The Catlins to Taupo (05-09 Jan)
Over breakfast in a wooden shelter at Porpoise Bay, the place where we had camped after our encounters with dolphins and penguins, we watched the black flecks of a sealion playing in the calm waters below the leeward side of the campsite. On the opposite shore great waves like walls of green marble were still pounding in, tossing up towering mounds of spray. I drove us back through the narrow lanes of the campsite as Emma checked the map and we both checked-off our wildlife wish-lists from the day before. Hector’s dolphins, smallest and rarest in the world, tick. Yellow-eyed penguins, rarest in the world, tick. Hooker’s sealion, rarest in the world, tick.
“Stop!” Emma yelled in one of those whisper-screams that one does when trying not to disturb something close and dangerous. A sealion was lying half on, half off the road and nearly under our wheels. We watched it for a while. It was, we think, a young male. He had dark panda eyes and patchy brown fur, like a mangy labrador but pretty. He was contorting his body in lazy, lolling curves and flaps, craning his head to the sky before dropping his chin to the ground and slowly closing his dopey eyes. We later heard on what soon became our favourite radio station, Radio National New Zealand, that the same sealion had caused a mild panic by terrorising the campsite, rolling on people’s tents.
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Haast Beach to The Catlins (02-04 Jan)
We were awoken in the night in our tent by a flash of light so strong we saw it through our closed eyes. A few seconds of rainless silence followed, then BOOM!! As the lightening came overhead we lay awake contemplating our safety on that flooded field but we soon fell soundly back to sleep.
We rose to a fog but it was mild and dry and a glow from one side hinted at a sun trying to come to our aid. The tent was lying on the edge of a large puddle amidst many other new ones. Our neighbours emerged from their mobile home and offered us a consolatory mug of tea as we swiftly packed away the tent in case it was going to rain again. We needn’t have feared. Just after making the road the fog dispersed to give us a clear sky. The road south followed the Haast river which had swollen in the downpour and spread itself across much of the valley floor. Rising on both sides of us were mountains which wore the breaking clouds like cotton toupées.
Now we could see why Crowded House wrote “Four Seasons in One Day”. Now we had the song stuck in our heads for much of the rest of the trip.
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Arthur’s Pass to Haast Beach (31 Dec - 01 Jan)
We had pitched the claustrophobic alpine tent, which cousin Mark had leant us, under a tree in a wooded corner of a basic campsite signposted as Lake Pearson. We had made out little besides a gravel track and a few parked campervans in the headlights the night before but, awaking just after dawn on the last day of the first decade of the millennium, we were surprised at how lovely our impulsive selection was. Our bright yellow tent stood just a couple of strides from the lake, which had been obscured in darkness before. Now it lay under a gently rising mist and a family of ducks skittering about on the water. The steep mountain bank on the other side rose a short way before disappearing behind a layer of cloud. The sun, shining like a platinum coin, was poking through a gap which revealed a snowy peak in the near-distance. It was exhilarating to feel far from anywhere and well inside the mountains.
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Wellington to Arthur’s Pass (29-30 Dec)
If you’ve read this far you’ve come on a long slog even just covering the past two weeks of meeting our kiwi relatives. The scene changes again now as we drive into a new travel adventure. We had five weeks in New Zealand through which our priority was to see family, many for the first time, but we had hoped somehow to see the mighty, rugged South Island in that time. Alas, budget wasn’t going to let us run that far. We didn’t mind, we felt blessed to have seen and done so much already. But auntie Wendy wasn’t going to have it that way. She had been expecting us to arrive with threadbare pockets so she took us to one side and told us that she would give us a gift of a considerable sum, passed down from our gran, who would have wanted to do the same if she had still been alive.
I won’t linger and fawn over the support we received for fear of embarrassment. However it is the least we can do to say that the next few days of our escapades are dedicated to Wendy and Rod, two of the kindest and most genuine people we know.
Enough! Onwards! Engine start and away….
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Inspired by reading the guide book Emma had it in mind to see one more place on North Island if we could get there, the town of Napier. We were about to head to South Island and it was a good time to pass by Napier but it was difficult to get to without transport. Then it just happened that cousin Bryan was planning to take his wife Venessa to Napier too, at exactly the same time. Wondrous luck.
The four of us drove southeast, out of the hills and down to a lowland boardering the east coast. The land down there, sheltered from the pernicious blast of the Westerlies, is considered mediterranean and as such is one of the country’s prime wine regions, best known as Hawke’s Bay. A curious natural feature announced our arrival there. A line of bluffs standing a few hundred metres back from the sea overlooks the coastal plain on which Napier is stretched. That land had not existed before 1931, or at least had not been land as such because it was under the sea before that. A hefty earthquake change everything, raising the seabed to meet the sky, and razing Napier to meet the earth. In a spirit of resilient optimism the city was rebuilt promptly and, to its and our lasting fortune, this happened to be done at a time when people were in the habit of making very pretty buildings. Thus a large portion of Napier’s centre was rebuilt in the Art Deco style, in pastille tones with curved corners, colourful stripes, skinny window frames and elegant lettering announcing building and company names with a kind of styling confidence.
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In a careless moment of event organisation far back in history, Christmas Eve was launched on our auntie Wendy’s birthday, what cheek. Nevertheless, with extra reason to celebrate, Wendy and Rod’s farmhouse was busy with cheery relatives and fizzing champagne when we were handed back there that day. Us Young’uns later took the party to the hottest joint in town, the Tokoroa Club, the local town’s sports members club. We sank pints and shouted at each other until we were hoarse over the din of the local rock covers band, amidst a thick crowd of ruddy, grizzly locals in great spirits.
With a head fogged by beer I awoke to cousin Mark knocking on our door at 05:00 on Christmas morning. I joined Cathy and Mark, the newly-weds who had postponed their honeymoon to keep the milk flowing from their herd, driving over to their milkshed on a misty 3° morning. The sun rose through the glimmering pipes of the shed and slowly warmed the day. After we’d emptied the cows I returned to find a pair of red sports socks lying outside our bedroom door. Mark and Cathy had sneakily pulled together stockings full of treats for us to open over coffee and breakfast, as the last of the beer mist finally burned off.
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I hope all this family stuff isn’t a little boring for the outsider, after the previous three months of travel adventures. I want to tell a lot of what we did but the pages are draggin far behind our roaming feet. Details and small chapters have fallen off already but there’s no going back, otherwise I’ll never finish writing this bloody thing. To put the issue in perspective, I am drafting this post on paper in the departures lounge of Singapore Airport in early February before our final return to India (I am typing it now in England in the snow!), yet my writing has not yet reached Christmas. Oh well, back to it now, perhaps at more of a pace in the hope of catching up.
On 22 December we were passed to the last cluster of the Bland-side of the family, that of my cousin Sarah, her husband Craig and their two kids, Ben (15?) and Kate (13?). Determined not to let us leave their home city of Hamilton still thinking that it had nothing to show beyond a statue of a sexually liberated alien overlord, we were escorted to Hamilton’s very fine public gardens. Honestly, I don’t usually have much care for rose bushes and water features, give me wild land any day, but Hamilton’s gardens are exceptional. The themed areas, each covering and different era and country, are not only serene and captivating to walk through, you also get the feeling of actually learning something along the way - cultural history, ecology, art and architecture. I salute the makers of that transportive place.
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Cousin Michael is the first-born of my dad’s brother Alan. His family were next in the chain of hosts to take us on. He drove us to their home in Cambridge, a city near the northwestern corner of the main square-shaped bulk of North Island. The house lies on the outskirts of the city, on the “Leamington side” of the Waikato river which runs through the city. Driving close to the house we saw a patchwork of residential and equestrian plots spread thinly in broad blocks over a region of natural plains. The change from barbed wire to expensive wooden, plank fencing by the roadside was indicative of us entering New Zealand’s race-horse capital. Mares and their foals were shining in the sunlight on expansive, pristine paddocks. A wide range of native and imported tree species had been planted by the road too, they are the other thing Cambridge is famous for.
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Auntie Wendy took Emma and I about forty minutes’ drive away to Tirau, no less than the corrugated-metal capital of New Zealand. She had made one phone call the day before and our itinerary until Christmas, taking in three different families of my relatives, was set. We were to start with the ones who launched the whole New Zealand arm of my family, uncle Alan and auntie Hilary. Alan, my father’s brother, moved to NZ after finishing his education in England and got work as an agent for the dairy industry. Over the years he became a farm advisor and established his own little plot on the edge of Te Poi, a village near to the town of Matamata, in the Waikato region of North Island like our other uncle and aunt’s farm. His house was snugly placed in the centre of his farmland, looking over a steady declivity of grassland to the foot of the Kaimai mountains. The Kaimai (meaning “food” and “me” in Maori, in respect of the fertility of the surrounding land perhaps) formed a steep, straight wall running across the horizon. It is a spectacular and peace-invoking spot, they are very fortunate people.
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Chapter 1 - Over the Paddocks
Let’s pick up after Peter and his bulging, expectant fiancée Kylie have dropped us at my Auntie Wendy’s farmhouse just outside Tokoroa, a little above the centre of North Island. I’ve mentioned the Teletubby-esque landscape of grassy hillocks which pervades the Waikato region of the island and that’s exactly what it’s like around Toke (as the locals call the town). The old main road from the north to Taupo comes through Toke, it’s a fearsome thoroughfare heaving with about one car every twenty minutes. Off that busy highway is a back-road servicing a few disparate farms, off that another smaller road still. Halfway down that road is a turning into a gravel driveway which rises in a string of steep arcs to a flat, square plot of land where Rod and Wendy made there home a quarter of a century ago. I’ve wondered all my life what their house looked like, how different life could be on the opposite corner of the world, and I was shocked at just how idyllic the reality was when we found it at last.
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