Kiwi Tracks (12 page)

Candy sits outside on the porch steps, surrounded by four more drooling males: two Americans, a Canadian and a Dane. They are so busy flattering her that I involuntarily stand apart. This is the first track for all of them. She asks me which tracks I have done.

Given an opening, I answer as if naming nature products bought in a tramper’s version of the Body Shop: ‘Rakiura,
Milford, Caples, Routeburn, Kepler.’ I don’t tell them I tried to do the Banks Peninsula but got booted off. I am fast moving out of my role as ‘new boy’ and becoming somewhat of an authority, a veteran tramping guru.

‘Which did you like best?’ Candy asks.

I think about this and stroke my unkempt beard in a show of sagacity. ‘It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Depends on the weather, your mood, who else was in the huts. They’re all different.’ I am still not used to how these various tracks are neatly packaged, marketed and put on the shelves for consumption. ‘Done the Milford’ – as if that was all that was needed to explain the nature experience.

Candy asks me where else in the world I have travelled. When I tell her, she says: ‘Sounds like you’ve got the travel bug.’

‘It’s not a bug. A bug is curable,’ I reply.

They sit around a candle on the porch and show no signs of going to bed. An overweight German, with his daughter next to him, snores loudly and contentedly on one of the mattresses put out for the overflow of trampers. I withdraw from the conversation about the best places to stay in backpackers’ Asia and walk the length of the beach and back. The peacefulness of the waves lapping on the empty shore, the sounds from the bush, the stars, all emphasise my solitude. It’s an exquisite evening and it feels intense being alone on an idyllic beach under a black sky full of stars.

When I return the others are still talking. I brush my teeth then plug my ears with wax balls so that I cannot hear the snoring. Even inside the hut, it is cold. I slip into my heavy-duty sleeping-bag and am soon asleep. Sometime later I feel someone climb onto the bunk, then crawl into the flimsy sleeping-bag next to mine. I turn to see who has disturbed me and recognise Candy’s curly blonde hair, strands of which are close enough to tickle my nose. I lift my head to see how crowded the mattresses are. On her side of the bunk is plenty of room, next to a couple who are huddled together, barely taking up any of their allotted mattress space. Ditto the couple next to me. There is plenty of elbow-room for Candy to sleep nice and secluded on her own designated mattress.
I lie down again but she insinuates herself closer, her hands almost shoved under my body. I do not roll away. I think I hear her whimper, but I have wedged my earplugs firmly in place and cannot distinguish sounds effectively. I lie there absolutely still, too dopey to remove the earplugs and find out whether the murmuring is just the fantasy of a Lonely Guy who has been travelling on his own too long. For all I know, she could be whispering sweet nothings to me.

She is still asleep when I leave the hut.

Timing my departure perfectly to coincide with low tide, I cross the exposed mudflats rather than skirt the long way around the lagoon to the next hut. Halfway across, I become bogged in sloppy mud and have to slow down. I stub my toe on a hidden obstacle, lose my balance and slip. Trying to regain my equilibrium, my extended arms fluttering like a butterfly, I overextend myself and dive forwards, plastered to the mire by the weight of my top-heavy pack. I slowly get up on my hands and knees. My entire front, head to toe, is covered in slime and I silently extricate myself, scraping the mud from around my eyes, mouth, beard and out of my nostrils. I feel like Charlie Brown’s mate, Pig-Pen.

When I reach the safety of hard ground on the other side of the lagoon, I watch gleefully as two trampers cross the expanse of mudflat, following my footsteps. Sure enough, about halfway across they too slow, lifting their legs in the gumbo like flies stuck on flypaper. Disappointingly, neither of them takes a nosedive.

I reach Awaroa Hut, to find another backpacker there. She takes one look as I come through the door, my entire front still covered in what looks and smells like dried cow shit, and ignores me. It’s not easy to ignore someone in the limited space of an otherwise empty hut in the middle of the wilderness. But she manages it, somehow.

The trees are blackened in many areas in the forest, as if a fire had raged through the area, but they are clearly still alive. As I walk, a distinctive sweet smell lingers in the air. Inspecting the tree trunks closely, I can make out nodules from which hairs protrude, with tiny clear drops on the end. I dab a finger on several globules and then lick my finger, to taste a flavour like honey.

The eastern side of the park is too full, but this end is empty. Although I find this north-west part of the Abel Tasman Park more alluring than the other, more popular extremity, there is no one else to share the homestead-turned-DOC hut when I arrive that evening.

John, a retired local from Takaka now working as the hut warden during the summer months, checks my pass. His long hair curls over his square shoulders. He sits down with me, clearly interested in talking about the fauna and flora of the park: ‘The small nodules you saw on the beech trees? They’re formed by a female insect, who seals herself within the bark. She draws sap from the tree and excretes the excess through a fine hair-like thread, which you saw protruding from the trunk. The excrement you tasted forms in a little drop at the tip of the hair and is fed upon by birds and insects like bees and wasps. If the drop falls on the ground or the trunk of the tree or the surrounding vegetation, it nourishes the black sooty fungus. That’s the black stuff.’

‘And the sweet smell in those sections of the bush is the honeydew?’ I ask, as I boil water for tea.

‘Yeah.’

I rummage in my pack and pull out a package of milk biscuits, hoping John will stay and talk for a while. I’m spending too much time on my own, and even if I have a lot of stuff to sort out in my life, there’s only so much I can accomplish by being alone.

‘Plenty of traps on the track,’ I observe, while pouring two cups.

He takes a sip of tea before commenting. ‘Ah yeah, some traps are for possums, some for stoats. I’ve got control over them now, but they were pretty bad. Possums practically sit up and beg from the trampers. Bit of a hard case, those possums. Even come into
the hut to steal food out of packs.’ He reaches into a breast pocket. ‘Ciggie?’

‘Don’t smoke.’ I hand him the opened package of biscuits. ‘Where’s the possum come from?’ I ask. ‘I thought there weren’t any endemic mammals in New Zealand except bats.’ I know the possums aren’t endemic; I’m just making conversation.

John shakes his head and sips his tea, closing his eyes against the steam. ‘Australian brushtail possum,’ he answers. ‘Ironically, they’re protected in Australia but here, without natural enemies and lots of food, they’ve multiplied so successfully that there’s some seventy million of them covering about 90 per cent of New Zealand.’

‘That’s the same number as the sheep you’ve got.’

‘Exactly. That’s why we have to get rid of them. Bloody useless. At least we can eat the sheep.’

I say, defending them: ‘But they’ve got big eyes, and soft fur, like African bushbabies.’

‘Marsupials,’ John corrects. ‘They have pouches and are nocturnal, feed at night.’

‘That’s why you see so many squashed on the road?’

‘Get caught in the headlights of vehicles. Good thing too.’ He dips a biscuit into his tea and chews on the soggy portion before finishing the rest.

‘I’ve seen dead ones lying on the track.’ I offer him another biscuit.

‘Poisoned. Usually by 1080,’ he says, as if this was a numeric combination of which everyone should know the meaning. ‘Good bikkies,’ he adds.

‘1080?’ I ask.

‘Sodium monofluoroacetate. Supposed to be water-soluble.’

I nod, as if those big words explain it perfectly. Poison. I also try dipping my biscuit in my Sleepytime tea. It tastes funny. ‘What’s that do to the environment, other animals, birds?’

He shrugs, and suddenly sensitive to my question, says: ‘What’s the alternative? The possums are eating our forests away.’

‘They look cute.’ I’m not trying to provoke John, because they really do look cute, other than in DOC propaganda, which makes them look decidedly evil.

‘They destroy our native plants and trees; snails, wetas and other invertebrates; bird eggs and chicks such as the kiwi, or those two oystercatchers you probably saw on the beach just now. Every time that dumb pair lay eggs the possums get ’em. Probably sit there watching and wait for them to lay their eggs. They also spread bovine tuberculosis, which threatens our dairy and meat industries.’

‘So what can you do?’

‘Shoot them, trap them, poison them. Whatever we do, it won’t be enough. Bringing possums here has really stuffed up our nature.’

‘Seems a bit harsh.’

His face flushes and I change the subject quickly. ‘I thought I saw a marijuana plant beside the path today.’

‘Ah yeah. You only saw one?’ He laughs. ‘There are fields of marijuana in the parks. You can make a thousand dollars from one marijuana plant. The marijuana growers keep one step ahead of the police and the possums. They began by protecting the gardens from possums by using razor-blade wire fencing. Then the possums found their way through that, so they started to use electric fencing. When the police flew their helicopters to search for marijuana fields, they located the gardens by listening to the electrical interference on their radios. So the growers got smart and used the electric fences only at night when the possums were out and the helicopters weren’t. It’s a cat and mouse game.’ He is quiet for some time before he flicks his long hair off his shoulders and adds: ‘Course, a lot of people think us DOC workers have got the best access to good growing areas.’

During the night there is a terrific rainstorm and before dawn the loud din of birdsong wakes me. It is impossible to sleep in on
such a glorious day. I follow the track to the western end of the park. Steam rises from the damp forest floor as if there were vents under the fallen leaves. The slanting rays of the early-morning sun filter through the upper canopy of trees, illuminating the mist in a ghostly latticework of light and shadow. The rainforest reverberates with the assorted melodies of unseen birds. The sense of infinity in this ancient forest humbles me.

Return to beginning of chapter

There are so few cars in this corner of New Zealand that I almost have to walk instead of hitchhike all the way to Takaka, the hippie epicentre of the country. On the main street, a horse-drawn carriage passes by, constructed out of the rear axle of a car. Grey hair, a beard and bushy eyebrows disguise the driver’s face, and he has a red kerchief wrapped around his neck. A long-haired grey dog sits on the seat next to him wearing an identical red scarf. They could be twins. The cart passes old Morris Minors, Hillmans, Anglias, Vauxhalls, Rovers, Humbers, Sunbeams, Land Rovers, Zephyrs, Oxfords, Austins, Triumphs and Bedfords. Half a dozen sheepdogs in the back of a ute bark noisily as the carthorse clip-clops by.

A minibus takes several of us trampers to the start of the Heaphy Track, a five-day walk which will lead us back to the West Coast. The track was a route used by the Maori; it is not just designed for tourists, there is some historic merit to it. En route, we stop by a spectacular gorge. As we climb out of the vehicle, our driver lectures us: ‘Adventure tourism is the wrong kind of tourism for New Zealand. It’s a fad. You can bungee jump anywhere in the world. Unspoiled nature is what we have that is unique. Look at this.’ He points ahead of him. ‘They’ve built this huge, ugly, steel contraption, just to bungee jump from. Why? It was such a picturesque place before, why not sit there and watch, meditate, or float down in a kayak or a canoe? People come all
the way from Wellington now by helicopter to bungee jump from the thing, but the river’s natural beauty is ruined.’