Kiwi Tracks (10 page)

Who is asking for a fight? I am lying helpless in a sleeping-bag feeling sicker than a dog. This cartoon character has come out of the forest beating his chest, defining his territory. What happened to the nice bloke I talked to on the phone, who was so understanding, calling me ‘mate’, telling me
we
could work out the payment? I do not feel like a tourist with a minor problem that can easily be sorted out in the morning with the management. Either this wild man should be on stage, or locked up. ‘Look, I think I’ll just quietly slip out of here and resolve the finances in the morning,’ I say meekly, as I extricate myself from the bag.

‘How are you going to get to Akaroa?’ he asks.

‘I’ll walk.’ It is now past sunset and almost dark. I drape the sleeping-bag over my shoulder and head to the bunkroom to collect the rest of my gear.

Then, out of the blue, he offers me a bit of advice. ‘There’s a backpackers hut a hundred metres up the hill. You can see the smoke coming out the chimney. They have a vacancy.’

The Kiwis are all silent. The farmer mumbles derogatory asides: ‘Bloody foreigners are taking over the country.’ With my tail between my legs, I walk up to the backpackers lodge in darkness.
A pleasant Swiss manager shows me the ‘cabins’, outside the farmhouse. The physical setting is lovely but the ‘cabins’ are the most dilapidated, hillbilly structures I’ve seen anywhere. I say to the manager, ‘Back in Canada, you would not be able to get a permit to operate something like this. Could you do this in Switzerland?’

‘No, I’d be in jail.’ It is the only time he says no. The rest of the time he says: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ He looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I opt for the cabin that looks least likely to collapse on top of me in the middle of the night. When I follow the manager back to the main farm building to retrieve my backpack, in the gloom I see my adversary sitting on a sofa glowering at me through blood-shot red eyes.

‘Is this your place as well?’ I ask, nervously grabbing my pack.

‘Yeah.’

Fuck.

Return to beginning of chapter

As I start to hitchhike again, a woman stops to pick me up almost before my thumb is out. She is barefoot, with close-cropped hair and a broad smile. ‘Shove your pack in the back,’ she says, opening the tailgate of the station wagon, which is filled with pillows and futons and clothes, all tossed about. I pitch the pack in with a practised motion, landing it neatly on a futon.

I tell her about the incident with the farmer. ‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ she commiserates. ‘Picked up a hitchhiker, a girl, and she was still so upset with her reception there she started crying when she told me what happened to her.’

I don’t want to go on about this negative experience so I ask her: ‘What about you? Where are you from?’

She tells me about herself as we drive to Christchurch.

‘I was born in Gore, inland and north of Invercargill, and moved to Christchurch when I was still a child. When I was fourteen
I met a Maori from Akaroa. At sixteen I married him and had my first child. Both my children are at university now, and I’m divorced. I did my big “OE”, you know, our Overseas Experience? During my seven months in London I became a Buddhist and a Shiatsu therapist. I loved it there; I could be whoever I wanted to be, totally anonymous. No one cared what I did. When I came back to Christchurch, I almost left again. It seemed so conservative and small-minded. I felt stifled. I cried myself to sleep that first night back; it was such a flat, empty feeling. I had changed so much, but none of my friends had, so it was hard to relate to them. Christchurch seemed so quiet compared to London. That was a few years ago.’

‘Has it changed since then?’

‘A lot, especially in the last three years. It’s becoming more cosmopolitan. Attitudes are changing fast among the pakeha.’

‘Pakeha?’

‘Whites. I’m glad I decided to stay in New Zealand now, but for a while I wasn’t. Too many guys with the attitude you just encountered.’ She is silent for a while as we drive through the rolling countryside. ‘Now I’m taking courses in the Maori language.’

‘But you’re no longer married to a Maori?’

‘Always been interested in Maori culture, even before I met my husband. I love the Maori legends, their songs, stories, dance. Maoridom captivates me.’ She gets animated as she talks. ‘It’s strange because I feel like a Maori, even if I’m not. When my husband and I divorced, I was upset that my ties to Maoridom might be cut, but then I discovered I had Maori relations, a great-uncle in Bluff. That made me happy, really happy, like I had Maori blood in me. It explained why I identified so much with the Maori people. I felt a Maori after all, and proud of it. But when I went to visit my relatives in Bluff, I found out my great-uncle was Spanish, not Maori. Then I had a real identity crisis.’ She nods, remembering. ‘I explained my affinity for everything Maori through having a Maori relation, and when I discovered I wasn’t a Maori at all, it kind of pulled the carpet out from under my feet.
I became withdrawn, depressed.’ She is quiet as we drive through impressive farmland.

‘And then I figured: this land is of the Maori. They’ve been here for over a thousand years. I too am of this land, born and bred, therefore I’ve got Maori in me too. That’s good enough, whether there are blood ties or not.’ She turns to look at me. ‘Then I was happy again. I could understand my identification with the Maori culture and history. It’s all a part of this land called New Zealand and I’m a New Zealander.’

I like that story.

She drops me off at a backpackers lodge in Christchurch, where I find myself with an Irish roommate who has spent the last three weeks in New Zealand. He has official ‘Government of New Zealand’ papers spread all over his bed.

‘Jesus, if I’d known it was going to be so cold, I wouldn’t have come here,’ he says, pulling on a jumper. He has been travelling around on a backpackers bus, but bailed out when everyone else started doing all the big adventures and put peer pressure on him to do the same. ‘Couple of hundred bucks to do a bungee jump,’ he exclaims in his Irish lilt. ‘Thank God I didn’t fall for that one.’ He shakes his head at how close he came to being parted from his money on numerous occasions, and counts the days until his departure for Australia, where it is warmer. He goes out for dinner bundled in layers of clothes against the cold. Good thing he never tried tramping down in Fiordland.

While unpacking my bags I cannot help but notice the papers, which he has thrown in the bin between the two beds. I read the words ‘Self-assessment Guide for Residence in New Zealand’ and pull them out. He must have picked up the application forms for immigration to New Zealand in London on his way over. The Immigration Officer at New Zealand House has attached a note to the brown envelope informing him the current pass mark for immigration is twenty-six points. It sounds like the daily fluctuation of currency exchange rates, or the level of the stock market index. I sit on my bed and calculate points for a ‘quick self-assessment’ under the ‘General Skills’ category. I get the maximum
twelve points for education and the maximum ten points for work experience. No one has offered me a job, so I lose those five potential additional points. Two points are offered for the capital I would bring over with me. No spouse, so I get no additional credits from a failed marriage and apparently zero credit for broken hearts either. If I married a Kiwi woman, I would not have to worry about calculating points at all; I would be in like Flynn. I barely squeak under the wire and only get two points for age; if I were fifteen years younger, I would get ten points. I add up the points and it comes to exactly twenty-six.

If I wanted to, I could settle here. But I’d have to make up my mind fast. If I wait another year, I’ll be too old to get the paltry two points for just being warm and alive.

I pick up my poste-restante mail from the Christchurch central post office, the first letters I have had in five weeks. Included is a package with a home-made Advent calendar, which has messages written on some twenty-five sealed red envelopes to be opened and read each day until Christmas. I sort through this treasured mail while sitting on the steps of Cathedral Square. The letters drag me emotionally half a world away, and when I have finished reading them they leave me alone with my thoughts.

I listen vaguely as the Wizard, a bearded Christchurch character in an outrageous outfit, provocatively spouts off tired chauvinistic ideas about the place of women in society. Unlike Speakers Corner in London, no one heckles him. Perhaps they all agree. When the Wizard tires, another speaker replaces him. He climbs a stepladder he has brought with him and starts spouting how Jesus Christ came to earth to save us sinners. A young man in torn jeans and long hair ridicules him and the evangelist threatens the fellow with a thumping in return. The jeering continues until the evangelist steps down from the ladder and really does thump the persistent heckler. A shoving match ensues before the young man takes off, to mutter profanities under his
breath from a safer distance. Satisfied, the proselytiser of goodwill towards all men climbs back on his stepladder.

He shakes his fist and points at the motley crew assembled in front of him. ‘I’m sick of you people getting up my nose. And Jesus Christ’ – his forefinger indicates the sky – ‘is sick of people getting up his nose.’ He dramatically thrusts with his forefinger as if he were trying to stick it up someone’s nose. ‘But I’m here to tell you in no uncertain terms, Jesus is going to get up your noses’ – he points to us – ‘like you wouldn’t believe, on the Day of Reckoning.’

Recovered from whatever it is that ailed me, I hitchhike north up the eastern coast to Kaikoura. When the Kiwi nurse giving me a ride stops at a local gas station to fill the car with petrol, I pick up a copy of the
Northern Outlook
.

The front page is dominated by the headline: ‘CAMPERS DIVE FOR COVER TO AVOID SHOTS FROM HELICOPTER’.

Campers cowered behind a vehicle for protection against shots fired from a helicopter spotlighting a deer above the Loch Katrine bach settlement on Saturday night … At about 9.45 pm several shots were fired from a semi-automatic weapon in the helicopter as it followed the animal down the hill … A group of campers were gathered around a campfire on the beach. Some of these people took shelter behind a vehicle as the shooting got close. ‘I’ve seen helicopters shooting deer in the area for thirty years, but this was the most blatant example of a flying cowboy I’ve ever seen,’ a witness said.

I ask the nurse what a ‘bach’ is, pronouncing ‘bach’ as in Johann Sebastian Bach.

‘Ah yeah, you mean a bach,’ she replies, pronouncing it ‘batch’. ‘That’s what you’d call a cabin or a cottage. They call it a crib in the woopwoops down south.’

I show her the article as we drink a couple of soft drinks. ‘Dangerous out there,’ I observe.

‘Is it what!’ she replies. ‘Too many trigger-happy lunatics lurking around with loaded rifles, bad eyesight and even worse judgement. Got be an Armed Defender with a reflective red flak jacket and helmet to survive a bloody walk in the bush nowadays.’

I gather she isn’t a hunter.

At the Kaikoura information office, the usual adventures are offered to tourists, but there is an innovative one I have not noticed before: ‘Possum hunting’. For a few dollars you can get equipped with a gun, accompany a local psychotic and blast a few deadly possums out of the trees.