by Josie Dew
Since the signing at Waitangi, the treaty has remained as the hub and central nerve of New Zealand’s race relations. Many Maori argue that their rights, guaranteed by the treaty, have scarcely ever been maintained and that they struggle for recognition every day. There’s a lot going on in the news at the moment about the so-called ‘privileges’ of the Maori. Some Pakeha are very unhappy about it, which reminds me of the nurse I met in South Island who complained to me how her daughter was having to pay to go through nursing college (and battling along on the subsequent debts) while her partially Maori friend at the college had all the fees paid for her. Just the other day I read a letter in the paper written by Sydney Keepa, a Maori from the North Shore:
As a Maori I would like to give my definition of being a ‘privileged Maori’.
I wonder, is it a privilege to have 10 per cent of my people unemployed; is it privilege that our lifespan (male) is nine years less than Pakeha; is it privilege that Maori make up almost 50 per cent of prison inmates; is it privilege that 40 per cent of Maori do not own their own homes; is it privilege that most Maori end up in low-skilled, low-paid jobs; is it privilege that Pakeha came to our land and stole 95 per cent of it; is it privilege that 163 years ago Maori entered into an agreement with the Pakeha giving Pakeha rights and then those same people trampled on Maori rights; is it privilege that when politicians want to lift their ratings they use Maori to do it; is it privilege that 45 per cent of the population agree that this is what being privileged is all about?
Maori don’t want to be privileged. All Maori have been saying is that we have rights – and the agreement that was signed 163 years ago guarantees that.
Auckland, 23 July
The water around one of the small islands rising out of the bay just off Paihia was mesmerising to watch, especially in a choppy swell when the waves rode in bumper to bumper each side of the island, then forgot which way to go. I was leaning against my bike watching these waves when a man called Tony, who owned a backpackers’ hostel up the road, said, ‘How’re you finding riding up all these hills we’ve got round here?’
‘Some are a bit of a struggle,’ I said. ‘But they’re mostly fine as I quite enjoy cycling uphill.’
Gary, who was standing close by, gave me a worried look before mumbling something to Tony about me being not well in my head.
Tony told me how last summer he had been driving along in his pick-up when he passed a girl with a bike crying at the side of the road. Tony stopped and, thinking she had taken a spill, asked if she was okay. ‘Turned out she hadn’t come off the bike. She was crying because she was at her wits end – she just couldn’t take cycling up any more hills. So I gave her a lift back to the hostel and she continued around New Zealand by bus.’
Before Tony headed back to his hostel he said that he thought that the girl should have chosen the South Island for cycling. ‘They say the South Island has hills to look at, the North Island has hills to drive over.’ I’m not so sure about this. More like the South Island has mountains to cycle over, the North Island has saddles and hills like mountains to cycle over. After all, 60 per cent of New Zealand is higher than 300 metres (1000 feet) and 70 per cent of it is either leg-quiveringly hilly or steep.
Gary and I were the only passengers climbing aboard the bouncing little passenger ferry that whisked us, plus bikes, across the bay to Russell, New Zealand’s first capital and most historic village. With a population of 800 it’s a tiny place, but very lovely in a dainty sort of way with its colonial villas tucked along a waterfront lined with pohutakawa trees. The village is a far cry from its early days as a port of call for rowdy whalers in the early 1800s. Then called Kororareka, it was dubbed the Hell Hole of the Pacific for its brawling seamen, runaway convicts, grog shops and orgiastic brothels. When Charles Darwin came this way in 1835 he wrote that the majority of the British there were the ‘refuse of society’. A year later another early traveller observed that it was ‘notorious at present for containing, I should think, a greater number of rogues than any other spot of equal size in the universe’. Missionaries, who are easily shocked at the best of times, were no more impressed by the amount of debauchery. One commented on finding it ‘a dreadful place – the very seat of Satan’.
Kororareka is Maori for ‘sweet blue penguin’ and the place originally started out as a fortified Maori settlement. It got its name after a Maori chief, wounded in battle, asked for some penguin broth to be brought to him. After drinking the broth he said, ‘Ka reka te korora’ – ‘How sweet is the penguin.’ By the 1840s the settlement was deemed far too bawdy to be worthy of capital status and so, after the signing of the Waitangi Treaty, the capital was moved south to Auckland, leaving Kororareka to be renamed Russell in an attempt to expunge its notorious swashbuckling past.
Russell may have the oldest surviving church in the country (built in 1836), complete with cannonball scars (from HMS Hazard) and musket ball holes (made by Hone Heke and his warriors when they ransacked Russell in 1844), but it also has the ubiquitous Four Square. I was shopping for picnicking material in this particular Four Square when I overhead on the local radio station how some professor in Maryland had just discovered a fifth chewing muscle that ran from the eye socket to the lower jaw. The excitable presenter seemed quite taken with this bit of news. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Just when you thought there were no more cheek muscles there’s another one!’
The sun has shown itself in the past few days but it has always been pretty short-lived. Rain is at the forefront of all weather agendas, with yet more floods (latest paper headlines: ‘TWO DIE AND THOUSANDS ARE EVACUATED AS FIRST FLOODS AND THEN QUAKES HIT THE BAY OF PLENTY’). The thing with rain is that it either makes you stay put in a place until it moves on to be problematical for people elsewhere (which in New Zealand is generally for a long time), or else it makes you scurry the miles away in an attempt to outpace it. Since leaving Paihia we have tried to outpace it, but then the minute we get ahead (or behind) one rainstorm, another one soon comes along to make all efforts worthless.
Death Highway 1 hasn’t helped matters; it’s busy, it’s fast and, judging from the number of white crosses at the side of the road, it’s full of death. ‘SLOW DOWN. HIGH CRASH RATE’ said one sign. ‘DANGER. DRIVE SLOW. THIS ROAD TAKES LOVED ONES’ warned another. Most motorists, of course, pay no attention to such advice. They tailgate, they overtake on blind hills and blind corners, they slice off our elbows, they drive like demons. There comes a point in life when you think that dying for the sake of an idiot encased in a tonne or more of metal and buffeted by springy airbags is not a good option when a possible life-preserving one lies just around the corner. So, for the last fast burst into Auckland, we slid our bikes into the undercarriage of a bus and let our driver Les, with fetching slicked-back hair, transport us back to the city. Every time a passenger joined the bus Les would murmur, ‘Sit back … relax … and enjoy the journey.’ And we did.
16
Rotorua, 7 August
Sometimes you do something which you don’t realise you’re doing until you discover after you’ve done it just what you’ve done. In my father’s case, it’s usually my mum who discovers that he’s put the butter in the jam cupboard and the jam in the fridge instead of vice versa. And after climbing Rangitoto volcano on Rangitoto Island off Auckland, it was only a few days later when I had an X-ray that I was told I had broken a small bone in the top of my foot – though I didn’t notice breaking it at the time.
Foot is fine now, at least for cycling. And just as well as I’ve got some sizeable mileage to be putting under my wheels. This is because travel plans have taken a surprising turn. As Gary only has a month left before he flies home to get building again, we have two choices: either continue getting very wet and not very far by bike in North Island; or hire a camper van so that Gary can see South Island. So, as I feel Gary can’t fly all the way to this other side of the world and not see South Island in some shape or form, we’ve gone for the van option. Gary
is going to be the man in the van with his bike on board, whereas, apart from the roads that I have already cycled, I’m going to chase him on my bike.
It’s amazing how frisky my bike feels without its usual excess of unwieldy clobber (I’m riding with just handlebar bag and front panniers). Gary and I have been going like the clappers (and Gary has naturally been clappering along a lot faster than me) through a green and rolling rain-lashed area of mostly M’s: Mangatawhiri, Maramarua Mill, Mangatarata, Mangateparu (manga is Maori for a stream), Morrinsville and Matamata. Matamata had a sign on the outskirts saying: ‘WELCOME TO HOBBITON’. Something, I presume, to do with all the feverish Lord of the Rings hype.
Other roadside signs I spotted told me such diverse things as: ‘BUCKLE IN BIG KIDS TOO – IT’S THE WAY’; ‘ADOPT DON’T ABORT’; ‘WATERCRESS (NOT HYDROPONIC) FARM’; ‘SAW DOCTOR SHARPENING SERVICES’; ‘PLOUGH THROUGH SNOW NOT TRAFFIC’; ‘DROWSY ? PULL OVER OR SLEEP PERMANENTLY ’; ‘TIRED DRIVERS END UP IN NIGHTMARES’.
Matamata might be trying to lure visitors with its Hobbiton connections, but, according to the town’s tourist leaflet, what the place is really noted for is its importance as a bloodstock region. As a long-time devourer of various countries’ promotional material, I can’t say the enticement of a top bloodstock region is one I’ve come across too often. Certainly it’s an unusual angle of approach for seducing the holidaying masses.
There’s no getting away from the fact, though, that there are cows aplenty around here. When Gary and I dropped by on Rob Edwards, an old friend from my village who’d been living in New Zealand for years working as a cattle farmer, he told us that in just a small area around Matamata there are over a million head of cattle. Rob used to have 450 cattle himself, until he gave up farming to go into the building trade, although ultimately he wants to be a funeral director. He never intended coming out here to live. When he left home in the eighties his plan was to have a year out. He got as far as Australia where, at a motorsport event (Rob loves motorbikes – he had a Honda 1100 Blackbird in his garage) he met Karen, an Australian nurse. They married and now have two young children, Georgia and Maddie. Rob is a good sort, funny and friendly. It’s no wonder he has a lot of friends, many of them Maori. Just last night he spent the evening with his Maori mates. ‘Everyone gets on well round here,’ he said. ‘It’s only politicians and extremists and hardliners who make it sound like we don’t.’
*
We’re now in Rotorua, which has to be one of the few places in the world that can be smelt before it is seen. Nicknamed ‘Sulphur City’ due to the pervasive rotten-egg whiff of hydrogen sulphide that hangs over the town that the locals call a city, Rotorua sits on an active fault line known as the Taupo Volcanic Zone. It is a narrow belt of vociferous activity characterised by volcanoes and earthquakes, and although it is only 20–40 km wide, it spans a distance of 240 km from White Island off the coast of the Bay of Plenty to Lake Taupo and the volcanoes of the Tongariro National Park in the Central Plateau of North Island. Rotorua is full of oddities: steam rising from cracks in the tarmac, craters of boiling mud and hot springs, gaseous bores and ground fissures, explosive geysers (outside this region, geysers occur only in southwest Iceland and in Yellowstone National Park in the United States) and multicoloured terraces of sulphur and silica deposits. After George Bernard Shaw visited Rotorua in 1934 he wrote, ‘I was pleased to get so close to Hades and be able to return.’
Situated on a thermal belt, Rotorua puts its steam heat to good use, piping it from beneath the town’s thin crust to heat homes, hotels and mineral hot spas. In some parts house-building is risky because digging the foundations leads to the release of unwanted thermal activity – some residents have woken in the night to find their front garden transformed into a hot bath.
Rotorua is full of Maori history and mythology. For centuries the Te Arawa tribes lived beside the boiling hot pools, believing in utu (revenge) and killing their enemies with jade war clubs and sweet potato digging sticks. The town still has the greatest concentration of Maori residents of any in New Zealand. What with being such a hub of Maori culture and all the weird geothermal splutterings, Rotorua is, not surprisingly, a tourist hot spot – one of its streets (Fenton) has the longest stretch of motels in the whole of New Zealand.
Luckily, being winter, the area is relatively quiet. Most tourists seem to be of the Japanese variety (‘Ah so, desu-ka?’) who arrive on tightly scheduled bus tours to be disgorged into the popular Polynesian Spa public pools built around the town’s most famous hot springs, with water ranging in temperature from 34ºC to a skin-scorching 43ºC. A nineteenth-century Catholic priest claimed that the waters cured his rheumatism. I’m sure they did, but I’m also sure they are likely to have ruined other parts of his anatomy. ‘The patients emerging from this bath,’ wrote a bather from the same time, ‘look like boiled lobsters.’
They still do. Gary and I had a wander within, but we didn’t participate in a boiling of tender regions as it was just too crowded. So we went for a cycle instead, but not before noticing a sign at the baths saying: ‘ASIANS. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM SPITTING IN THE POOLS’.
Twenty fast-pedalling kilometres later we were at Hell’s Gate, a highly active thermal area, where we had the spa pool to ourselves. We followed our dunking with a wander around the steamy and gurgling reserve, peering into waking mudpools that bubbled and klopped like boiling porridge. Beside a mudpool called The Inferno, varying between 100ºC and 115ºC, a sign said: ‘WARNING – PERSONS WHO THROW LITTER OR STONES INTO THE THERMAL POOLS MAY BE ASKED TO RETRIEVE THEM’. It was worth hanging around to watch for anyone who might fall prey to such treatment, although it wasn’t just litter-throwing tourists: more than a handful of visitors to the area, unprompted, liked to walk where it was not a good idea to walk and had ended up falling into bubbling mudpools or dropping into steaming vents with all the nasty results that a boiling alive entails.
Talking of death, after riding 50 km around Lake Rotorua and getting rained on hard out of clear blue skies, and then nearly knocked on the head by the end of a full and fat rainbow, we paid a visit to Whakarewarewa, known as Whaka and pronounced (in that way that Ws turn to Fs) Fa-ka. Whaka is a thermal reserve and much tourist-trampled Maori village (currently quiet) that sits suspended 35 metres over the surface of an underground thermal lake. We came away from this geyser-gushing place having discovered that, traditionally, the Maoris here had three ways of burying the dead. They either hung the bodies in trees from fibres of New Zealand flax and used mussel shells to scrape the skin before burying the bones in caves and holes. Or they trod and stamped the bodies into the hot mud until the bodies dissolved. Or they placed them in tombs over the steam to cook slowly, over an extended period of time, like a good Lancashire hotpot.
Kaikoura, South Island, 11 August
It’s been a busy week chasing Gary over hilly volcanic ridge and windy desert dale. From Rotorua we headed south to Taupo via Waiotapu (Maori for ‘sacred waters’) – a freakish, fantastic landscape of deep sulphur-crusted pits, jade-coloured ponds, silica terraces and a steaming lake edged with red algae and bubbling with minute beads of carbon dioxide. Oh, and a large American tourist screaming abuse at his son to keep away from the boiling cauldrons of mud.
And so to the largest lake in Australasia, Lake Taupo. This huge body of water, 40 km long by 30 km wide, is so big that it’s tidal. It fills a massive crater formed originally some 25,000 years ago but also the scene more than 1800 years ago of a cataclysmic volcanic eruption, one of the most violent in history – six times as violent as Krakatoa’s in 1883. Enormous volumes of ash and pumice were blasted up to a height of 50 km, producing spectacular sunsets that were recorded by contemporary Chinese and Roman scribes.
Taupo is now known as the ‘Trout Fishing Capital of the World’. Even by New Zealand standards, the fish are monsters, with rainbow trout hitting the scales up to a weighty 9 kg. Somewhere around here is Huka Lodge where the Queen Mother used to stay,
apparently fishing out of her bedroom window. Maybe it was a desperate measure. Maybe she wanted to buy some nice trout at her lodge to send home to the Queen, but then came upon one of New Zealand’s quirky laws which states that it is illegal to sell trout in this country. If you want a slab of trout you have to catch it.
I left Gary in the local museum looking at things like long sharp stones shaped like a hand axe that the Maori used to thrust with a twisting action into the upper nasal cavities of their enemies (must have made their eyes smart), while I took off at a canter on my wheels around the lake and on to the Desert Road. It was freezing up here, sleeting horribly, the roads treacherous with ice and wheel-eating potholes. The only traffic was the odd army jeep and the big articulated trucks that go stonking up and down the country, with the now all too familiar writing on the side: Streight Freight; Owens Global Logistics; Freightlines; Opzeeland Transport; SR Selwyns Freight; Linfox Integrated Logistics; TNL Freighting. Everything looked as remote as the last time I was up here – wind-tossed tussock grass, brown scrubby trees, dish-rag skies, wintry volcanoes and those miles of marching pylons, their high-tension wires cantilevering across the broad flat sweep of land.