Kiwi Tracks (29 page)

‘Sometimes I see young visitors on the backpacker buses. They cross the harbour on the ferry where you have a beautiful view of the hills, the church and historic buildings. It’s easy to imagine what it was like one hundred years ago when there would be thirty schooners anchored, waiting to load up with kauri gum or logs or timber. But nowadays, you’ll see all these young passengers intently playing cards on the bus, or sleeping off their hangovers, not even vaguely interested in what’s going on around them. At the end of the day, if we can’t cater to the more ecologically and culturally sensitive traveller, we’ll end up with tourists coming here for the drinking, bungee jumping and jet boating. But they
can do that anywhere, and we’ll have lost an opportunity to have a tourist industry that encourages Kiwis to examine their own traditions.’

Tomorrow, Lisa and I will continue up to Cape Reinga, where Te Moana-a-Rehua, the man-sea of the Maori, the colder and rougher Tasman Sea, meets the woman-sea, Te Tai-o-Whitirea, the Pacific Ocean. I sit in Phil’s library and read about Northland. To the Maori, Cape Reinga is known as Te Rerenger Wairua, leaping place of the spirits. It was here, the Maori believed, the dead should depart the island to rejoin their ancestors in the half-mythical island known as Hawaiki.

The books in the library whet my appetite to walk up to this last point of land where my trip will end. I feel sentimental about my departure. Although I have been travelling for four months, sleeping in a different bed almost every night, I am not tired, nor fed up. New Zealand is growing on me.

It takes us no time to hitch to Kaitaia, our staging point for Ninety Mile Beach. Hurtling along the road, we look vainly for the Brit soldiering his way northwards. Lisa and I shop for food at a local supermarket and loaded with supplies we walk to the backpackers lodge. In the afternoon we draw the curtains in the lounge and watch the video of
Once Were Warriors
.

That evening, Lisa suggests: ‘Want to go to one of the local Maori pubs and find out for ourselves what it’s like?’

We head off to a Kaitaia pub where the local clientele is mostly Maori. Two men arm-wrestle at a stand-up table. One has a tattoo of a skull on his neck; his opponent has ‘Maori’ tattooed on his forehead. They look formidable with their pumped-up Popeye muscled arms. They all greet us warmly enough though, and smile amiably.

The violent images from the film we have just seen hardly seem applicable to these friendly people. A group of Maori women join the table of arm-wrestlers. While the men have
become bloated through years of beer consumption, many of the women are quite skeletal, with haggard looks which make them look old beyond their years. One has a badly broken nose. Guiltily, I realise Lisa fits in here, with her swollen black eye and cut face. She smiles at the people around her, and a man comes over to chat her up.

A sofa-sized man in his late fifties enters the bar and sidles up to me. ‘I don’t know them,’ he says, indicating the rest of the Maori in the bar, most of whom appear the worse for drink. ‘But if they tell me they are unemployed, then I have no sympathy for them. If you’ve got two arms and two legs’ – he holds out his worn hands – ‘and a head on your shoulders, then don’t give me this shit about the world being against you. Everyone has obstacles in front of them. You climb over them’ – he gesticulates with his hands – ‘or around them, but don’t sit back on the dole feeling sorry for yourself …’ He lets the sentence hang in the air before continuing: ‘They say 90 per cent of prisoners in jail are Maori. They also tell us, with respect to land rights, that there are no full-blooded Maoris left in New Zealand today. Well then, I can tell you how to change those statistics with just the stroke of a pen.’

‘How?’ I ask. I am overshadowed by his ironing-board shoulders on one side of me, and the huge Maori chatting up Lisa on the other.

‘The pakeha say there are no full-blooded Maoris. Then why don’t they admit that most prisoners are half English, a lot are half Scottish or Irish or Dalmatian, instead of saying the jails are so full of bloody Maoris?’

Return to beginning of chapter

While standing on the gravel shoulder, waiting for a ride up towards Ninety Mile Beach, we read a DOC pamphlet that Lisa has bought:

The whole of the northern tip of the North Island is steeped in Maori tradition. It is, in fact, the most spiritually significant area in the country, for it is here that after death all Maori spirits travel to the pohutukawa tree on the headland of Cape Reinga and descend into the underworld (Reinga) by sliding down a root to fall into the sea below. They climb out again on Ohaua, the highest point of the Three Kings Islands, to bid their last farewell before returning to the land of their ancestors.

Three Maori loggers give us a ride in their truck. They are exhausted, and don’t say a word; even the driver seems to be asleep, his eyes almost closed. They drop us off at a petrol station where we are picked up by an American woman who tells us the minute details of her life, non-stop, for the forty-five minutes we are with her. I barely listen to her autobiography and keep a lookout for the walking British publican. I believe I am going to beat him to the top, even if it has taken the two of us four months to get here from the bottom of the South Island.

We are dropped off at Te Paki stream, already more than halfway up Ninety Mile Beach. Lisa observes: ‘Almost the only words we said during the ride were to thank her at the end. She has no idea where we are from or who we are. We could write a short biography on her. We know the names of her children, her husband, why she took six months off from her family to wander around New Zealand, what she does for a living and why she quit.’

‘She just needs some time and space, someone to listen to her. She’s sorting it all out. She’ll be OK.’

It is drizzling, almost like a heavy mist, which cuts down on the glare and heat from the sun. On a clear day it must be unbearably hot walking across these mountains of dunes. The sand underfoot is slightly damp, rendering it more compact and relatively easy to climb. The moisture brings out the colour of the darker grains of sand, which are patterned like beautifully stained wood. From the top of a dune we can barely see through the mist and over the humps of sand to the indistinct grey ocean beyond. Winding south-east is Te Paki stream, recognisable even from a distance as a line of green vegetation, which acts as an effective
barrier to the encroachment of the dunes further inland. We leave the interior behind, the green paddocks dotted with heavy trees, contrasting strangely with the barren coastal dunes rising 150 metres high. At the top of a dune I wait for Lisa, who emerges from the drizzle and desolation like a character from a classic movie.

When Lisa had asked me if I wanted to join her on the walk up to Ninety Mile Beach, I had been ambivalent. On reflection, it is appropriate that I share this final walk with another tramper. All these months I have walked alone and met up with other foreign trampers in the evening. It is fitting now that I finish my odyssey the same way.

‘So we agree then to stay within sight of one another until we stop for lunch, and to break camp?’ I ask. I am worried she might remember her swollen eye and abandon me to the elements, my imagination and the possums. Although she has the tent, I have the cooking gear and most of the food.

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘I prefer to walk in front. Shall we make a direct line for the ocean?’

‘Once we get to Ninety Mile Beach, we head north along the coast. Should be easy enough.’ I look around at the scenery. The vague forms of dunes are dreamlike, adding to the ambience and heightening my nostalgia about this trip. After four months of wandering around New Zealand, my journey is ending. ‘Let’s take our time so we can enjoy it. We can stop whenever and wherever we want. We have everything we need with us.’

She agrees, striding down the slope of the dune and into the mist, leaving me following in her tracks. The desert landscape is featureless except for the ridgelines into which Lisa disappears. With the swirling mist and slight rainfall, there is a sense of transition, of passing into an ethereal world. The sand is devoid of life and the sea gives off what I imagine is an odour of death: a kind of a stale smell. It is easy to imagine how the Maori thought their spirits wandered up this desolate coast before moving on to an afterlife.

I lose sight of Lisa in the folds of dunes and cannot find her footsteps in the damp sand. It is not so much that it is difficult to
follow her trail; rather, it is because I have not been concentrating, so lost am I in my own world of thoughts. This sense of isolation is abruptly shattered when I climb over the last small dune overlooking Ninety Mile Beach. Lisa is standing on the beach, staring at me with her mouth open, eyes wide in astonishment. Up and down the flat expanse of beach are hundreds of utes and thousands of fishermen standing deep in the surf, casting with long fishing rods into the ocean waves. She laughs when she sees my look of disbelief. We thought we were experiencing a special sense of wilderness isolation and spirituality, but the reality is that we are in a sandpit surrounded by a thousand happy Kiwi fishermen.

I slide out of the dunes onto Ninety Mile Beach. A fisherman steps from under the canvas tarpaulin stretched from the back of his ute and stares at me. The back gate of the ute is open and a gas stove with several burners sits on top, supplied by a large tank of gas. Fatty food cooks noisily on the stove.

His frying pan contains eggs floating like life rafts in a sea of fat, with bits of charred bacon clinging on like desperate survivors. ‘Steak, eggs and bacon. Want some?’ he asks, appraising our lean backpacks.

‘No thanks. Why are there so many fishermen? There must be thousands of you.’

‘Fishing contest for the best snapper,’ he replies, flipping the eggs. Despite the overcast weather, his face is florid and burnt to a crispy red. The ute faces the sea, providing shelter against the prevailing wind. He has dug a pit behind the vehicle so he can use the tailgate as a table. It is a mobile bach.

‘You camping here?’ I ask.

‘Nah, we fish different stretches of the beach each day.’

‘It looks like a lot of work setting it all up just for the day,’ Lisa observes.

‘Yeah, but it’s cold in the sea, so it’s worth it,’ he explains. One of the fishermen waddles up from the surf, pulling at the shoulder straps of his wetsuit. He examines us, with our heavy backpacks and hiking boots, as if we were astronauts. He pulls the
top of the wetsuit off and puts on a T-shirt with the motto ‘Groper all day long’ printed on the back.

Eager to move on, we thread our way through the line of vehicles. A sizeable ray and a small shark are either stranded on the sand, or more likely have been thrown there after being caught. We walk to the end of the official fishing area, marked by a Land Rover with a flag advertising beer waving from an antenna.

‘This the end of the fishing area?’ I ask the long-haired Maori man cutting bait on the bonnet of the vehicle.

‘Yeah,’ he replies, not bothering to look at us.

‘Seems a lot of the fishermen are pretty far out into the surf,’ Lisa observes.

He looks up at the waves, which almost engulf some of the anglers casting their lines into the waves. ‘Yeah, had to rescue five of them yesterday. Got pulled out by the rip-tide.’

‘How’d you rescue them?’

‘Rescue teams drive up and down the beach with a boat. As soon as someone gets sucked out, we radio for them and they come and reel him in.’

‘Must be dangerous,’ Lisa says.

‘Yeah.’

‘All that for a snapper the size of a big shoe,’ she adds, a comment more intended for herself than anyone else.

‘Some are a lot bigger than that,’ the Maori says.

We continue walking to the end of the beach, to Scott Point, which is marked by a rocky peninsula. The tide is out, revealing a carpet of mussels clinging onto the exposed shoreline, growing so thickly, mussel on mussel, it is impossible to see the bare rock underneath.

‘Let’s make lunch,’ I suggest. ‘One of those pasta dishes, with seafood pictured on the packet. We can boil up the mussels and mix them with the pasta.’

We scramble along the rocky promontory to find the biggest, fattest mussels. Within minutes, we have collected more than enough in our two pots. We fill the pots with water and find a
cave offering protection from the strong onshore winds. It is some twenty metres deep and ten metres high.

‘I hope this isn’t one of those caves where the Maori used to leave their dead,’ Lisa worries. ‘It feels like it.’ We look around the natural cavity, but the only things living are crabs and huge spiders suspended in silver webs hanging from the roof. It smells like death; the same smell as earlier.

Lisa says: ‘It’s eerie in here, let’s get out, I don’t like the feeling. I think there are ghosts.’

Safely outside the cave, we attach the gas canisters to both of our stoves, boiling water for the pasta and mussels. Placed in the boiling water, the mussels open, revealing succulent apricot-coloured flesh. We extract the meat from the shells and mix it with the pasta, adding the powdered flavouring. Mixed with a kilo of fresh mussels, the pasta actually tastes of seafood for the first time.