Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

  Find a bit of bush, look this way, look that way, making sure no one else is looking or lurking, then dive on in.

  EVOCATIVE SOUNDS OF BUSH CAMPING:

  Squabbling possums hissing, morepork owls moreporking, unidentifiable creatures squawking and flapping and scurrying, heavy rain, heavy wind, howling rain, howling wind, crash of large falling branches and trunks, gush of rivers rising, distant screech and squeal of boy-racers racing (yes, they get everywhere).

  PEOPLE:

  In a generalising way of course: frank, matey and to use one of their oft-used expressions ‘good as gold’. (That’s before they get behind the wheel).

  DOWNFALL: They think that anyone who rides a bike around their wildly mountainous land ‘bloody nuts mate!’ (How wrong could they be?)

  QUIRK No. 1: A fetish for sporting short welly boots (often white) which they remove before entering country stores/petrol stations/pubs etc.

  QUIRK No. 2: If they’re not welly-booted they’re bare-footed – even in the middle of winter in the middle of the street in the middle of the rain. Must be a back-to-nature mother-earth sort of thing.

  GENERAL UNPLEASANTRIES AND ANNOYANCES:

  Possums; boy racers; logging trucks; driving standards; un-rollable toilet paper dispensers in public conveniences; sandflies.

  GENERAL COUNTRYSIDE QUIRK:

  For a land reputedly full of sheep there’s an awful lot of cows.

  Once back in Auckland I dived through the rain on to the ferry to Devonport. Riding north out of town the blazing pohutukawa trees of last Christmas were now standing dull and lifeless after their December spree. And then I was back at Jacquie’s where I discovered that, since my last visit, she was lacking a lodger. Milly the cat was now deceased, having been run over by a car. When alive, Milly had been almost as partial to a harvest moon as she had been to leaping out of the first-floor kitchen window on to the adjacent balcony before jumping back in again. So keeping to a similar line of attack in memory of her much-missed cat, Jacquie waited for the great orb of a harvest moon to hang suspended in the sky. When at last it appeared, she leant over the balcony to sprinkle the considerable collection of Milly’s ashes (‘much more than I thought they’d be for a cat,’ said Jacquie) to the moon. Unfortunately, Jacquie had not only failed to take into account the direction of the wind but also to close the kitchen window, resulting in clouds of Milly’s remains blowing back in through the window to land all over the kitchen. The parts of Milly that didn’t make it back in through the window ended up covering the windows and prize plants of Mrs Basham, the elderly woman who lived downstairs. Mrs Basham never said anything. And nor did Jacquie, despite the fact that half of Mrs Basham’s house and garden resembled the aftermath of Pompeii.

  Auckland, 5 June

  I’ve spent the past week based at Jacquie’s while scuttling around the environs of Auckland on my wheels purely for investigative purposes. I’ve also used the opportunity of some dry floor space to sort through my kit and burrow to the bottom of my musty panniers, the contents of which, after nigh-on six months of solid on-the-road usage, resemble the layers in an archaeological dig – the various strata of squinched and creased possessions each relaying a story through the history of time.

  Tomorrow morning at 05.00 hours Gary is scheduled to drop out of the sky with a boxed bike. A journey that took me two months of watery slow motion will have taken him a mere cloud-racing, DVT-induced twenty-four hours. I’m getting some good strong builder’s tea in for him to make him feel at home in case he’s already suffering from workshop withdrawal symptoms. Talking of strong tea, Jacquie told me that her grandmother, who was Scottish and disliked wasting money, would spend hours cutting each teabag in half before sewing each half up with a couple of sturdy stitches.

  Auckland, 6 June

  I nearly cycled off with the wrong man today. Jacquie and I got to the airport at some unsociable hour of the morning and sat in the arrival lounge waiting for Gary to appear. As we were sitting watching crowds of bleary-eyed passengers shuffling round the corner of customs dragging their wheelie cases and pushing trolleys piled high with perilously stacked mountains of luggage, Jacquie asked me if I was nervous. I was a bit, though in a nervously excited way. I also told her I felt a little perturbed because as I hadn’t seen Gary for nearly eight months I might not recognise him. He might slip through the net and walk out of the airport without me even realising it was him. Jacquie asked for some landmark features of what he looked like.

  ‘Short hair, big shoulders and wheeling a long cardboard bike box,’ I said.

  No sooner had I said this than a man with short hair, big shoulders and wheeling a long cardboard bike box swung round the corner into view.

  ‘That must be him!’ said Jacquie excitedly.

  He swivelled, scanned the crowds and, spotting us, waved and grinned before moving at speed in our direction.

  Jacquie said, ‘He’s coming, Jose! Run and greet him!’

  But I just remained rooted to my seat, almost cowering back into it, while staring at this bike-box-carrying person scooting towards me.

  Jacquie looked at me and said with a degree of urgency, ‘What are you doing, Jose? It is him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Errr, I think so,’ I said, suddenly feeling very hot. ‘But I’m not sure!’

  He was practically on top of me now and yet I still couldn’t respond. All I did was remain rigidly in one position with a nervously shocked smile fixed upon my face as a rush of blood flooded my head. He kept grinning, looking straight at me, and then, at the last second, he advanced one pace beyond where I was sitting to be greeted by an elderly woman who was positioned directly behind me. I looked at Jacquie and we both exploded into laughter.

  It took me a good few moments to recover before remembering I still hadn’t found Gary. And then I saw him, travelling at speed for a side door with his bicycle box-mounted wide-vehicle trolley. The next thing I knew I had landed in his arms in an ungainly heap of guffaws, telling him how I had nearly gone off with the wrong person. Things then turned even funnier when, referring to my bed-head hair, which is never good even at the best of times, Gary’s first words to me were, ‘I see the rooks are nesting early, Jose!’

  15

  Parakai, Auckland North, 15 June

  To escape the traffic throngs of Auckland in one easy swoop, Gary and I took the suburban train out of the city. It seems not many people enter or escape Auckland by train because no one we asked, all of them locals, had any idea where we would find the main railway station despite the fact that it sits right on Queen Street, the commercial heart and main shopping drag of Auckland. Once inside Britomart, as the station is called (sounds more like a giant hypermarket) it was about as far removed from London’s mainline railway stations as you could imagine. For a start, the place was deserted. It was like Waterloo or Paddington after a bomb scare or anthrax attack. But unlike Waterloo or Paddington, the station was spotless. It was all glass and silver and shiny mirrors everywhere. Made us feel like lifting the bikes instead of wheeling them lest we left an unsightly tyre track in our wake. And what’s more it was cheap – $12 (about £4) for an hour’s train ride for two people and two bikes. As the train rumbled through the suburbs past such buildings as King Dick’s Liquormart and another splayed with the words ‘INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH FOOD’, the only other person to enter our carriage was the train guard, a friendly Indian from Bombay – the Mumbai Bombay, not the Bombay south of Auckland. I asked him how he liked New Zealand. ‘I am liking it very much indeed,’ he said. ‘I am finding it a very empty place. I have come from living in a city of twenty million people to living in a country with a population of under four million!’

  He told Gary and me he had emigrated here with his family over a year ago. ‘It was very easy for us to come and live here,’ he said. ‘But we arrived here just in time because three months later the New Zealand authorities clamped down on immigrants and made it very much more difficult to apply for residency
.’ The only trouble he found was that, as a chemical engineer, he was overqualified. So he had to take a job on the trains instead.

  At Waitakere we left our empty train for another empty platform. In fact it was a mini platform, like a toy town platform only a few paces long, containing a locked shed. That was all. The only other person within sight was located about a mile down the road. He was a road mender, a big-handed Maori. With no useful signposts to be seen, I asked him to point me in the right direction for Kumeu and Parakai. For a moment I lost him because he went off at a tangent about various weights of road-crushing equipment. He then said, ‘Bloody year it’s been for weather, bro. Never seen this amount of road damage since I’ve been on the roads, eh?’

  I said I couldn’t agree with him more, before steering him back to the matter of directions. He then went on for some considerable time describing a complicated route to lead me on to State Highway 1 – just the road that I had dragged Gary all the way out here to avoid. I had a little banter with him and told him I didn’t want to go the long way round on Death Highway 1; I wanted to go the quieter back route through Woodhill.

  ‘What you want to go through Woodhill for, bro?’ he asked.

  ‘Because the road goes through it – on the direct route to Parakai,’ I said.

  He rubbed his chin with his big hand in deep thought and said, ‘Woodhill? Hmmm. Well I guess yous want to take this road what we’re standing on here now.’

  So we did. And that’s how we came to join a busy road loaded with overly close-passing tankers and logging lorries and Kenworth aggregate trucks to arrive in Kumeu, home of The Hot Breadshop. Unusually for a hot bread shop, The Hot Breadshop sold no hot bread but it did have hot pies – egg and bacon and mince and cheese, a hefty stack of which Gary hungrily devoured within minutes of our arrival. Along with The Hot Breadshop that sold only hot pies, the only other notable thing about Kumeu was the number of people hobbling about on crutches with a broken leg encased in plaster. What could have caused such an endemic fracturing of the limbs? Maybe they had all fallen over each other in a frantic stampede to reach the The Hot Breadshop when, during a lapse in concentration, it had errantly baked a batch of hot bread instead of hot pies?

  We now appear to be camping in a swamp opposite Black Pete’s Bar and Grill, which advertises ‘Beer, Bait and Free Ice’ for sale, apart from the ice, which is of course free. The swamp is in fact an official camping spot of the Parakai Aquatic Park, but although we are not camping directly in the aquatic department itself, you’d hardly know the difference due to the excessive amount of water underfoot. Everyone else on the site is sensible enough not to be sleeping in a tent, but that’s because every other person is a permanent resident in a permanent caravan.

  Having said that, a retired couple pulled up into the site in their vast bus-like motorhome, adorned with the words ‘JUST UZZ’. I discovered that the Just Uzz twosome were country music fans and were here for a country music event occurring this weekend in nearby Helensville. They suspected it would be a washout as the forecast was, as usual, spectacularly wet.

  This evening, Gary was just in the process of picking a big beetle with a body the size of a penknife out of his packet of Tim Tams (two-layered chocolate biscuits with a lightly gooey interior of chewy caramel) when one of the permanent residents, a man with a large angular body and very wet moccasins, asked uzz, I mean us, if he could buy our bikes for a couple hundred bucks. Gary was a little too keen for my liking (I think the wet has already got to him), but I held fast. I like my wheels and I was not going to sell them to a man in moccasins even if he did originally hail from Tilbury (on the Thames Estuary – the London Thames that is, not the Coromandel one), which meant we were able to share a little conversation about the delights of the Fobbing Landfill Site that I happened to pass on these very same wheels back in the autumn of 2001.

  Helensville, 19 June

  We’re making good progress – all of 3.5 km in four days. Well, it has been a bit wet. The first night in the tent it rained so hard we were almost set afloat into the chop of the Tasman. It was still raining the following day so, as we were wet already, we endeavoured to get a little wetter, though warmer, by wallowing in the virtually empty (save for the odd local Maori) hot thermal mineral pools of the neighbouring aquatic park. Night number two within tent was wet again, albeit with some improvement because the rain stopped for all of ten minutes – time enough to stick my weather-monitoring head out of the door to glimpse a dark sky with a small patch of clear sky studded with rain-washed stars.

  On the third day we rose again to find no improvement in the weather but a need for a new location. So we packed a wet tent into a wet pannier and exerted ourselves the two miles until we reached Helensville.

  Helensville is situated at the bottom of Kaipara (Maori for ‘eat fern root’) Harbour, New Zealand’s largest harbour with a shoreline of over 3200 km (there are lots of indentations). The town used to be a bustling place. It was founded on timber that was conveyed on ships across Kaipara Harbour or floated to the town on huge rafts before being loaded on to wagons. Now most of Helensville seems to be run down and closed up. Antique shops and shops selling ‘collectibles’ are what appear to keep Helensville going, though who knows how as even most of these, like the Lock, Stock and Barrel Antiques and Memory Lane Furnishings, were boarded up. Gary and I sat in a cafe for a good chunk of the day watching the heavy logging rigs and Kenworth aggregate trucks stonking down the uninspirational main street in the pouring rain.

  Finally, when the rain looked like it had no intention of stopping, we made a move up the road to Malolo House, a nineteenth-century kauri villa, which had rooms, dorm beds and camp spots. We were going to camp, but when the Dutch owner, who hailed from Hoek van Holland, told us the weather was set to get worse with damaging gale-force winds, we took one of the old, creaky wooden-floored rooms instead. Mr Hoek van Holland lived in the other half of the house with his children and Dutch wife and he told us he had been a contract cleaner all his working life. ‘It was always a very busy and fast life,’ he said. ‘In Holland I had a BMW and would drive very fast everywhere. When I came to New Zealand I kept up the fast lifestyle. For me it was impossible to drive without speeding. But when I was caught the third time and lost my licence for three months, I thought maybe it was time to slow down. So we bought Malolo House just before Christmas and at last I am living at a sensible pace!’

  Mr Hoek van Holland was right about the weather. The heavy rain turned to even heavier rain with a large helping of wild winds on the side. Gary and I were busy with tent-drying and sleeping-bag airing when a very weather-battered backpacker (a car-free one at that – rare species!) tumbled through the door. This was Ivor, a long-distance hiker who was walking up the coast to Cape Reinga.

  Ivor was originally from Tauranga. A baker by trade, he had given up the profession many years ago because instead of starting baking at 4 a.m., like all bakers had for years, the times were changed to start baking at 10 p.m., which Ivor found too tiring because he was not a night person. So he started travelling and had not long since got back from Korea, where he spent two years working as a teacher. The current incarnation of Ivor sounds like a bit of an action man, travelling as he was with not much more than a bush knife, a billycan and a tarp shelter – though he was now thinking of relenting and buying a tent. The only food he carried was a 500-gram bag of muesli and maybe a packet or two of two-minute noodles, both of which he ate dry. He was having a rare rest here because, to take a shortcut across a mangrove swamp (in an Indiana Jones fashion), he had removed his boots and in the process cut his feet badly on oyster shells. He seemed quite excited to find some fellow travellers heading for Cape Reinga in all this winter rain and, presuming we were of a hardy nature, asked us how far we had travelled today.

  ‘See that tree over there?’ said Gary, pointing out of the window and getting Ivor to follow the line of his fingers. ‘Well, we’ve come all the way from just beyond that
point.’

  Ivor thought we were joking.

  ‘No, really, we have,’ I said, trying to stop myself from laughing. ‘Exhausting it was too!’

  Ivor looked decidedly concerned and gave us a wide berth for the rest of the day. But before I packed myself off to bed, Ivor took me aside and gave me a word of warning.

  ‘Beware this travelling as a couple thing,’ he said. ‘In my experience – and everyone I’ve known who’s given it a go – it inevitably ends in disaster.’

  Makarau Bridge, 19 June

  It was still raining when we woke up this morning, but then the sun came out. Time to hit the road with gusto. And we did. At least for the first twenty kilometres. Progress then came to a rapid halt not far past Kaukapakapa (Maori for ‘to swim with too much flapping’) when, at Makarau Bridge – a rather splendid iron bowstring truss bridge, at that – we met Carol Forsyth, who invited us to spend the night in her big red barn of a home down by the river. Carol, who seemed to be about the only resident of Makarau Bridge, was a coastguard ‘day skipper tutor’. After marrying at sixteen and travelling and working around New Zealand while living in a van for nine years with her two young children, Carol had spent most of her working life living on or around boats. Her jobs included being anything from master on a yacht in the 2003 America’s Cup to skipper on the very same passenger ferry service that I’d caught to the Coromandel on New Year’s Eve. Carol now lived with her teenage son Benjy and fat cat Widdles in their red barn, a home with a large high-roofed room centred around a big log-burning stove with the kitchen and bathroom and bedrooms (all with handleless doors) squeezed off to the sides.

  Down the muddy track and in one of Carol’s working outer barns lived her friend Fran. Fran’s barn was a dusty cobwebbed jumble of a junkyard workshop-cum-studio. Sitting in pride of place was a 1914 clinker-built boat called Butterfly that she had found down in the nearby creek sinking into the mud. Fran was restoring the whole of the wooden boat herself and was currently in the process of a spot of caulking. She led us up the wonky ladder and into the cockpit and low-slung cabin so that she could talk wood with Gary. Gary, being a chippy and whose life revolves around ancient joints and the whole history of wood, was more than happy with this. Pouncing skittishly all over the boat was the more-kitten-than-cat ship’s cat, Pappy. ‘It’s short for Papillon,’ said Fran. ‘French for butterfly.’