found on this land without permission they would be shot.
For a road that had virtually no traffic on it there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of tyre-squashed possums. Maybe, like those pukeko swamp hens, possums are suicidal and throw themselves in front of vehicles. After seeing an advert in the window of one of only two small stores I’d passed since leaving Opotiki, I thought maybe I should scrape the possums off the road to earn some money. The advert said:
POSSUM FUR & GREEN SKINS
(For Sliping)
We are buying hand plucked and machine plucked
possum fur.
For $60/kg
Let us help you make extra money from your trapping/poisoning programmes.
Fur must be:
• An average length of 25cm
• Clean with no contamination (eg bullets, staples)
• Dry to the touch (we do not buy water)
• Keep H/P and M/P separate
Skins must be open skinned and rolled into balls before freezing.
Phone Sue and Steve on—
Brush-tailed possums were introduced into New Zealand from Australia in 1837 to establish a fur trade, but got rapidly out of hand. There are now more than 70 million possums (17.5 per person!) running havoc throughout the country, falling out of fruit trees on to unsuspecting cyclists’ tents, slaughtering ground-dwelling kiwis and chomping through more than 20,000 tons of native vegetation a night with blithe indifference to the principles of conservation. People are out there in their gardens and the back blocks (remote areas) shooting and poisoning and trapping them whenever they can. As a result you can now wear possums in the form of jumpers, skirts, gloves, hats, scarves and socks.
A few years ago a retired North Island farmer came up with a new approach to New Zealand’s least-wanted pest. His motto seemed to be: If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em, or at least persuade pets to. The result was Possyum, a gourmet casserole of possum meat, vegetables and jelly that is packed with high levels of heart-friendly polyunsaturated fats. The farmer, Bryan Bassett-Smith, says dogs love it. He also doesn’t mind the taste himself. ‘It’s good on crackers – just needs a bit of salt.’
*
Here at Oruaiti (‘yes, I’m fine thanks’) Beach campground I met a mouthful in the form of two Belgians on bikes. They were Diane and Günter Vercammen-Brems from Oostmallebaan and their laden bikes were even heavier than mine, which is always reassuring. They were even using large Ortlieb rear panniers on the front for more capacity. Günter blamed me for getting him in this cycling mess after reading one of my books. Neither him nor Diane much liked the North Island. The South Island, they said, was a vast improvement. ‘But still we are very disappointed with the amount of traffic and standard of driving,’ said Günter. They were hurrying now for Auckland to catch a plane to Alaska. ‘Alaska?’ I said, ‘In January? Isn’t that going to be a bit cold?’
‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Very cold.’
And then we went to bed.
Te Araroa, Eastland, 27 January
There was an article in today’s Herald headlined: ‘CYCLIST LOSES FIGHT FOR HELMET EXEMPTION’. Wearing a helmet when cycling is law in New Zealand. I wasn’t very happy about this when I first got here because I don’t like being forced to do things. I think something like wearing a helmet should be a matter of personal choice. Although I’ve had various helmets for seventeen years, I’ve probably worn one for about 10 per cent of that time – always at night, always in bad weather, always on roads so full of traffic that I think I might die if I don’t put one on. None of which, I admit, are very good reasons, but then that’s up to me and not some man in a suit who sits in an office and drives a car. But since I’ve been in New Zealand, land of bad drivers, I’ve been wearing my helmet – only occasionally taking it off when inching my way up a mountain in direct sunshine with sweat streaming down my face. I don’t mind my helmet any more. In fact, most of the time I hardly even notice it.
But Patrick Morgan was obviously not a happy helmet wearer. Last year he had applied to Wellington District Court to overturn a decision by the director of the LTSA declining an application for exemption. It seems the director can grant an exemption on a case-by-case basis for religious, medical or other reasonable grounds. Patrick said that the helmet-wearing regulation was discriminatory. He also claimed that helmets lacked protection and they could lead to increased risk of spinal and brain injury. The director obviously thought he was talking rubbish. This resulted in his application being refused.
The traffic has tapered off even further. Just the odd Maori wagon and the occasional logging and stock truck. Adjacent to Cape Runaway at Whangaparaoa (cusp of the East Cape where, the story goes, the warriors in the Tainui, one of several ancestral canoes loaded with settlers from Hawaiki, first stepped ashore about 650 years ago on the land that they came to know as Aotearoa) the road finally turned inland and was a lovely lonely stretch of green hills and small mountains and farmland and forest interspersed with lots of cows, rivers, fennel and honeysuckle. The road plopped out at the sea again at Hick’s Bay. Hick’s Bay was originally named Te Wharekahika, but was renamed after one of the crew of Cook’s Endeavour. Quite a lot seems to have gone on in Hick’s Bay. It once had a port and freezing works (in Kiwi-speak, a slaughterhouse or abattoir) and was the home of Tuwhakairiora, the most famous of Ngati Porou fighting chiefs – though I think Tuwhakairiora came a little before the freezing works. Then, in 1830, the new European settlers were celebrating the marriage between a Pakeha and a Maori girl when an enemy tribe launched a surprise attack and ate the wedding guests.
Talking of Maori, I was just packing some freshly purchased produce away into my panniers outside the Hick’s Bay store when at the sound of a gallop of hooves I turned my head to see two Maori men riding bareback, one with a small boy holding on tight, clattering up the dusty road. Just the local method of transport for coming to pick up their mail.
A short sharp shock came in the form of a steep headland I had to climb in a sun-induced sweat before hurtling at breakneck speed down the other side to Te Araroa (‘boat ashore’). But before I embarked upon my swift descent I stopped at a scenic outlook at the top of the headland. The minute I arrived a Chinese student in a hire car turned up at the same spot. He couldn’t speak a word of English but when he came grinning and proffering his camera and pointing at me I took it that he wanted me to take his picture accompanied by the attractive scenic backdrop. I was wrong. Instead he wanted to take a picture of me. ‘What do you want to take a picture of me for?’ I said. ‘You don’t know me from Adam!’
The boy just grinned some more and pointed to where he wanted me to stand – not with the scenic backdrop as I had imagined, but beside his Hertz hire car. There was not even a hint of the dramatic view before us, just me and a maroon blob of metal. I could have been standing on a patch of scrubland on the outskirts of Uttoxeter for all you knew. I dutifully took up position beside his car. ‘I’m not feeling at my best!’ I warned, aware of the oily chain marks tattooed across my shins and sweat-soaked hair stuck to my forehead. As I held my unflattering pose I tried to imagine the scene back at his home in Nanchang or Chengchow when showing his holiday snaps to his extended Chinese family. ‘So, Wang Woo,’ his uncle-once-removed-three-times would say in a teasing tone when they got to the picture of me, ‘Who’s this then? Some floozy you picked up on the ro
ad?’
And Wang Woo would say defensively, ‘No, not at all. She said her name was Adam.’ Which would result in everyone becoming very confused.
Tokomaru Bay, Eastland, 28 January
Today’s been a bit of a busy day. I spent the night, or part of the night, camping in Te Araroa – site of the oldest (600 years) and one of the largest (with twenty-two trunks) pohutukawa trees in the country. At 3 a.m. I crawled out of my tent to cycle over 40 km on a bumpy dirt road to East Cape (the most easterly point in New Zealand) to see the sunrise. The sun rose, only I didn’t see it. Momentary cloud cover the minute the moment arrived. Nice lighthouse though.
Back in Te Araroa I packed up my tent. This was covered both inside and out with the cockroach-like carcasses of a nocturnal invasion of cicadas, two of which got stuck to my face. Then, as I was strapping on my bags, I met an Austrian man on a bike. He must have been in his fifties and looked like a mad professor with long white electrified hair flying in all directions. Speaking in slightly stunted English, he referred to the mountainous day we both had ahead of us not as a ‘hard’ day but a ‘strong’ day. When he looked about his tent and saw the amount of clobber he had yet to pack away into his panniers, he said, ‘Every morning I see all this and have little bit panic!’
I’ve ridden 120 km today – most of which have felt uphill. Apart from hills, some of which have names like Gudgeons and Letterbox, here’s what came my way: burning sun and melting heat, torrential rain, waves of truck-passing spray, waves in shoes, fennel, maize, cows, multicoloured beehives, logging trucks, forests alive with the deafening clatter of cicada chatter (this was before the rains came), spectacular ornate Maori church at Tikitiki which was near the burger-selling Kaui Kart which was near the Barry Avenue petrol station, horseback-riding Maori, Rastafarian Maori. The latter I came across in Ruatoria, centre of the Ngati Porou tribe, where many Maoris have taken on Rastafarian colours and beliefs. The Ngati Porou ancestors were renowned for striking fear into the hearts of their enemies. The tribe still has something of a rough-tough image and Ruatoria has a reputation in New Zealand as a belligerent cowboy town with spates of machete and arson attacks.
By the time I arrived in Ruatoria the rain was still waterfalling out of the sky and I was so wet that I went to warm up in the Blue Boar Tavern on the junction up from Piggery Road. The Tavern was owned by TeAo and Duke Henry and was full of Maoris. The men were all big blokes, many of them loggers having stopped early for the day because of the rain. One was a big bull of a man with a strong spade-shaped chin and face muscles that seemed to be made of knotted wood. Everyone was incredibly jovial and friendly and bidding me kia ora (hello, good health, good luck). I was given a big mug of steaming hot tea by one of the women, who wanted to warm me up. She was going to give me coffee but then she said, ‘Yous Pommies like tea, eh?’ Maori English is very enjoyable to listen to. It’s not so much an accent as a speech pattern with a distinctive rising intonation of each sentence ending with ‘eh’. It also seems to have the odd plural and surprise, like when Duke asked me, ‘How’s yous doin’, bro?’
A man called Gary, a logger who had lived all his life on the East Cape and was married to chain-smoking Rita, wouldn’t allow me to cycle down the road to the local Four Square store to stock up on supplies. ‘Yous ain’t goin’ out in that rain, eh?’ he said. This wasn’t so much a question as a statement. And that was that. He drove me down in his wagon instead and sat in it while I went to do a shop. Then he drove me back to the tavern again. He and Rita wanted me to come and stay the night in their house up the way. But I was keen to get going even though the rain was still hammering down outside. As this point a man called Grant pulled up at the tavern in a Liquor King van. He was here to deliver a few crate-loads of drink before driving the 140-odd kilometres back to Gisborne, where he was manager of the Liquor King store. A number of Blue Boar regulars took Grant aside and before I knew it they had got him to pack my bike on board his van to give me a lift to Gisborne. Not what I wanted at all! But arguing with a tavern full of well-wishing Maori is not easy, so I climbed up into the Liquor King cab and squashed up alongside Leticia, Grant’s girlfriend, on the bench-seat and off we went, sluicing through the floods of rain.
Before I asked Grant to stop out of sight of the Blue Boar Tavern to let me out, I learnt that Grant and Leticia had only moved down to Gisborne from Auckland six months ago and that Leticia had spent two years doing, as she put it, ‘the OE thing’.
OE? I thought. What’s that? Old English? Oxford English? Organised Evacuation? Overtly Exuberant? Ordained Evangelical? Overhead Eiderdown? Origami Egg? Osteopathic Elephant? It was a job to know. So I made some enquires.
‘Overseas Experience,’ said Leticia.
Although New Zealand is a very spacious country for the size of the population, the population is so small that most young people can’t go anywhere without meeting someone who knows someone who knows them. This can seem a bit claustrophobic so they tend to head off around the world for about three years with a rucksack, most of them ending up in the UK. Leticia had done this and spent two years living in Portsmouth, where she worked on the cross-Channel ferries to Le Havre.
Grant begrudgingly agreed to dump me at the side of the road in the rain despite telling me, ‘You’re bloody nuts, mate!’ He gave me his address and told me to come and stay when I made it to Gisborne. I cycled back in a Blue Boar direction to redo the bit that had passed me by in the Liquor King van.
Hills came, hills went, but the rain remained as I aquaplaned through Papawera (‘he’s over there’), Hiruharama (‘Bananarama’s brother’), Takapau (‘I’ve taken one, thanks’) and Te Puia (‘or not Te Puia, that is the question’). And so to Tokomaru Bay, a shabby and crumbling seaside settlement cupped in a cliff-framed bay that had seen better days. It had seen a busy wharf and freezing works, now quiet and derelict. It had also seen a cyclone. This struck in 1988, destroying many of Tokomaru’s old wooden buildings, including the Te Puka Hotel, now risen from the debris in the shape of the Te Puka Tavern.
I’m lying behind the petrol station in the Mayfair Camping Ground, which, despite its grandiose name, is a bit of a dismal-looking place (not helped by the oppressive rain) with dirty toilets and kitchen. The only other people staying are an elderly couple in a pop-up caravan who have come for the fishing, or ‘fushing’ as they call it. The wind is doing strange things tonight – one moment my tent is being buffeted senseless and a loose slab of corrugated iron on a nearby shed roof is singing like a banshee, and the next everything is quite still. Apart from the sea, that is, which sounds boomingly loud all the time.
Tolaga Bay, Eastland, 29 January
From Tokomaru Bay to Tolaga Bay – the grand distance of 40 km. Well, it was a bit hard to get going this morning. It rained most of yesterday, it rained all of last night and it was still raining when I woke up within my dripping cocoon. So I did the only thing I could do in the circumstances – I turned over and went back to sleep.
The morning then formed a pattern: wake, hear rain, eat, sleep, though at one point I performed a little variation on the theme and clipped my toenails. Finally the rain abated and the sun came out – tentatively at first, but then with sumptuous gusto. Then it was all hands on deck and a desperate drying of all possessions in the sun that had turned from watery to milky to skin-witheringly hot.
The escape from Tokomaru Bay involved a steep 3 km climb over Purau Saddle followed by a steep descent. It was on the steepest part of this descent that I came across a woman with a STOP/GO sign standing ahead of some roadworks that had closed the road down to a single lane. As I was plummeting at high speed towards the woman she stood with the GO towards me. Then, when I was only about fifty feet away, she flipped the sign around to STOP. When you’re falling full pelt down a mountain with half a tonne of kit on board on a road that has suddenly turned to gravel, a sudden stop is not the easiest manoeuvre to pull off without much skidding and steaming of brake blocks. So instea
d I continued careering past the woman while calling out, ‘SORRRYYY – CAAAN’T STOP!’ All I hoped was that there wasn’t a logging truck rumbling towards me round the bend. I tore round the bend and there it was – all fifty logging tonnes of it, growling up the hill towards me. The only way to get past it was to dodge through a slalom of cones dividing the one open lane from the roadworks lane, navigate through two heaped piles of grit, a JCB and a steam-roller and then bounce up back on to the road again into the black cloudy fuelled wake of the logging truck. Compared with my morning of eating and sleeping and nail-clipping, this manoeuvre felt the height of excitement.
The rest of the ride was comparatively uneventful as I glided down the valley of the Hikuwai (‘questionable hiccup’) River past fields of maize and courgettes interspersed with rotting car wrecks to Tolaga Bay. Tolaga Bay was a quiet town with a straggle of houses and stores straddling the road. All the streets were named after Captain Cook’s crew, as Cook cast anchor here in 1769. When I pulled up outside George and Mildred’s, a small grocery store situated a few stores along from The Snarler Parlour – Tolaga Meat Supply (now closed down), a large Maori woman was waddling in hot pursuit of a bevy of chickens making a break for freedom down the main street. As soon as a logging truck came rumbling through they scarpered off in all directions.