by Josie Dew
I’m now camping down at the beach alongside the wharf that marches 660 metres out to sea on an army of stilted legs. When Tolaga Bay was a thriving port, this wharf (much-heralded as the longest wharf in the southern hemisphere) hummed with coastal shipping activity. I was about to go for a swim when I noticed a headline in the local paper warning that a 4½ metre great white shark had been spotted off Gisborne. As Gisborne is only about an hour’s swim away for a shark I decided to concentrate on washing my socks instead.
Tolaga Bay, Eastland, 1 February
I arrived here last month and I’m still here, even if it was only three days ago. In between several lengthy bursts of washing and walking, some more cyclists turned up. They were John and Alison Rankin, the couple I’d met back in Opotiki who were about to head overseas on their extended OE. They told me that about ten years ago they had travelled around Europe in a camper van and then when they were living in Taupo they met some keen cyclists who became their friends. As a result the friends got them into cycling and so they went touring around southeast Asia by bike. They had read one of my books, which didn’t appear to have put them off cycling, so that’s good. John said he was in the process of writing his own book, currently titled, Work Sucks – Let’s Go Cycle-touring and that he had an uncle who worked in publishing, so John was relying on him for a helping hand.
This morning in the campground kitchen I came across a pile of the past week’s papers stacked in the corner. As I ate my porridge I leafed through the various copies of New Zealand Herald. There was a lot about the ‘foreshore and seabed issue’ (Maori are laying claim to rightful ownership when for all New Zealanders it has been a generally accepted truth that the sea and its contents belong equally to all) as well as the views of John Tamihere, the Land Information and Associate Maori Affairs Minister, on the ‘Maori right to choose place names’. Because of their whakapapa (a Maori’s oral family history), John Tamihere said Maori had rights to name places and landmarks and he was keen to see Auckland’s name changed to Tamaki Makaurau, the Maori name for the area, though he said he would not ‘die in a ditch’ for it and agreed it would change only when the country was more mature. There was also a lot about the ‘controversial race relations speech’ made this week by the National Party leader Don Brash.
More eye-catching than all of this were the words I spotted in the advertisement section of the Bay of Plenty’s Bay Trader: ‘Barbed wire, 2 rolls, swap for Mongolian nose flute’.
It’s still the 1st of February but after a few hours of cycling I’m now in Gisborne. Arriving here was a bit of a shock to the system – like being hurled back into the chaos of civilisation. Although Gisborne is more large town than city, it feels like a metropolis after riding through the wopwops (remote area) over the last few days. In Maori the area around Gisborne is known as Te Tairawhiti – ‘the coast where the sun shines across the waters’. Because of its proximity to the International Date Line, Gisborne is the most easterly city in the world (whiti means east) and it makes the most of being the first city on which the sun rises.
In similar fashion, Gisborne blows its trumpet as being the place where Captain Cook first set foot in New Zealand – at nearby Kaiti Beach in Poverty Bay. Poverty Bay acquired its distinctly misleading name from Captain Cook when he found little to feed his crew on here and discovered that the area ‘did not afford a single article we wanted, except a little firewood’. Poverty Bay is now far from poor, known for its warm summers and fertile alluvial plains, and is a farming, viticultural and horticultural hub.
I was going to drop by on Mr Liquor King when I spotted John and Alison wandering along Gladstone Road just up from the Pak ’n’ Save supermarket. They told me they were camping down near the docks. After cycling along to Liquor King and finding Grant not in, I went down to camp at the dock site too. Alison and John were sitting at their tent-side picnic table and drinking wine out of their unbreakable and collapsible travelling wine glasses and invited me to join them. By the end of this little session I had discovered quite a lot more about them – especially John who, along with being a purchaser for a food distribution company that supplied restaurants, had also had a stint at managing a wine shop and being a forester. For most of the 1980s John had been a policeman. That’s how he met Alison. She was working as an accountant in an office opposite John’s. Both offices had glass walls so they could easily see each other. Three policemen worked in John’s office. They all knew Alison was single so when the police office party was coming up John held up a big handwritten sign against the window that Alison could read. Together with their office extension number it said: ‘WHICH ONE OF US DO YOU WANT TO GO WITH TO THE POLICE PARTY?’ And all three policemen stood against the window trying to look alluring. Alison pointed at John’s mate Paul. ‘Because he was the only good-looking one,’ said Alison. But for some reason, when the party came, John went instead of Paul. ‘That was twenty years ago!’ said John.
John had spent some time in the CIB (the New Zealand version of the CID), mostly based in Rotorua. There was always a lot of trouble going on – mainly between rival tribes and gangs of Maori. He told me about one particular Maori man, a Rastafarian nicknamed Diesel Dick who used to soak rags in diesel and then set fire to buildings – often public buildings like supermarkets. Once he even burnt down a fire station. The local cops were sick of Diesel Dick and wanted to teach him a lesson so they kidnapped him and beat him up. Not surprisingly, Diesel Dick made an official complaint and those policemen were all arrested. I’m not quite sure what happened after that except that John eventually left the police because he found it too stressful. But his policing definitely put him in good stead to be an attentive citizen of the community. Several years ago, when he had a stint at living in London, he was working in his wine shop in Wandsworth when a man came in and put a £300 giant bottle of Moët & Chandon under his jacket. A giant bottle of champagne is not the wisest thing to try to conceal beneath a jacket and the man attempted to walk out of the shop with the bottle sticking out of both the bottom and top of the jacket. John saw the whole amateurish smuggling operation take place and found it quite amusing how anyone could be so blatantly stupid. He chased the man down the street. The man turned round and tried to bash John with the giant bottle but nearly fell over with the weight of the thing and just ended up feebly throwing it at him instead. The bottle landed on the ground but didn’t break as they were now on Wandsworth Common. ‘Champagne bottles are made of strong glass to withstand pressure,’ said John by way of explanation. The man then ran off. John took off after him and performed a spectacular rugby tackle on his assailant of which he was sure the All Blacks would be proud. He held the man to the ground until the police arrived.
Another time in Taupo, he and Alison had just been for a long run and were still in their running gear when they saw a man running down the street with a handbag tucked under his arm. Just up the road stood an old woman angrily shouting and shaking her stick in the direction of the fleeing man. John gave chase to the handbag man – a pursuit that involved vaulting over walls, running down alleys, leaping steps and careering across people’s back gardens. It sounded just like something out of Starsky and Hutch. I was waiting for him to say how he cornered the man by jumping off the roof of a two-storey building to land, unscathed, on the bonnet of a car, preferably a Dodge Charger with 01 on the side. But the fire brigade came to the rescue. An attentive crew on board a fire engine noticed the chase and saw the handbag man run into a cul-de-sac. So the firemen blocked off the entrance of the cul-de-sac with their engine. The handbag man saw the fire engine and turned to run into the dead-end street only to find John standing there looking mean. Handbag Man, who John said was a huge bloke built like a rugby prop forward, decided he stood a better chance of escape the John end of the street and charged at him like a frenzied bull in a china shop. John fended the man off before tackling him to the ground in similar vein to Champagne Man and then bashed his head against the pavement to ‘quiete
n him down’, as John put it. John had a lot of loose change in his pocket which in the ensuing struggle rolled all over the ground. When the police arrived they thought the coins were part of the money the thief had nicked so put it all back in the retrieved handbag. ‘So in the end,’ said John, ‘the old woman made a profit!’
Unless I end up cycling in completely the opposite direction from the one I’m intending, I don’t think I’ll be bumping into John and Alison much after Gisborne; they are returning home to Hamilton before heading to Nepal and London, while I’m riding south to Wairoa and beyond. As with most things, John had a few stories to tell about Wairoa (there again, it could have been Rotorua), one of which involved rival Maori gang ‘warfare’. Apparently not that long ago a gang member was beheaded and his head speared on a pole and left on the edge of town for all to see. ‘Be careful when you’re down there,’ said John. ‘It’s a rough area.’
Morere, edge of Wharerata Forest, 3 February
Gisborne was hit by a mini monsoon yesterday. All day water poured from the sky as if from a bottomless bucket. As merely sprinting to the campground toilet block involved a severe soaking, I decided to leave tent disassembly to a drier day. As did Alison and John. Instead I wandered around a few museums, stocked up on food and sat in the camp kitchen chatting to Alison and John.
On the radio last night there was news of a man somewhere down south stabbing his two children to death before killing himself. This morning the paper headline was: ‘KIDS DEAD IN BEACH STABBINGS’. What’s happened to the supposed fluffiness of this land?
To head south I had to ride out of Gisborne in a northerly direction (to skirt Poverty Bay) past HAIR WE ARE hairdressers and Granny Tarr Street before hitting the dreaded Death Highway 2. No sooner had I rejoined this road than a carload of boy-racing hoons squirted past me with a contemptuous throaty roar. Further up the road they performed a tyre-squealing donut before racing back down the middle of the road. As they burnt past, one of the boys spat at me from a backseat window.
On top of this there were stock and logging trucks a plenty. The landscape since leaving Gisborne had gone from vineyards and orchards to farmland with sheep-stations to forest. Or put another way, it had gone from flat to flipping hilly. The highest of these was the Wharerata (‘I’m up here!’) Saddle. With saddling great hills there are down points in so far as you have to go up them, but then come the highs when you have to go down. The high of the Wharerata Saddle came in a stepped descent. On one of these steps the road fell straight downwards, carving a swathe through a forest of radiata pines – pines that were being enthusiastically logged. I was plunging down this saddled step, catching glances of my handlebar-mounted computer (38 mph, 39 mph, 40 mph, 41 mph, 42 mph …) when, despite having one-and-a-half lanes of empty tarmac on which to pass me, a logging truck, approaching from the rear, ran me clean off the road. It all happened very fast. When the truck thundered alongside I had two choices: either be sucked under the rear wheels or be pushed off over the side and down a deep and steeply sloped embankment. I thought I stood a better chance of survival there, so went bouncing off at an angle into its rocky grounded midst, expecting to end up arse over axle. Happily I hit the bottom while still saddled upright. I checked my heart for signs of life, counted my limbs and, finding all intact, made my way out – a procedure that involved unhitching all my panniers and clambering back up to the road with them one by one, followed by a laboured dragging of muddy rock-bashed bike.
Tonight I’m camping in a tangly thicket of native coastal forest across the way from Morere hot springs. I’ve just been wallowing in the rain in a hottish pool of the mountain stream that is rushing down through some rocks below my tent. Surrounding the area is a whole host of nikau palms which, despite the rain, make the whole place appear decidedly tropical. Nikau palms don’t look like your normal run-of-the-mill palm tree at all – more like an elongated feather duster. The name ‘nikau’ might be derived from the disappointment the Polynesians felt when they first settled in New Zealand and found the country lacking in their main foodstuff, ni kau being Polynesian for ‘no coconuts’.
5
Wairoa, Hawke’s Bay, 4 February
This morning in Morere I met a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: ‘TRUST ME – I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING’. Well, I’m not so sure myself. He was manoeuvring his motorhome in a lay-by and reversed into a picnic table. Sustaining a dent in his rear-end didn’t seem to overly concern him though. In fact he was more disturbed by the news that I was heading for Napier. ‘Jesus, mate,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to go down there on a bike. I’ve just driven up the coast that way and there’re some bastard big hills!’
Hills were the last thing on my mind today as I’ve had enough rain on my plate to fill a lake. It started out as sudden full-blooded rain and seems to have stayed that way. Apart from waterlogged, the road from Morere to Wairoa was mostly down with a few ups and then a rolling flat with another up and down at the end. I’d gone from mountain forest to valley to coastal farmland and lagoons loaded with black swans to town.
Wairoa (‘because I’ve lost my sail’) sits either side of the broad Wairoa River. If you come to New Zealand and fancy looking for the Wairoa River then it is quite understandable that you could become very disoriented and confused as there is a Wairoa River up near Auckland at Clevedon, a Wairoa River at Dargarville and a Wairoa River and Pa (not ‘father’ but fortified Maori village) at Tauranga. To add to the chaos, there’s a Wairau River, Wairau Valley, Wairau Bar and Wairau Pa at Blenheim, a Wairua River near Whangarei and a Waitoa River near Hungahunga.
There’s a lighthouse sitting in the middle of the main street in Wairoa. Obviously the town must suffer from so much rain and floods that it’s something of a navigational hazard for cars as well as washed-up shipping. Ah, I’ve just discovered from the campsite owner (whose catch phrases are ‘good as gold’ and ‘way to go!’ – example: Me: ‘Here’s $10 for my tent spot.’ Her: ‘Good as gold!’ Me : ‘I’m planning on cycling to Napier.’ Her: ‘Way to go!’) that the town lighthouse, built in 1877 of solid kauri, is not there as a warning light for aquaplaning pedestrians, cyclists and drivers, but was relocated from nearby Portland Island at the tip of Mahia Peninsula purely for historical value. What a disappointment. I rather like the idea of traffic navigating their way through the flooded streets past the likes of the Write Price supermarket and Oslers Bakery with the aid of flashing beacons, water-wings and depth sounders.
Wairoa, 5 February
I’m still here because it’s still raining. Hard. I told the woman at the campground desk that I was going to stay another night and she said, ‘Good as gold!’ Then when she asked me what I was going to do today and I said I was going to the sports centre for a swim, she said, ‘Way to go!’ The sports centre swimming pool, by the way, was Olympic size and, apart from a very large Maori woman wallowing about like a giant seal in a swimming cap that looked like a herbaceous border, completely empty. Maybe the residents of Wairoa (which is actually Maori for ‘long water’) prefer to swim in the streets instead. They are certainly wet enough.
Talking of residents, apart from a sumo-sized man with a full-face tattoo dressed heavily in a black denim shirt and black jeans and crumpled leather motorcycle boots, I haven’t seen any signs of Maori territorial tribeland warfare material. Nor have I seen any severed heads speared on sticks. I’m feeling quite let down.
This evening in the campsite kitchen I met a sixty-two-year-old Irish woman from Dublin called Iris. Irish Iris was garrulous and jocular but never opened her eyes wider than a slither – letting in no more light than a slanting chink in a Venetian blind. She’s a retired schoolteacher and she told me that she had always said that when she was sixty she was going to go travelling. Then when she hit sixty she got some sort of serious illness and had to put her plans on hold. But as soon as she was better she sold her house, her possessions, her everything, including her car. ‘It’s the first time I haven�
��t had a car since I was seventeen,’ she said. ‘And it’s wonderful. Very liberating!’ She was now travelling everywhere while she got a house built in Melbourne. ‘I chose the house from a catalogue. I wanted to buy a house in an area that I had never seen so that I wouldn’t have any preconceptions about the place.’
Kotemaori, Hawke’s Bay, 6 February
Here’s the headline news back home: nineteen Chinese immigrants were drowned while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire. Though they thought it could have been as many as twenty-three. And here’s the headline news here: Helen Clark (the manly prime minister of New Zealand) was attacked on a Maori marae (tribal meeting place) while Don Brash, the National party leader, had mud hurled at him.
And here’s the headline news in Hawke’s Bay Today: ‘POKIES TAKE $2.3 MILLION FROM WAIROA’. When I first got to New Zealand I thought maybe pokies were the equivalent of our pikeys – otherwise known as tramps, travellers, gypsies or mischievous ne’er-do-wells, depending on whom you talk to. So I thought maybe the pikey-like pokies of Wairoa had been hoodwinking the locals out of pocket. By a few million. But then I discovered a poky is not so much a person as a fruit machine. Big money-grabbing ones at that.
Another up-and-down day full of gorges and steep saddles – some of which offered fine sea views. The day was windy and the land was wild and rugged and green and every now and then I rode through heady wafts of wild fennel and honeysuckle and flowering gorse growing alongside the road. All day there had been no towns, not even solitary stores. Apart from logging trucks, and motorhomes nicknamed things like ‘J & RUBY’, ‘STRESSLESS’ and ‘FOOTLOOSE’, the only sign of modest modernity was a railway that followed me all the way, occasionally ducking and diving out of sight through a number of hefty hills. Yet I didn’t once see a train on this track. This seemed a terrible waste as it would have been a fantastically dramatic train ride, especially when the track crossed the spectacular viaduct at Mohaka.