Geothermal Wonderland

A day trip around Rotorua (sister city to Beppu). The Wai-o-Tapu 'geothermal wonderland' and the volcanic Waimangu Valley, where an 1886 eruption obliterated nine Te Arawa villages. There are bubbling mudpots, hot springs which stain the ashy clay vivid yellow and green, and pools of intense green, blue and red. Years of deposits build up into intricate sinter terraces. At the Lady Knox geyser (they say Guy-zur here), a man throws soap flakes down its maw in order to ensure it spouts on time at quarter past ten every morning.

Hangi in Vegas

On the road from Taupo to Rotorua, alongside the steaming geothermal plumes and the encroaching smell of eggs, signposts to 'maori villages' and 'cultural experiences' line the highway. You don't see a 'Pakeha suburb' sign pointing to Korokoro, so perhaps this is a unicultural country after all, though there was that Kiwiana bar in Wellington with the spiked drinks… maybe that's 'culture' too.

But the hangi and cultural experience are to Rotovegas what bungy jumping is to Queenstown, so off I go to the i-site and take my pick of what's on offer. I choose Mitai because it's outdoors and not in a hotel.

First up when we get there is a chance to take photos of the hangi (and a quick explanation of the difference between this and a hongi, which is the nose-touching Maori greeting), a huge steaming pit containing our dinner. Burning wood is put in the pit and rocks piled on top of that: when the wood burns out, the rocks fall through the embers, then water is poured on the rocks and the food laid in trays on top of that, covered in blankets and left for about three hours. It smells delicious.

It all goes a bit Disney for a while after that, as we're led down a path through the woods past scary masks, warriors shouting at us from the bushes, and a party in a war canoe paddle up a small river beside us, torches blazing, and leap out onto the riverbank opposite to do a quick haka.

Then comes the main show. A traditional Maori village has been laid out, with huts and smoking fires, and the 'junior' troupe (mostly high school students) is waiting to do the formal welcome. An Australian named Simon has been appointed temporary chief of our tourist 'tribe of ten nations', and goes up on stage to be shouted at and then offered a symbolic gift of peace, which he accepts (if he didn't we'd have to go to war with these guys and though there are more of us, they look better-prepared). Then we sing a song, and the chief speaks very seriously to us in Maori before saying 'OK, you can clap now'.

The rest of the show is entertainingly shambolic: taiaha and other weapons are demonstrated; conch-shells and other instruments are played. The tribe drop their stuff sometimes and giggle. They do a properly frightening-looking haka, and the chief explains it all as they go along. Most of them have full facial moko and body tattoos, all stamped on rather than tattooed (I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I've seen walking the streets in New Zealand wearing moko). We all have to stand up and practice a bit of a haka. It's all done in a non-patronising and funny, very kiwi way. The chief says he hopes we've learned something between the jokes.

When the performance is over, the kids all bomb off in their cars, and we go to the feast awaiting us. The meat from the hangi tastes just as delicious as it smells: the meat is soft and tender and has a slightly smoky barbecue flavour without being the least bit charred on the outside. There's a trifle and chocolate log too, but I don't think they've been anywhere near the steaming pit.

We finish off with another walk through the woods to see some glow worms and a spring pool with trout and eels swimming in it. The bus drops us back all over town and I pester the coach driver, John, about the relationship of his peoples to this show: his iwi is Te Arawa, the hapu is Ngati Whakaue, and Mitai is the family organisation who lease the land from the hapu to do the cultural performance business. He thinks I must have either either read a lot or be married to a kiwi to be interested in this stuff.

It would be easy to sneer at this all as a tourist spectacle, which it is. But it's good-humoured, funny, and you do learn something (I didn't know that the moko which women wear that looks like scary dribbles represents the head of an owl, or that the forehead on a man's moko is a bat and the marks on his nose a parrot's beak). The thanks we are offered at the end for visiting "our place" is genuine and well-meant. There could be tree museums much worse than this.

Tongariro Crossing

The Tongariro Crossing, widely-hyped (believe the hype) as New Zealand’s finest day tramp, starts off where the Kepler left off, above the bushline at about 1000m, and climbs to 1880m or so, up lava flows, across crater beds, and past lakes and fumaroles. The bus comes to pick us up at 6.30am outside the fairly unpleasant Go-Global Backpackers. There are two other English blokes there waiting with me. One of them is coughing like a proper consumptive and wearing jeans, and his mate tells him he looks dressed for a hike all the way to the shops.

If you don’t enjoy reading rambling tramping monologues as much as I like writing them, click on the links for the pictures, or even better just go straight to the pictures.

It’s a bit of a circus at the Mangatepopo car park. Even this late in the season there are a couple of hundred people attempting the walk. Three have died on the crossing this year, the driver tells us, but people who were unprepared on days worse than this, which is an unusually lovely day indeed. We quickly catch sight of the massive crags of Ruapehu, the highest of the three major volcanoes, followed by the dimpled cinder cone of Ngauruhoe, and the broad and stumpy Tongariro.

The biggest eruption at Taupo was the one that created the crater which forms part of Lake Taupo. In 186AD, New Zealand, anxious to announce its existence to the inhabited world, blew 24 cubic kilometres of ash and debris out of Taupo into the air, clouding the world’s skies for several days, which was noticed (and therefore dated) in both China and Rome, but no-one was sent to investigate for more than a thousand years.

The walk starts off easily beside a stream and waterfall, through yellowy tussocks, at the end of which is a crater bed and then a steep climb up a chunky lava flow to the side of Ngauruhoe. Nothing grows here, and any stone you grab onto to help you up is hard and scratchy volcanic rock. It takes about forty minutes to climb, and it’s known poetically as ‘The Devil’s Staircase’ (I wonder what the Maori for ‘bastard steep hill full of sharp bits’ is?). At the top is the side path off to ascend Ngauruhoe’s dimpled summit, which is stained red, yellow and white with salts, and if you look very hard you can see it smoking slightly.

On the way up Taranaki’s cone is visiable all the way over on the west side of the island, peeking above the clouds. All four mountains used to live happily together round here until Taranaki started hitting on Tongariro’s girlfriend. Taranaki beat Ngauruhoe in a fight, but the massive Ruapehu got the better of him, after which he ran away, carving out the Wanganui River behind him.

Even by midday, where the ground has yet to feel the sun’s light, ice crystals and thin crusts of rime persist. A man who did the Northern Circuit and missed the view yesterday has come back with his plastic bag for a look (he’s not stupid) and warns me where the ice is on a tricky bit of the climb.

The yellow, muddy bed of the South Crater follows, and then a further hike up leads to the summit of the walk at 1886m, at the ridge of the Red Crater, whose black black sides are stained with salty red like spraypaint. Immediately beyond, at the bottom of a steep scoria track, which I edge down nervously, are the resplendent Emerald Lakes, an unhealthy-looking green bordered with yellow, and several fine steaming fumaroles. As I walk across the Central Crater someone points out how great the view behind me is, and indeed it is, but within minutes cloud has obscured the view entirely and is creeping rapidly upon us. I start to frantically hope that my backpack is full of all the things that a bewildered seventy-year-old wouldn’t think to pack (rolls, bananas, scroggin, woolly hat; no USB key!) but it’s OK because the worst the cloud does is kind of obscure the view of the Blue Lake.

From there it’s a zigzag through tussock to the Ketetahi DOC hut where everyone hangs out and has their lunch. There’s no mileage in getting to the end too quickly because you’re only going to have to wait for the shuttle bus when you get there. I deduce that almost everyone is younger than me, and that everyone English is posher than me.

We cross the stream below the mysteriously steaming Ketetahi hot springs, which are off-limits. The National Park land was a gift from Ngati Tuwharetoa in 1887 to pre-empt development and preserve the ‘cultural landscape’.

And then we descend, seemingly endlessly, back to the pickup point. The track falls first through scrubby vegetation, and then into virgin bush proper, down your standard-issue DOC retaining steps: tramp-tramp-tramp-thump, tramp-tramp-tramp-thump. I get stuck behind a bunch of English girls, who despite having Latin A-levels don’t seem to be able to pronounce the name of the mountain they’re climbing up, and a kid who has his own personalised ‘Gap Year 06’ hoodie with his itinerary on his back (he’s been to Peru! He’s going to India!).

When the buses arrive, everyone crowds to get on so they can go home at 3.30, rather than wait on the 4.30 bus for the stragglers to arrive. Back to Taupo we go, but not before we drop the meatbombs off at the skydiving centre, to do what Taupo is after all there for. But this has been one of the most amazing walks I've ever done.

Napier

It's a beautiful day sandwiched between two cloudy ones in Napier, and I get up early to make the most of the light. I only discover later that I slept through the tsunami warning, and not one person back in London thought to give me a call and let me know that I was in imminent danger of being drowned and/or squashed.

It probably wouldn't have done any good anyway, because after a week of sitting on my fat arse in New Plymouth and smoking lots of cigarettes, I doubt I'd have been able to outrun the oncoming wave. But the weather being sunny, I take a hike up the posh end of town to the Bluff Hill lookout, puffing and panting my way to a gorgeous view both ways along the bay, north towards Gisborne and south to Cape Kidnappers (named, natch, after an early Maori-Pakeha encounter: calumny written on the very map). Pretty soon it's time for the afternoon walking tour of Art Deco Napier.

The last version of Napier was obliterated in February 1931 by an enormous earthquake that lifted the ground by two metres, kindly reclaiming land from the sea that would later be used to build an airport, and giving the inhabitants the opportunity to rebuild the entire town in contemporary architectural styles, mostly Art Deco, with a little bit of Nouveau and Spanish Mission chucked in. Having rebuilt the town they just went on living in it until the 1980s when they had an epiphany about how cool Art Deco was, and started preserving the fuck out of it.

The buildings were mostly designed by native architects, echoing and adapting international styles, chief among them Napierian Louis Hay. Patterns and detail from the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright pop up here and there, and alongside the usual riot of 'exotic' influences — Egyptian, Mayan and Spanish, there are of course some Maori designs, the most impressive of these lining the ceiling of the ASB bank. Hay aside, not having name architects is good: instead of great buildings, Napier has a tone. In typical New Zealand fashion, Napierites like to have a laugh with it all, and every year on the anniversary of the earthquake they have a big party, dress up in Jazz Age clothes, don straw boaters, play cricket, shout 'what ho!' and generally all try to act like they're the Great Gatsby or something.

Once it gets dark I cream the battery of my camera taking pictures and movies of the Tom Parker fountain, which lights up in a shifting variety of colours, the blues in particular bringing to mind Anger's Eaux d'Artifice.

Back at the YHA, I'm distracted from my email by a Kiwi/English couple decrying London's ethnic diversity for the crime it causes. He's just returned from five years working in London, and she's from Portslade and working over here: they're not unpleasant people, and it gets a conversation started, but it strikes me that English people who want to live anywhere in New Zealand but Auckland aren't the kind of people who can't live without ethnic diversity. Or perhaps it's just backpackerland. Like Nathan says, it's the last all-white suburb.

Northland

Sunday

With Gareth at the wheel of the trusty little red Nissan, and Megan navigating, we set off across the harbour bridge for Northland, the most northerly part of the North Island, separated from the rest of the ‘real’ New Zealand by Auckland’s narrow isthmus, and full of watery crinkles, ocean beaches and sandy bays. Once into the northern suburbs we leave the certainty of good coffee behind, freeing yours truly to bitch about the temperature decay curve of a ‘long black’, which is never even that long.

Driving along the east coast, we pass through northern beach suburb Orewa where Gareth used to live, and stop at Puhoi, a town where Bohemians (of the next-to-Moravian rather than next-to-hippie variety) settled, and inspect a small wooden Catholic church whose stained glass windows are dedicated to local families. Next stop is Goat Island Marine Reserve, where crowds with wetsuits and snorkels are gathered to see the electric blue maomaos swimming in the shallows between the rocks. Unfortunately, you’re no longer allowed to feed the fish frozen peas.

We stop at Leigh Sawmill for lunch (well, as much lunch as we can handle after stuffing ourselves with pie at Orewa), as close to an English country pub on an Easter Sunday as I’ve seen here yet. We drive past a huge wooden carving of a wizard and I leap out to take a photo, getting in the way of someone coming the other way. "Take your time," he laughs. "You're in New Zealand." At Whangarei we stay in a youth hostel: the town is less grim than we feared, with a nice view across the lake, but nothing much is open in the evening. In a bar, the cigarette machine has to be unfrozen by remote control from the bar, part of New Zealand’s anti-smoking policy: deterrence by social humiliation.

Monday

We set out the next day for the Bay of Islands, heartland of British colonial settlement, and the zone of initial interaction between Pakeha and Maori. At Ruapekapeka pa, the remains of earthworks outline the shape of the Maori fortress where Hone Heke’s ally Te Ruki Kawiti stood against the British at the end of the Northern War in 1846. George Grey’s troops significantly outnumbered the Maori defenders, and the pa took a pounding from British artillery, but thanks to Kawiti’s innovation in pa design, including the use of near-impenetrable anti-artillery bunkers, and the tactical evacuation of the pa under the final British onslaught, the victory was less complete than British histories usually claim. All that’s left now to wander round in the drizzle are holes in the ground and a few interpretive boards. The site is guarded by a newly-carved gateway, and is a tapu, or sacred place. At Kawakawa we stop to inspect (and of course use) the gaudily-decorated Hundertwasser toilets: Hundertwasser spent the last twenty-five years of his life in this otherwise unremarkable town.

Pahia is our stop for the night, and the place to catch the ferry to Russell. Once called Kororareka, and known as ‘the hell-hole of the pacific’ for its lawless community of whalers and other trans-Tasman disreputables, it was sacked in 1845 by Hone Heke’s forces at the beginning of the Northern War. Today it’s a pretty tourist town: the first non-mission church in New Zealand is still standing (with bullet holes carefully preserved in its white board walls), and its churchyard contains the graves of both the first Pakeha woman born on the new land’s soil, and Tamata Waka Nene “a consistent supporter of the Pakeha” and British ally in the 1845 conflict. We walk up the hill to the flagstaff which Heke chopped down four times in his protest against British sovereignty, passing on the way a bush simply crawling with monarch butterfly caterpillars.

The settlement of Waitangi is now more or less completely dedicated to a memorial complex of the buildings used by British Resident James Busby in the period immediately before and after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and to a celebration of the treaty as the founding document of the ongoing Maori-Pakeha relationship. Our introduction is a rather patronising and awful AV presentation narrated by a Maori woman who talks of her ancestors seeing the white ‘goblins’ arriving in their big boats, and the buildings themselves are rather dull little colonial cottages. Gareth and Megan get very excited by the vegetable garden outside the meeting house, and leap all over the lawn taking pictures to use as inspiration for the ongoing agricultural transformation at the back of Penney Avenue.

Tuesday

It rains nearly all day on Tuesday, and even the chickens are taking shelter under picnic benches. We stop at Kerikeri to see the Old Stone Store, built in 1835 and the oldest standing stone building in the country. Typical self-deprecating kiwi comments about the bus stops in London being older etc ensue, but inside there’s a reasonably fascinating collection of colonial artefacts from nails made by piecework to colonial rifles to the metal-framed beds visiting bishops slept on, and the timber-framed construction looks as if it will last another century or two.

We eat delicious fat pan-fried scallops and bacon at the waterfront café in Mangonui, and then head on to Coopers Beach, where we’re staying in a motel bang on the beach of Doubtless Bay (colonial place names are generally more optimistic in the north: no dusky, doubtful or disappointing geographical features here). We take a five-dollar luxury upgrade to a two-room apartment as insurance against loose accusations of snoring, and whimpering nightmares flying any further. Though it’s still drizzling, the water is warm enough and the offer of borrowing the owner’s little sea-kayak too tempting to resist, and so we take to the water with gusto (actually, a few shivers and gasps). Bouncing out through the surf on the kayak to the flatter swell beyond is cool, but not quite as exciting as waiting for a big wave and surfing back in on it, something I succeed in doing correctly fifty percent of the time, only falling out and banging myself on the back of the head with the kayak once.

Fully salted, and in search of dinner at a winery and a sunset view of Maitai bay, we drive up onto the Karikari peninsula. As dusk falls, the wide fields and tiny townships start to feel a long way from anywhere else, slightly bleak and remote. The Karikari winery’s approach road flanking giant twin palms is very impressive, but unfortunately the café is closed. So we motor back to Mangonui and the Waterside again for dinner, this time scotch fillet steaks so fat they’re nearly round, done rare to a gorgeous mouthwatering pink.

Wednesday

An early start gets us to our next night’s stop, Kataia, which greets us with a friendly Dobro Došli as well as the usual Haera Mae, a sign of the town’s Dalmatian population: Dalmatians were among New Zealand’s earliest non-British settlers. We have time to grab a coffee before getting on the bus that will take us to New Zealand’s most northerly accessible point, Cape Reinga. Coach driver Robin is a white-haired local Maori who keeps up an informative cheeky-chappie comedy commentary for the length of the journey, punctuated with his own wheezing giggle and occasional pleas to his audience to laugh a little. We stop along the way to visit a factory manufacturing furniture from the stumps of giant Kauri trees preserved in peat bogs for anything up to 40,000 years.

At the cape itself, we walk over a hill and down to the famous lighthouse where a fingerpost points across the seas to all the places I’ve been and have still to go. The water today is very calm, but just beyond the cape itself the Tasman Sea and Pacific Ocean can be seen coming together in fluffy white breakers banging against each other. Further out and along the crags falling down to the water a lone pohutukawa tree clings bravely to the rocks. In legend the souls of Maori travel through its roots reach the ocean and return to Hawaiki. Robin says he’ll be flying Air New Zealand when he goes.

Having reached the cape by road, we return by sand, along Ninety Mile Beach. Before driving along Te Paki stream (no stopping on the wet sand under any circumstances, even for drivers already stranded), we pull up at the Te Paki giant sand dunes, and Robin whips out a stack of plastic toboggans from under the bus. We troop up a sandy ridge as far as we dare, sit at the edge of a huge sand slope and push off. Once you get the hang of stretching your hands out behind you as brakes it’s not too scary. Well, I’m not too scared until I wipe out properly, bouncing off the dune like a rag doll and getting a good coating of sand all over.

Ninety Mile Beach is actually more like ninety kilometres long, and runs along the west coast of the isthmus leading up to the cape. It’s officially a state highway, and the rules of the road apply, though you won’t get insurance to drive it in your own car, and the tour buses which drive it every day fall victim to fatal sand and salt corrosion in three or four years. We drive along the middle of the strand on an outgoing tide. A few cars do venture this far, and as we’re waiting for the waves to recede around some protruding rocks, a low-slung sports car swings round through the water, gets caught on a rock, and promptly stalls, blocking our path. Several of us leap out of the bus to push the shamefaced singlet-and-sunnies driver and his pissed-off looking girlfriend out of the way and listen to them try to get the engine started again in vain.

A couple of miles down the beach, we see what happens to those who don’t get the engine started again. Buried in the beach right up to the steering wheel are the remains of a Mercedes which got stuck here six weeks ago. The fine-grained beach sand works like quicksand, and on the very shallow tilt of the beach, you can be standing on dry sand one moment and the water will be up to your knees the next.

Here in Northland, Maori are everywhere (unlike the South Island, where every tour has a Maori legend repeated like a tired catechism by a Pakeha guide, and Queenstown Maori dances are performed alongside caged kiwi). Maori faces are everywhere, there are marae by the side of the road, Maori cultural centres on smalltown high streets, and even Maori numberplates (TAPU2). Our Maori-run YHA hostel has its own whare runanga (meeting house). At Te Kao, on the road up to Cape Reinga we see a strange little Maori Ratana church, green-faced and twin domes topped with crescents pointing to the sky. I begin to get an inkling of what ‘bicultural’ New Zealand looks like.

Thursday

Having gone as far north as we can, we head down the west coast, the Tasman side of Northland. At Hokianga Harbour we cross to Rawene on a car ferry, past several canoes going the other way, and slip by the sleepy-looking resort towns of Omapere and Opononi, still celebrating their tragic 1950s star turn, Opo the friendly dolphin.

We stop in the Waipoua Kauri Forest to see some of few giant Kauri left standing by the pioneers who stripped Northland of its covering of Kauri forest for the young trees’ straightness and strength as ships’ spars, and valuable resin gum. They’re comparable in size and longevity to Californian giant sequoias. We pay our respects to god of the forest Tane Mahuta (who in Maori legend created the world by separating his mother and father, a great story for the children of divorced parents), allegedly the largest standing Kauri, and then trek further into the dense bush along boardwalks to see Matua Ngahere (“Father of the Forest”), the second largest, who is no less impressive. His massive trunk splits into branches high up in the canopy, but his crown of leaves is almost outweighed by the tufts of epiphytes hanging onto his sleepy regality.

The Kai Iwi Lakes are beautiful, but less accessible by car than we hoped, and we stop at a small beach to jealously watch the kids from motor camps sliding across the smooth water in their kayaks.

Our last sleepover is in a bach at Baylys Beach (sadly missing one of the apostrophes that are ubiquitously unnecessary everywhere else: New Zealand is a nation of greengrocer’s), an orange-and-purple ramshackle little cottage that’s somehow been there since the 1920s and has the pictures on the wall to prove it. Mismatched furniture and furnishings, non-plumb walls and window-frames, internal walls that don’t reach the ceilings: these are all the hallmarks of the archetypal bach, proper kiwiana. An ancient Sharp midi system with fuzzy speakers is alas hardly up to playing a stash of early eighties classics on vinyl, including two Blockheads albums, X-Ray Spex, and a white-vinyl twelve-inch no less of Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead.

We buy tasty crumbed Dory and chips at the top of the road and eat them out of newspaper on the beach: Gareth digs up pipi and spots a sand crab rushing through the outflowing water before diving deep back into the sand. The long coastal Ripiro Beach is driveable too: the occasional tourist car noses out onto the sand for a peek, and a couple of boy racers noisily zoom out to use the hard-packed sand as a skidpan. The water’s warm enough for ankles, and rushes in fast again along the flat sand as the setting sun lights the sandstone cliffs behind us a glorious orange.

Friday

We get up early to wander the beach again. Gigantic breakers far out are lit by the sun peeking across the hills, and the beach gives up its shade piece by piece until it’s clear it’s going to be a fine day for our drive back to Auckland. We stop in Dargaville for breakfast, where the local butcher proudly announces that it processes ‘Home Kills’.

After tootling around Matakana for a while, a roadside grape stall (such delicious fat sweet grapes) gives up the secret location of the Ransom winery, one of a burgeoning family of small vineyards just north of Auckland. Inside its modernist concrete building we see vats of wine being prepared, and get a platter of food and a tasting ‘flight’ of small samples of their wines: Rose, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and a fruity blended Bordeaux to finish. I like the oaky Barrique Chardonnay best. At the next table, an ugly and pasty bunch of late-middle-aged kiwi/English, made-up with housepaint on trowels, announce in advance that they’re going to tell a deeply unfunny racist ‘joke’, and then do. I’m pruriently confirmed in my assumption that such foul-looking people are indeed foul, but Gareth rightly turns round and lets them know they’re disgusting. Their politely embarrassed noises aren’t too genuine.

Sun shining in earnest we hit the Auckland traffic and float past the city skyline across the harbour. Back at Penney Avenue, within minutes Megan is checking the status of her sales on TradeMe and Gareth is pushing a lawnmower around the garden. The overflowing mailbox yields a packet from Graeme in Tuatapere containing the clip-on sunglasses and Maglite I lost on the return flight from Stewart Island, which is somehow also full of tiny ants.