by Josie Dew
Other residents partial to the kauri forests, and which (like so many of New Zealand’s ancient fauna) display gigantism, include native earthworms that can exceed one metre in length. And then there are the wetas, New Zealand’s most primitive ancient creatures, having changed little in the last 190 million years. The wingless giant weta is the heaviest insect in the world, weighing almost as much as a thrush. Despite its size, the giant weta is harmless (it’s related to grasshoppers) and unable to bite. But I bet that’s down to it being of New Zealand stock. Were the weta to be found in Australia it would undoubtedly be a hazardous killing machine, capable of sawing off your head with torturous ease.
Between Motukaraka and Kohukohu, 2 July
After two nights spent beside the mountainous golden sand dunes at the head of Hokianga Harbour, we cycled on through the thrashing wind and rain following the twisting harbour and mangrove swamps. At the head of Rawene Peninsula perched the tiny town of Rawene, whose timber buildings cantilevered over the waters of Hokianga Harbour in fetching style. For such a small and out-of-the-way place, Rawene had a strangely large hospital plonked on top of the hill. Back in the 1820s, this spot was a site for a proposed settlement, but when the English settlers arrived it rained so relentlessly they thought ‘sod this for a lark’ and, refusing to stay, sailed on to Sydney instead.
While Gary wandered off to the local chippy to get what turned out to be dory and chips, I had a look around and came across a white wooden building with a plaque on the wall that said, ‘Dog Tax War 1898’. I soon discovered this building was the old police station where the Mahurehure Hapu of the Ngapuhi (the local tribe) refused to pay a tax on dogs – a refusal that led to the last armed conflict in New Zealand.
All this part of Hokianga Harbour is literally a backwater, with precious little employment now that timber milling and farming have declined. In other words, it’s a perfect cycling route with virtually traffic-free roads and a jaunty little ferry to take across the choppy harbour from Rawene to the Narrows just south of Kohukohu.
*
Tonight Gary and I are sleeping in a wooden cabin surrounded by sheep and groves of orange and grapefruit and tall wind-waving trumpets of yellow canna lilies at a backpacker’s eco lodge called The Tree House.
The only other people staying are an ill English couple. They’ve spent the past five months backpacking around various South Pacific islands and suspect they’ve picked up some incurable disease. They said they’d tried ‘every drug under the sun’ to try to cure themselves, but nothing is working. ‘We’ve got no energy,’ said the girl, ‘so we’re just here to chill.’ I told them about the hospital-in-the-middle-of-nowhere handily situated across the harbour, which might be able to sort them out. They were initially keen to pay it a visit until they discovered it would cost them all of $14 to take them and their car across. I said they could leave the car behind and walk and it would then only cost them $2 each. They said they couldn’t be bothered with that, so we left them to die.
The Tree House is owned by Phil and Pauline. Phil (who built the place himself) said that just after they had opened, an American cyclist who had spent the night at the lodge sneaked away without paying. Phil gave chase and found him waiting for the ferry over to Rawene. ‘He said he forgot to pay and handed me a $100 bill, presuming I wouldn’t have the change on me, hoping that would put me off. But I simply returned to the lodge to get change, making sure I took a very long time so that he’d miss his ferry. Which he did! I gave him a bit of a lecture, telling him how I had built the place myself and that they were cheap rates anyway. Then, when I got back home, I got on the “phone tree” and made a couple of calls to the next couple of hostels on his route warning them about an American cyclist who likes to get away with a free night. They then made a couple of calls warning hostels further down the line. And that way, we spread the word!’
Herekino, 3 July
About 1200 years ago, there were around 12 million kiwis (the birds, not the fruit or the people) in New Zealand. Today there are only 7,000. But last night we heard the hoarse whistling cry of one and this morning we found a kiwi feather outside our door. We’re taking this as a good omen. Even if it is still raining.
There wasn’t a lot happening when we stopped up the road in Kohukohu. The only signs of life came from the small store where the owner was playing loud country music (Dwight Yoakum – ‘Guiii-tars and Cadillacs’) to no one but himself. Gary bought the country music-liking owner out of chocolate and then we stepped outside to see the only other form of life around: a hirsute hippy in pointy cowboy boots pulling up helmet-less at the store on a long trike motorbike. Every other building in Kohukohu was closed – every other building being the Waterline Cafe and the Palace Flophouse and Grill.
These days there’s not a lot to Kohukohu. It’s a far cry from the 1830s when the area was the heart of New Zealand’s timber industry, making Kohukohu a busy port and the main means of transporting all the straight and knot-free kauri that had been felled for ship spars. Being such a thriving milling town (the double mill employed 5,000 men capable of milling 6 million feet annually) Kohukohu was a bustling place full of wooden buildings. Then fire struck. The hotel was the first to go when it became engulfed in flames in 1900 and had to be pulled into the tide to prevent the blaze from spreading. Twenty years later, the general store caught fire; the flames arched across the road and destroyed the library, the reading room and the Courthouse. Thirty years after this, another hotel and a supply store, a bakery, tearoom and dressmaker’s shop were burnt to the ground. Then in 1967, Andrewes Store caught fire and was destroyed along with the Bank of New South Wales, the tobacconist, a men’s hairdresser, the police station, tearooms and the offices of a lawyer, a dentist and an electrician. Some of the buildings might have been saved if the tide had been in at the time. As it was, the fire hoses were not long enough to reach the water. All that remained were the post office, the library and the butcher’s shop.
Despite the torrential downpours, it was a lovely ride over rolling hills to Herekino, passing through bush and undulating farmland and heady-smelling groves of eucalyptus and cedar. The only vehicles on the road were battered utes with dogs chained to their rears. Kingfishers were everywhere, either perched on poles or flitting around like blue-green starbursts. There was no shortage of herons either, standing stock-still admiring their reflections in unmoving water or ensconced in magnificently ponderous-winged pterodactyl flight. Every field seemed to have a couple of Paradise ducks releasing their mixture of high-pitched calls and deeply discordant warning cries whenever they spotted us breezing by.
Tonight we’re staying at the Tui Inn, a bit of a back-to-basics hunting shack with no electricity, a long-drop toilet and a handful of soiled mattresses dumped on the floor. The kitchen has candles, a singing kettle and a grimacing boar’s head above the fireplace. Over the door is strapped an eight-foot, two-man salmon-belly crosscut saw. The inn belongs to Grant, a real backwoods country boy who seems to live for hunting. Nailed to the top plank of his long sheds are a score or more of boars’ skulls, while hanging from a hook outside his house is a fly-buzzing cow’s carcass. A neighbour brought the cow over because it was diseased, so Grant cut its throat and strung it up to drain. ‘Can’t have good meat going to waste, you know, bro,’ he said. Grant is married to Tangi, a Maori, and runs hunting adventures for those in need of a kill. The visitor’s book has comments from satisfied customers singing Grant’s praises and esteeming the virtues of possum shooting and boar killing. One American wrote: ‘It sure felt good to stick that knife in the pig.’
Kaitaia, 4 July
Was awoken this morning by the sound of Grant hacking into the hanging cow carcass with an axe. Grant’s yard was covered in severed bones, sending his heap of dogs into crazed excitement. When Gary and I appeared, Grant said, ‘Awright, bro?’
Yes, lovely, thanks.
More rain, mingled with welcome bursts of steamy sun. Climbing up one hill that
skirted Herekino Forest we passed beneath two pairs of trainers, tied together at the laces, dangling on the power lines above our heads. We took this as another good sign. A good sign of what, I’m not quite sure. Maybe of the art of power-line shoe-hanging. And then the rain started. Again. Still in the middle of nowhere, I was chased down the road by a yappy mutt in an Elizabethan ruff. Quite where it had sprung from, I don’t know. Nor do I know why it felt the need to sport a bonnet in the shape of a satellite dish. I suspect it was on the run from a vicious needle-jabbing vet.
There were cars all along this stretch of road. Not live ones, but corroding corpses, abandoned in fields and rivers. Gary and I stopped to admire a small rusting cuboid wall of oxidising metal, comprising twenty-two cars tightly compressed into an impressively compact space. If the world’s got to have cars, this is how I like to see them: crushed into blocks, impotent to do any damage. Better still, they could be melted down and built into bicycles.
It is a big Maori area around here; they live in mostly ramshackle and shabby abodes with old armchairs and tattered sofas pulled out on the veranda and yards full of car wrecks and rooting pigs. Despite all the rain and occasional cold, we were in subtropical climes up here and the cluttery homes and worn three-piece suites on the deck were all very South Pacific island. One veranda even had a ropey piano propped against a wall, and there was always someone plonked in one of the armchairs, usually male and sturdily built, watching the world go by. One cheery young woman, hanging up washing, saw us swoosh by and, waving, called, ‘Whes yous goin’?’
Gary called back, ‘North!’
‘Yous ridin’ north?’ she replied with an excitable shriek, ‘Waaaaaaaaa!’
*
My camping days seem to have fallen by the wayside. Our top priority for accommodation in Kaitaia was to find a cheap motel with Sky TV so we could watch the Tour de France. Oh, and an electric blanket would be nice, too, as the nights are getting rather chilly, you know. Fortunately, Kiwis like their electric blankets. (See what a bad influence Gary is having on me? Two months ago I thought nothing of sleeping out in minus 7°C. Now when I take a room, I check the bed for wired heating devices and the television for satellite capabilities.)
Since arriving in Kaitaia, the rain has been torrential. But for some reason there’s a pink van driving around with a pig painted on the side brandishing the sunburn advice: ‘ONLY PIGS LOOK GOOD PINK! SLIP – SLOP – SLAP –WRAP.’ I suspect they’re a bit mixed up round here.
Kaitaia (promisingly, Maori for ‘food in abundance’ – must be due to the giant Pak ’N’ Save just around the corner from the motel) is the main town of the far north of Northland. It was founded by Croatian settlers who came here in search of kauri gum. A number of local signs are still written in English, Maori and Serbo-Croatian, reflecting the influx of Dalmatian settlers.
Nearly every face up here is a Maori face – some of them with impressive full-face tattoos. The town has swags of men hanging around on street corners, smoking and drinking. Some of them are plainly off-their-heads drunk. The owner of our motel, a fat and ham-faced Pakeha, said that the dole is the biggest employer up here. ‘A lot of these Maoris are the second or third generation in their family to be out of work. They’ve got no need to work. Their house gets passed down from generation to generation and they can claim the dole for their daily dollars. Most of them have a boat, or else they work the boats and get paid under the counter.’
Walking around town we saw cafes and clubs with signs on their doors saying: ‘No gang insignia. No patches. No beanies, wellies, muddy boots, torn clothing’. Which just about ruled out every inhabitant of Kaitaia.
This whole area, known as the Far North, has no counterpart in New Zealand. For a start the subtropical climate places it apart from the rest of the country. Known as the ‘cradle of New Zealand history’, the whole district has cultural importance for the native Maori inhabitants and historical importance for Europeans. Early whalers, sealers, missionaries, explorers and settlers made big impacts up here, but despite its early start off the blocks, European development continued at a much slower pace here than in many other parts of New Zealand. Compared with other areas of the country, the Far North’s social and economic development has been quite different, owing to a long period of neglect. From the beginning there was little interest in the interior because the few roads were often impassable and so transport was by coastal vessels calling at river and estuary ports. Small settlements grew up in semi-isolation and independence.
When the Church Missionary Society established a Maori mission station in Kaitaia in 1833, they purchased around 260 hectares of land from the Maori. But instead of giving the Maori money, they handed them articles of trade: 80 blankets, 70 axes, 30 iron pots, 40 plain irons, 30 pairs of scissors, 10 shark hooks, 2,000 fish hooks and 50 pounds of tobacco. Sounds more like the products of a car boot sale than a commercial transaction for a hefty lump of land.
Kaitaia, Northland, 7 July
We’ve been here three days now and the rain has been relentless. It did stop today for a few brief moments, prompting us to mount up and take off on a side trip to Ahipara – a scattered village at the southernmost section of Ninety Mile Beach. This vast stretch of beach, receding into the far distance as a haze of misty sea-spray, is a little too optimistically named; it is in fact more like 90 kilometres (56 miles). Still, it is an amazingly long beach, referred to by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman as a ‘desert coast’. The sand below the high water mark is almost concrete hard, making the beach popular as an alternative road to the north for 4WDs and specially adapted tour buses.
I was keen to cycle up the beach before joining the dirt road for the final leg up to Cape Reinga before cycling back down the middle of the peninsula on the road to Kaitaia. Gary, though, thought it would be more sensible and far less hard work to do the whole thing by bus. I looked at him, thinking he was joking. But no, he was perfectly serious, which came as a bit of a shock. ‘We don’t have to cycle everywhere, Jose,’ he said. This came as even more of a shock because I’ve got it programmed into my system that we do. I couldn’t travel to the top of New Zealand by tourist bus! That would be far too unexcitingly easy. Think of all those nooks and crannies only seen from a bike that would pass us by. What’s more, we would miss out on feeling all this heavy winter rain splooshing off our skin. There again, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Gary and I left the motorhomes parked up on the beach (motorhomes with names like RAMBLIN’ ROSE; AWAYAGEN; IMAROMA) and cycled back to Kaitaia, where we discussed further the final assault on the north. Gary was quite happy to give Cape Reinga a complete miss, unlike me, who was as keen to cycle to the very north of North Island as I was to cycle to the very south of South Island. But I was forgetting that Gary, who’d been working hard, building buildings in all weathers virtually every day for almost twenty years, had come out here for a holiday, not an endurance test. Whereas cycling for me is a way of life, cycling for Gary is a fun activity to do from time to time, as long as there are no hills, no wind and the sun’s shining. A bit of a tall order for New Zealand, then.
So we came to a compromise: we would take the bus up to the top and cycle back. But when we walked round to the two bus companies, Sand Safaris and Harrison’s Cape Runner, and were told by some unhelpful people that they wouldn’t take our bikes, we had to think again. A very friendly Bet in the tourist office came to our help. She thought her mate Lyall, a local farmer, could help us out. So by our slipping him a few dollars into his back pocket, that’s what’s going to happen. Lyall is scheduled to pick us up tomorrow morning at 9.15 in his dark green Mitsubishi ute.
Waitaki Landing, 8 July
True to Bet’s word, Lyall appeared and we threw our heap of bikes and panniers into the back of his pick-up and took off up Ninety Mile Beach. Lyall was a good sort, a cattle farmer with 540 of the beasts, which he kept down on a farm near Ahipara. Many years ago he did the big Kiwi OE (Occidental Earthworm)
thing but got no further than London, where he stayed for months working in pubs in Potters Bar and Stevenage.
‘The pub owner told me not to serve “travellers”,’ said Lyall. ‘I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this because I felt travellers were people like me, and if I turned up in a pub I’d feel pretty hard done by if the barman refused to serve me. So I served them. I remember the landlord coming up and saying to me, “I told you, mate. Don’t serve travellers. They’re gippos.”’
We kept driving up the wide and empty expanse of spray-lashed sand, me itching to be out there riding along it, but doing an admirable job at keeping my mouth shut. Every now and then we would pass a small group of Maori bent over digging in the sand. Whenever they spotted us they would suddenly straighten up, trying to look all innocent. Lyall told us they were illegally digging for toheroa, a shellfish delicacy prized since ancient Maori times.
‘They eat them raw, steamed open or cooked up in frittas,’ said Lyall.
Along with the shellfish, there were also a lot of shags along Ninety Mile Beach. To me shags are wonderful diving birds, but Lyall had a mate, a fisherman, who, as Lyall put it, ‘hates the bastards.’ Lyall explained why.
‘He accuses them of eating all the smaller fish so he used to drive up here in his ute and hang out the window with his semiautomatic and shoot as many as he could. He hated them so much he’d empty the whole mag into a shag. After a while, he was sure the shags began to recognise his vehicle because they would fly off when ever they saw him coming!’
Lyall, a tough-looking bloke, told us that he had a sister who lived on a sheep station in Queensland. Although he liked his sister well enough, he’d never been to visit her. In fact, he’d never even been to Australia. Said he didn’t fancy it.