Kiwi Tracks (25 page)

The backpackers lodge in Gisborne is an imposing former convent, built in 1930. I ring the doorbell, feeling dwarfed by the massive wooden front doors. A woman with heavy hips and a flowery skirt opens them. She shows me around the convent, with its high-ceilinged rooms and rimu-wood cupboards, floors and staircases. The lounge is recognisable as the old chapel, with high stained-glass windows and two confessionals built into the wall, but now it is furnished with a pool table and a cinema-sized television.

I ask the manager, as I follow her around: ‘What’s there to do in Gisborne?’

‘Nothing,’ she replies.

‘Sounds good to me.’ No bungee jumping, no jet boating, no jet skis, no rafting, no drunken fishermen. There is so little action here, even the convent closed down for lack of pregnant unmarried teenagers, before being resurrected as a backpackers lodge and rooming house for itinerant vegetable pickers. Gisborne is an authentic New Zealand town and that is enough to enchant me.

I select one of the rooms formerly occupied by nuns. It’s my first overnight stay in a convent, and as I lie in bed staring at the high ceiling, I try to imagine what the previous occupants of this bed thought and dreamt every night as they lay here. Were the nuns lonely? Did they miss home? Did they dream of romance?

I console my lonely self with the concept of a nun’s lifelong celibacy and devotion to God. Perhaps it is auspicious, lying alone in a nun’s bed in a convent. I mean, there could be a dormant hot line from this mattress to heaven just waiting to be reactivated. Lying prone in bed, I press my palms together, close my eyes and cast out a supplication, just in case.

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The road passes alongside endless stretches of deserted beaches. There are few houses or settlements. An old furniture-removal truck, apparently a holiday home, lies half-buried in the sand dunes, stranded like a shipwreck.

A young sheep shearer gives me a lift to Hicks Bay where I find a backpackers lodge situated on a small cove, with its own beach. The arrival of a German woman interrupts my reading at the kitchen table. She unpacks her food bags. Despite her poor English, I understand that she is a scientist, homoeopath and author.

She explains: ‘I use a number of different oils extracted from plants grown in New Zealand, including the manuka bush, or tea-tree. These oils help many of my patients in Germany recover from illnesses that Western medicine has been unable to cure,
including cancer and depression. I am here to collect oil extracts from my suppliers and to find new sources, maybe even new oils. And what about you? What are you doing here?’

‘Mostly walking in the rainforest for four months,’ I reply.

‘Is it good?’

‘Very good. I feel a tangible sense of wellbeing. I imagine it’s as if I’m on some kind of drug.’

She laughs. ‘You are. The nose is the hot line to the brain.’ She continues, as she selects food for her dinner. ‘There is no doubt that there is a psycho-chemical reaction. The fragrances from the forest, including perhaps the manuka bush, the tea-tree, are being absorbed directly by the brain.’ She chops garlic. ‘It is not surprising you feel so good. That is what my therapy with depressed patients is all about; to absorb the healing properties of the manuka oil and other trees. The only difference is that you are wandering around in the rainforest, going through the aromatherapy in a natural setting, while my patients are in a sterile clinic, doing the same thing, in less harmonious surroundings. You are lucky.’

She scrapes the chopped garlic into a pan. ‘It is a good idea doing what you are doing: looking after your soul and body, before something is wrong with it. Preventive medicine and therapy is much more effective than curing. We should all invest the time in a long walk, especially in the rainforests, every year, just as we have life-insurance policies with an annual premium that we must pay. People are too busy making money to worry about their health until it is too late. Then, if they are so fortunate, they come to see me and maybe get a little bit better. If they are not so fortunate, they are ending up in hospital, or maybe they are dead.’

I continue around East Cape and a Maori schoolteacher pulls over at the empty junction off Hicks Bay, to pick me up. She drives slowly and speaks quietly, with deliberation and in a self-effacing
manner. In response to my persistent questions, she tells me about her tribe, the Ngati Porou, and the land they were handed back through the Waitangi Tribunal.

‘We produce farming and forestry products now. The farm is managed and run by staff under a board of trustees. From the profits, educational grants are given to applicants and seed capital for small businesses. I am proud of the way our trust is run, and what it is doing on behalf of my people. It is managed on business lines and employees are hired through local advertisements. There is no corruption and no favouritism. It’s the first of such lands given back to the Maori that has become completely independent.’

The road is winding and narrow, with little traffic either way. She waves at the drivers we pass. The few homes are scattered, isolated, almost hidden in the bush.

‘Can you speak Maori?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, but not very well. I moved up to East Cape from the South Island as an adult. Down in Dunedin, where I grew up, there are more Chinese now than there are Maori. This’ – she indicates with a sweep of a hand – ‘is originally my home area. My ancestors were forcibly moved away from here to the South Island last century, as punishment because they pulled out the surveying stakes of the pakeha settlers when they took our land.’

Her Maori history is learnt not only from listening to her grandmother, but from extensive reading. ‘Heaps of Maori in the North Island can speak Maori. They learn it from their grandparents. My own grandparents were beaten for speaking the Maori language at school, but now my people are learning to speak our own language again.’

I have noticed that the Maori talk of ‘my people’ as if there were some inherent solidarity to being Maori. I suppose there is, when they are aligned against the pakeha.

‘I’m going full on to learn Maori,’ she continues. ‘When I moved up here, I had distant relatives I had never met, but they accepted me anyway. That is the way it is with Maori. If you are from the same canoe, the same mountain, the same river, then you
are treated as family. I can tell you more about the seven different tribes of the great
waka
canoes than I can tell you about the different counties in New Zealand.’

She pulls over to the side of the road to drop me off in front of her school. ‘I’d invite you in for a tea, but then I’d be late for my class. If you are still here during my lunchbreak, I’ll come and get you and we can have lunch together.’

Although marked on the map, Potaka has only a schoolhouse and nothing else. Must be difficult for touring cyclists planning to buy food, when they get to places marked on their maps only to find nothing there, not even a store. I lean my pack against a fence and wait.

The tops of the monocultured radiata pine-covered hills are hidden in mist. It looks like it is going to rain. To pass the time I stretch, cut my fingernails with the scissors of my Swiss army knife, examine hangnails with the knife’s magnifying glass and pull out offending nose hairs with the tweezers, which makes me teary-eyed. Then I put the handy knife away and collect garbage lying beside the road.

A small hatchback pulls up, driven by a young man with a shaved head, earrings and a baseball cap worn backwards. He wears a T-shirt printed with the motto ‘Life is short, play hard’. Leaning over, he looks out the open passenger window. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Anywhere,’ I reply. He has a tuft of yellow beard right under his lower lip and nowhere else, as if it were something that is not supposed to be there; like fried egg yoke dribbling down his chin. I want to wipe it off for him.

‘Cool.’ He says it, kuh-ool, just like the others. ‘I’m Scott and I’m cruising around looking for good surf.’

‘Crisp,’ I reply.

‘Crisp?’

‘Yeah, means cool, but it’s cooler to say “crisp” than it is to say “cool”,’ I bullshit.

We haul his surfboard out of the car and strap it onto the roof rack so there is room for me in the car. I sit in the passenger
seat, holding a dangerously flicking fishing rod away from my face.

‘On holiday?’ I ask as we pick up momentum on the empty road. This guy should also be on a race track.

He laughs, his eyes hidden by Ninja sunglasses. ‘Don’t have a job.’

‘How do you manage to pay for your surfing?’ I turn around to look at the back of the car, stuffed full of food and camping equipment.

‘Live cheap in a tent on a beach, smoke dope instead of drinking alcohol; marijuana is everywhere. I live off the dole. Some of my friends even manage to have their names listed twice, so they can collect double the dole. Inefficient system,’ he concludes happily.

At Waihu Bay, my laid-back driver stops and removes binoculars from the glove compartment. He examines the surf. ‘No good wraps, onshore wind and the waves are just crashing.’ The weather is misty and it looks as if it could start raining. We continue driving, and around a bend in the narrow road he slams on the brakes to avoid three horses ambling casually down the middle of the road. When we continue on our way I keep both hands holding onto the dashboard, eyes riveted on the road. The only time we slow down is when we go up steep hills and the small Japanese engine struggles with the load. Going down hills, it’s as if his big toe is glued to the accelerator pedal, which in turn is welded to the floorboards. At Raukokore, where he thankfully stops yet again in his serious but esoteric examination of the surf, I explore a wooden church. The church, built on the wind-swept peninsula in 1894, has a hand-written note tacked to the front door: ‘Please excuse the fishy smell. We have a family of penguins nesting right under the floor by the door. Mother penguin is very busy bringing in fish to feed the
whanau
.’

We continue, whizzing past an ornately carved
marae
building in a school ground. Scott tells me: ‘Some of my best friends are Maori but I resent the fact that they get scholarships to go to
universities, overseas or here. At school, OK they were clever, but they were lazy as could be too, and now they’re getting scholarships and grants from the Maori trusts.’ He hands me a bag of crisps and takes a corner at excessive speed, one hand on the steering wheel. The car rolls alarmingly and I keep both hands on the dashboard, in case we meet another posse of horses straddling the centreline. Released from my clutches, the fishing rod flicks continuously in my face.

Scott continues: ‘I also resent the fact that 90 per cent of prisoners in jail are Maori. It angers me when land is given back to the Maori and they sell it to Koreans or Japs who exploit it to make money, and not necessarily in the best interests of New Zealanders.’ He takes off his baseball cap to scratch his bald scalp. ‘Maori are great people. My best mates are Maori. But just a few bad ones are spoiling it for the others. If I were prime minister, I would give the foreigners five years to sell the land back to New Zealanders. As a Kiwi I would be willing to accept a lower standard of living to pay for that, just so we can have our land and keep New Zealand the way it is, rather than sell it all and have no land in the future.’

He stops to examine the surf at yet another beach. I sit patiently as he studies the wave action. It starts to rain, and despite the slippery road we cruise through the landscape as fast as before. He launches into the Maori issue with renewed vigour.

‘When we play rugby, we do the
haka
as a challenge to the opposing team. Right?’ He studies me expectantly.

‘Right,’ I reply, keeping my eyes on the road.

‘OK, look at New Zealand’s national All Blacks rugby team. They are mixed pakeha and Maori. However, the Maoris have their own Maori team, with no whites in it. That’s racist. There’s no all-white rugby team. They’d never allow an all-white rugby team. But an all-Maori rugby team? That’s OK. They want it all their way, there’s no give and take.’

I sit there quietly. He has been generous enough to give me a lift and besides, if I start challenging him, he is likely to throw me out.

Perhaps he takes my silence as tacit approval of his opinions. ‘Another thing that gets up my nose is this stuff about the Maori being conservationists. In prehistoric New Zealand, there were flightless birds called the moa. There were eleven species, some not much bigger than geese and others that were giants weighing three times as much as that horse out there.’ He points at a scraggly horse in a paddock, its lower lip hanging loose from its mouth, a lazy back leg cocked. ‘The biggest moa were the tallest birds that ever lived. They survived changes in climate and vegetation brought about by ice ages and volcanic eruptions, but the Maori exterminated the moa in a few hundred years. So don’t tell me Maori are conservationists.’

Rolling about on the dashboard is a paperback,
A Good Keen Man
by Barry Crump. To keep it from sliding about I pick it up and flip through the pages. Mr Crump, a hunter of some repute according to his autobiography, details how many deer he slaughtered over a period of years.