Long Cloud Ride
Page 29
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘It’s the snakes,’ he said. ‘One of my mates used to live in Australia and when he came back to New Zealand he told me that 75 per cent of Aussies have got a python living in their attic. Then there’re all those snakes and spiders that lurk in the toilet. I can do without living in a country where you have to check under the toilet seat every time you want to take a shit!’
Along with foreign snakes, Lyall also had a deep aversion to possums, or ‘squash ’ems’ as they are more fondly known once splayed out on the road.
‘Man, I hate the bastards!’ he said, addressing them with similar hatred as his mate to the shags. ‘If I see one in front of me, I will do everything possible to flatten the bugger.’
His wife used to cringe when he slaughtered them this way, but she had hardened up considerably, so much so that when she was at the wheel she took immense pleasure in aiming at the possum herself. According to Lyall, the trick when driving was to ‘aim for the possum’s head, mate, and listen for the double boomph of the front and back wheel hitting’. He explained that this method resulted in a clean kill requiring no hosing of the ute’s bodywork. I must admit that, due to the slower pace of life on a bicycle, the efficiency of this method could be seen to be very effective, judging by the large number of road kill possums we passed in the road suffering from ‘Dunlop Disease’.
Come to think of it, when riding in New Zealand, it often feels as if cyclists have little more than the status of a possum. Motorists appear to hate us two-wheeled travellers as much as they do their pesky Australian import-of-a-rodent. Gary and I all too frequently found ourselves the target of this manic possum-like killing charge, the direction only being altered at 10 to 15 metres from the point of impact by a wild swerve accompanied by frenetic honking and shouting as the driver-cum-hunter vented his anger at not being able to pull off the kill. This abuse was often used in conjunction with the passenger hurling a cocktail of hand signals, spit or empty ‘stubbies’ (small glass beer bottles) at the cowering cyclist.
Quick but nonetheless highly scientific tests carried out during idle moments (e.g. roadside toilet stops) concluded that, yes, from a distance of several miles, a heavily panniered bike could bear a faint resemblance to a possum straying on to the sacred ‘I’ve-paid-my-taxes’ stretch of tarmac of a motorist’s domain. And thus, complying with the Kiwi hunter’s mantra of ‘If it’s brown, it’s down’, the accelerator would be mashed flat to the floor in a frenzied attempt to eliminate this unlawful intruder.
Such hazards fare lowly in the fear stakes when compared with the simultaneous passing of opposing 50-tonne logging trucks. The saving grace has been our handlebar-mounted mirrors – a must for the cyclist in New Zealand, for the trick is, on spotting a fast approaching logging truck from the rear, to bale out – get off the road as far as possible even where this means into a ditch, up a bank, through a hedge, into the bush or over a bridge. These thundering multi-wheeled monoliths stop for no one.
It’s not that there’s not enough room for the logging trucks to pass. It’s the sucking and wrenching vacuum that exists between their front and rear trailers which threatens to drag you under their wheels. The woman in the Dargarville tourist office told us that recently this logging truck vacuum had resulted in an eight-year-old schoolgirl being literally sucked out of a bus stop to her death.
But I digress from possums and Lyall, who was still in full flow about his hatred of these vegetation-destroying blighters.
‘One night,’ he said, ‘a possum had climbed a tree outside our bedroom window and was making a bloody awful racket, hissing away like they do. So I went outside and climbed up a ladder and knocked the bastard out of the tree with a stick. It then ran across the yard with me hot on its heels, but because it was walled in it realised it was cornered, so it ran directly for me because a possum will climb the tallest thing around, no matter that it might be human! Luckily my dog caught the possum before it got to me, but one of my mates, he had a possum run straight up him and land on his head.’
After seeing no one for mile upon mile, and catching sight of the odd half-submerged vehicle (abandoned by drivers who had misjudged the tides and become bogged down in soft sand – ‘They tend to be the Asians,’ said Lyall), we passed a small figure standing in the waves: a Maori man fishing for mullet with a net. Lyall pointed out how green the waves looked around where the man was standing. ‘That’s plankton,’ he said, ‘which the Maori take as a good sign as a spot to dig for toheroa, as the toheroa like a good bit of plankton.’
Lyall dropped us off in the middle of the sand opposite a mountainous ridge of sand dunes. These dunes are where the tour buses stop for their passengers to go sand tobogganing.
‘When I was a boy,’ said Lyall, ‘there was none of this tour bus business. But from time to time I used to come up here with a few mates and we’d toboggan down the dunes on nikau palm leaves.’
Big handshakes all round and then Lyall climbed back into his ute and started back towards Kaitaia. But twenty foot away he stepped on the brakes and thrust his head out of the window.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ he called, ‘to mind the mosquitoes round here. They’re as big as sparrows!’
Gary and I set off cycling inland up the Te Paki Stream across the watery sand into a spanking wind. We then joined a sandy dirt road that took us south to Waitiki Landing, the last stop before the land runs out at Cape Reinga, comprising a petrol station, small store, cafe (serving ‘Mrs Mac’s Famous Beef Pies’) and place to camp with cabins all rolled into one. So this is where we are now, sitting in the cafe out of the wind and rain. The only people around are the couple who work here and a small group of Maori propped up at the bar, smoking and drinking. I’m drinking pot loads of tea and Gary is eating an ostrich burger and chips. Says it tastes like chicken. As does anything odd. Like snake.
Waitiki Landing, Northland, 9 July
We’re now on the Aupouri Peninsula, a narrow, 100 km-long slither of forest and dunes and hills. This is the Maori’s Te Hika o te Ika (‘the tail of the fish’), recalling that legend of Maui hauling up the ‘fish’ of the North Island from the sea while sitting in the canoe of the South Island.
From Waitiki, the dirt road to the Cape is only 21 km, but thanks to the weather (wild, wet and exceptionally windy) and state of the road (pot-holed, rocky, corrugated and, in parts, wheel-sinkingly muddy), it took us a good three hours to cycle and occasionally push. There was only one point where the road grew smooth for a few hundred dirt-packed yards, but then it settled back to the same old scabby, stippled surface. Matters weren’t helped by the odd fat-tyred 4WD and high-bottomed Unimog (ex-army truck) tour buses like the Dune Rider or Sand Safaris that did nothing towards reducing their speed when they passed, leaving us to nurse wounds where the big stones kicked up by their wheels bounded off our bodies like large lumps of shrapnel. But despite the drivers, weather, hills and road, the seascape of scenery was as dramatic as it was wild and beautiful.
The advantage of spending so long cycling this stretch of rough road was that by the time we arrived at the Cape the last of the bus passengers were climbing into their bus to be bussed away. We fought with the lusty wind on the track down to the fat, squat white lighthouse. The wind was such that we had to cling to the lighthouse to avoid being blown over the nearby sharp drop of a cliff. Had we been blown over the cliff we’d have ended up in the sea – a confused and lumpy sea that stretched on for ever and ever. Somewhere to the west lay Australia. Big as Australia is, the ocean is bigger and it would be easy to be washed clean past it. Somewhere to the east and far above lay the tail end of South America. But mostly it was just the vast Pacific. We didn’t want to fall into the Pacific, or any other sea for that matter, and so after braving the obligatory photographs we took of each other with bikes in our Michelin Man-like wind-inflated waterproofs, we took ourselves off into the hilariously scary wind to a position of less likely cliff-falling drowning.
Although Cape Reinga sits at the northern tip of New Zealand, it is not the northernmost point of the country. That honour goes to the Surville Cliffs on North Cape, 30 km to the east, which beats Cape Reinga by a few latitudinal degrees. But the Cape is the northerly most accessible point on the peninsula and holds great significance to the Maori. Reinga means ‘place of leaping’ because the Mauri hold that, after death, their souls journey to this point to climb down the roots of an ancient pohutakawa tree that still clings to the cliffs, before leaping into the sea for their final departure to the spirit world in their traditional homeland of Polynesia.
Apart from wild seas, the Cape has seen some interesting comings and goings. First on the scene was the early Maori explorer, Kupe, who canoed this way more than a thousand years ago. Some four centuries later along came the Great Maori Fleet. In 1642 Abel Tasman sailed by and named the land Niuew Zeeland, after the Netherlands province of Zeeland. But he didn’t linger long in New Zealand after his only landing attempt (in South Island’s Golden Bay) resulted in the murder of three of his crew.
One of the strangest episodes of European exploration in New Zealand waters occurred in late 1769, when Captain Cook and Captain Jean Françoise-Marie de Surville were sailing around here off the northern coast. Unknown to either of them, their vessels Endeavour and St Jean Baptiste must have been as close to each other as 70 miles. In the age-old tradition of help freely being given to those in peril on the sea, Captain Cook would most likely have assisted Captain de Surville had he known of the predicament faced by the French captain. After all, Britain and France were not at war at the time, and Captain Cook held the secret of how to prevent and cure scurvy, which at that time was killing de Surville’s crew at the rate of one per day.
Pukenui, 10 July
The ride back from the top was even slower and harder than the one going – but only because the wind had swung around to smack us in the face and the rain had made the bone-rattling road far soggier and bumpier. When we finally hit the stretch of sealed road outside Waitaki Landing, it felt so astonishingly smooth that it prompted Gary to proclaim, ‘I love roads and tarmac!’ He said it in a tone of such exaggerated heartfelt silliness that I fell into a bout of hysterics and had to bring my steed to heel as it made my legs go weak.
Today the wind was still feisty and still in our faces but the sun was out, making the rigours of yesterday feel a world away. Apart from being a lovely ride following the only road (Death Highway 1 – which is pleasantly un-deathlike at the moment as it seems precious few people want to come all the way up here in the dead of winter) down the middle of the peninsula offering occasional views of the Pacific and the Tasman and inlets and outlets and harbours, the only things of note are the bamboo hedges, a field full of cows and turkeys, me being chased by an ostrich (possible doomed burger material?) when I climbed over a fence for a pee, and all the kingfishers dipping and diving alongside us like wagtails before landing on gateposts and telephone wires. We also passed a house whose owner was using an old microwave as a postbox. Further down the road, I spotted a Sunday Star Times headline board with the words: ‘HE BASHED ME BUT I STILL LOVE HIM’. Better buy that, then.
Awanui, 13 July
Keeping to the tradition of getting nowhere fast, we are getting nowhere fast. I was banking on getting a good few hilly miles under our belts, but Gary spotted a motel on the junction of Death Highway 1 and SH10 and, seeing as it had Sky TV (hence Le Tour) and an electric blanket, in we went. The motel was owned by Patrick and Jannette, a friendly Dutch couple with a high standard of cleanliness (the toilet had a Miss World-like ‘Sanitised For Your Convenience’ sash draped across the lid). They had been in New Zealand for two years. Jannette told us why they had given up on Holland. ‘Life there was just too hectic,’ she said. ‘It was impossible to relax. One of the many things that used to get on our nerves was how, whenever we were asked out to dinner and we didn’t want to go, we felt we had to make an excuse. But here we can just say, no, we can’t come that day. And people leave it at that. They don’t question why we can’t come, or feel put out. They simply ask you again another time.’
There’s not a lot to Awanui – a couple of stores and something called The Nappy Shack. It’s located on the banks of the Awanui River and was originally established as a port for Kaitaia. Scows plied the twisting waterway to Awanui to load kauri logs and, in later years, kauri gum. A huge mass of giant peat-preserved kauri logs, recovered from swamps where they had been submerged for between 30,000 and 50,000 years, were stacked up in a sawmill just up the road from the motel. The sawmill was all part of the tourist-luring Ancient Kauri Kingdom – a workshop and shop where you could wander among slabs of wood made into odd-shaped furniture at quite shocking prices. A salesman told me that one highly uncomfortable-looking kauri three-piece suite which had a ‘sold’ label attached to it had been bought for $60,000 by a German couple. ‘And that doesn’t include the freight cost for shipping it to Germany,’ he said.
During our extended stay in Awanui we went on the odd hunter-gather cycle mission into Kaitaia to replenish food supplies. Kaitaia may have looked on the surface as if things were going on in the usual uneventful way, but there was more to the town than met the eye. While we were there, a man was accused of burglary. More interestingly, he was found by police to be wearing two bras, a petticoat and a pair of bright red knickers.
Kerikeri, 17 July
A sudden flurry of activity. We’ve been washed down the coast in more extreme weather: sheets of torrential rain and wind so strong that when looking into it for a second you could feel your eyes depress. In the process of keeping all hands on deck, we splooshed through such places as Kaingaroa (‘kangaroo in rowing boat’), Mangonui (‘tropical fruit of the night’, famous for its fish and chips – or as they say in these parts, ‘fush and chups’), Pupuke (‘unwell undeveloped butterfly’) and Otoroa (‘Tarka by boat’). In a camping store in Kerikeri, just along from shops with names like Manzone, Unichem Pharmacy, The Sound Lounge and Bin Inn Foods, I bought Gary a birthday present – a Primus PTL 2245 Alpine EasyLight for battery-saving inner tent activity. The shop owner was an elderly man called Mr Simpson, a Pommie who had come out here in ’sixty-four. ‘I hold no love for the homeland,’ he said. ‘I threw away my passport in the seventies. Britain had nothing for me then, and has nothing for me now. I owe it no favours.’ He used to be a shipwright in the Merchant Navy. ‘When the Falklands War came along, my mates said, “They’ll want you back in the navy again!” But I said I’d refuse to go. The only interest I have in the place is the football. Wolves. I’ve supported them all my life.’
Paihia, 18 July
Apart from the logging trucks, the most frequently sighted vehicle on the roads up here have been big bulbous water tankers delivering, funnily enough, water. Most farms and houses out in the sticks have no mains water. Instead they all have hefty tanks sitting on blocks outside the home, topped up from time to time by these tankers. You’d think in a land of so much rain all they’d have to do is take the top off the tanks and let nature fill it up for free. But I suppose it’s not quite as simple as that.
We’re now in Paihia, pronounced ‘pie here’ though it actually means ‘here’s a good place’ – not for pies, apparently (though Gary begs to disagree), but for being the site of New Zealand’s first church, made of reeds. It’s since been rebuilt in mor
e sturdy stone. Never mind churches or pies, this place seems particularly keen on its sea and its fish. Here’s a taster of some of the names of the eateries: Tides, Only Seafood, Saltwater Cafe, The Wheelhouse, The Beachcomber, The Ferryman’s Restaurant, The Lighthouse Tavern, Cafe Over The Bay and The Blue Marlin Diner. And whereas you might expect to find some sort of nightclub in a touristy town of this size, Paihia does have a club but it’s a Bay of Islands Swordfish Club.
The reason Paihia sounds so nautical is due to its position: plopped in the heart of the Bay of Islands – a beautifully watery region embracing an irregular 800 km coastline and some 150 green-topped islands of varying size, clustered in clear blue waters, that stretch out like stepping stones to the horizon. For such a scenic setting, it’s a shame the ‘township’ can’t reflect it in comeliness as it’s little more than an unremarkable stretch of motels and touristy shops sitting at odds with the quiet allure of the island-studded waterscape.
Following several lengthy sessions spent bobbing about on the pouncing chop and slap of the ocean wave in bobbable kayaks (wildlife encounter: small blue penguin unexpectedly surfacing off portside prow), and after a high-speed, wave-skimming excursion in the touristy Mack Attack speed boat to surf through a hole in a rock called the Hole in the Rock, we thought we’d better give ourselves a bit of Treaty of Waitangi treatment. So up the road we cycled to Waitangi, one of the earliest sites of permanent European settlement in New Zealand and said to be the single most symbolic place in the country for Maori and Pakeha alike, as it was right here on the wide green sweeping lawns running down to the bay in front of a white clapboard colonial house (known as Treaty House) that the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document for modern New Zealand, was signed. On 6 February 1840, with Governor William Hobson signing on behalf of Queen Victoria (who was a little tied up with something more pressing on her plate), Maori chiefs and a bunch of well-to-do folk from England inked a pact ostensibly to end Maori–Pakeha conflict, to guarantee the Maori land rights, to give them and the colonists Crown protection and to admit New Zealand to the British Empire before the ‘bloody French’ (who were already making inroads on the Banks Peninsula) could get their hands on the country. This treaty, which was apparently to ‘signify a partnership between races’, has been found, without too much trouble, not to signify any such partnership. The barge-poling British expected to rule New Zealand alone and did so.