Kiwi Tracks (17 page)

The imposing edifice of the Grand Chateau Hotel dominates the village of Whakapapa (pronounced something like Fuck-a-papa, which makes it one of the few Maori place names that is easy to remember). The hotel appears empty and no one stops me from wandering around its cavernous interior, which boasts a massive lounge with plush carpeting, chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside are manicured lawns and a golf course. Opened in 1929, the hotel, which was modelled on those in Banff and Lake Louise in Canada, offered ostentation never before seen in the country. Through the windowed door separating the lounge from the dining hall, I see a few Japanese eating sushi in the restaurant. They stare at me, with my boots and legs muddy, loaded with my heavy backpack and sporting my usual unwashed, lopsided tramper-head. I stare back at them.

At the information centre in Whakapapa, I listen as a guide reads from a leaflet on the history of the national park.

‘The volcanic mountains, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, came to personify the ancestors of the Maori people and were held in the deepest respect and awe. Few journeys were made into the mountains other than to collect
titi
(mutton-bird) from Tama Lakes and to bathe in the Ketetahi Hot Springs. So sacred were the mountains that the Maori would not even look at them when passing through Rangipo Desert. They shielded their vision with leaves, did not eat, and did not use the wood they found. Many Europeans had little sympathy for the awe in which the Maori held their sacred mountains. In 1839, John Bidwell became the first European to climb one of the volcanoes, Ngauruhoe.

‘Horonuku Te Heuheu, the local chief, was outraged at the infringement of his ancestral
mana
. He had established ownership of these sacred mountains from other tribes and saw the pakeha development coming closer. As paramount chief of the Ngati Tuwharetoa, the tribe of the area surrounding the Tongariro mountains, Te Heuheu discussed the problem with his son-in-law, Lawrence Grace, who was an MP for Tauranga at the time. Grace agreed that it was undesirable to permit the mountains to be dealt with in the ordinary way. They should be regarded as
tapu
from private hands. He said to Te Heuheu:

‘ “Why not make them a
tapu
place of the Crown? A sacred place under the
mana
of the Queen. The only possible way to preserve them forever is to give them to the government as a reserve and park, to be the property of all the people of New Zealand, in memory of Te Heuheu and his Tribe.”

‘And so, on 23 September 1887, Te Heuheu formally offered the mountains to the crown as a national park, the first of its kind in New Zealand.’

When Peter, the owner of the backpackers lodge, comes to pick me up in his shuttle bus, I enquire about the Ketetahi Hot Springs issue. He replies as he drives his shuttle van out of Whakapapa village: ‘Ah yeah, that’s nothing more than a question of greed. It’s ridiculous. Now we are giving everything back to the Maori, even paying them royalties for fishing miles offshore at depths that you can’t tell me the Maori were fishing two hundred years ago.’ He shakes his head angrily. ‘I reckon that’s why there’s so much talk of New Zealand becoming a republic, so we don’t have to adhere to the Waitangi Treaty.’ We drive along an empty road adorned with tall toitoi grasses.

‘You mean it’s the British courts deciding these issues?’

Peter’s jaw is set. ‘The Waitangi Treaty was signed by the British and the Maori in 1840. It’s got nothing to do with us pakeha now, but we have to sit back while all these negotiations go on and on, trying to decide who owns what.’

‘What negotiations?’ I ignore the scenery, more fascinated by the conversation.

‘The Waitangi Tribunal. They’re supposed to sort it all out but they’re giving everything back to the Maori. If we don’t give it back, it’ll go to the Maori’s court of last resort, the Privy Council in England, because it’s a British court and the Waitangi Treaty was a British treaty. The British want to look good, it’s no skin off their nose handing back all this land.’

‘But if New Zealanders didn’t have the well-established British laws and the Privy Council as a court of final arbitration, maybe foreign investors wouldn’t have so much confidence investing in the new Republic of New Zealand either.’ For the first time in New Zealand, I feel as if I am starting to get under the skin of white Kiwis. The friendly banter fades when the land issue comes up.

‘The Maori just want money,’ he repeats.

‘But you’re making money off the volcanoes. Trampers doing the Tongariro Crossing don’t pay anything to DOC, but we pay you to overnight before and after the track, to drive us to the start of the track and to pick us up.’

‘I have to pay DOC for each person I drop off.’

‘You do?’ I ask.

‘Yeah.’

‘How much?’

‘Fifty cents.’

‘That’s not much.’

‘It’s something,’ he replies.

‘When do you pay them?’

‘It’s on the honour system. We keep track of how many trampers we bring in.’ He stops at a crossroads, despite there being no traffic in sight, before turning towards National Park. I believe Peter would be meticulously honest about paying, but it seems a ridiculously small sum.

As if giving vent to his anger, he makes no attempt to avoid a possum carcass on the road. ‘Just making sure it’s dead,’ he says, as we drive over the body, flattening it with a double thump of tyres. He looks in the rear-view mirror and adds: ‘The only natural enemy of the possum in New Zealand. The steel-belted radial.’

To his credit, Peter goes out of his way to show me the site of a Maori
pa
, a balustrade built to fight off the British. The old Maori stronghold is overgrown with grass now, but the walls, the ramparts of the small fortification, are still plainly visible. A modest sign informs visitors that buried in the grounds are the bodies of Maori warriors who died fighting for their land. There are no formal monuments, no gravestones, no names, no dates. It seems inconsistent, with all the impressive monuments to the New Zealanders who died so bravely in the First and Second World Wars, that there is nothing more here than this simple symbol to the nameless Maori, who died equally bravely fighting for their land.

In the evening, I walk around the sleepy community of National Park. Down the road in an empty paddock an old truck has been converted to a house, complete with chimney and wooden shingles on the peaked top half, just like a proper roof. The sides of the truck have been pulled out, like shelves in a cupboard, expanding the size of the interior to almost three times the truck’s width. The surrounding paddock is overgrown, but the mobile home looks better tended than the adjacent shanty-like dwellings, the gardens of which are decorated with rusty engine blocks and mud-splattered ATVs. Bored-looking dogs tied up in the yards bark at me as I walk by.

Cars and utes are parked outside the National Cosmopolitan Club. Curious, I peek inside a smoke-filled room to see a dozen bulky men crowded around a table with several jugs of beer. The men have bloated beer stomachs hanging over tight stubbies, massive thighs and oversized biceps decorated with tattoos. All of them seem to have missing teeth and shaggy hair. There are equal numbers of Maori and whites, although it is not easy to distinguish one from the other. The interior walls of the clubhouse are adorned with magnificent heads of red deer stags and wild pigs.

A Maori beckons me in. ‘Want a beer?’

It’s too late to beat a hasty retreat. ‘Sure.’

I follow him and take a place at the bar. He returns behind the counter and reaches over to shake my hand. ‘Welcome to the Cosi Club.’ He pours me a beer. ‘So, what are you doing round here?’

‘Travelling around New Zealand for four months.’

‘Ah yeah? Where you been?’

‘All over the South Island. Now I’m slowly making my way up through the North Island.’ Then I ask: ‘What’s the story with the Ketetahi Hot Springs?’

He looks around him to make sure he is out of earshot of anyone else. He is big and handsome, with the square jaw, smallish nose and olive skin typical of a Maori. ‘Ah yeah, that’s easy enough. The iwi, that’s our local tribe, and the trustees of the Ngati Tuwharetoa want DOC to come to the party.’

‘Come to the party?’

He continues quietly, turning away from the rough characters at the bar ordering drinks. ‘The iwi are fed up with DOC, outfitters, lodges and air-charter companies sucking as much money as they can from the Tongariro National Park. It was deeded over as a gift, not to make money out of it. Everyone charges for everything, but the local iwi get nothing.’

He falls silent when one of the customers approaches the bar, serves him, then continues: ‘The elders mostly want to close the springs and make it
tapu
, sacred, like it was in the old days. A spiritual retreat for the Ngati Tuwharetoa.’ He shrugs. ‘But the younger members of the tribe don’t want to listen to them. At meetings, the young ones are often rude, shouting down the elders. Many, not all, of the younger ones want to turn the springs into a moneymaking venture based on the spring’s healing properties. They see DOC, the lodge owners and outfitters all making money off the volcano, so they reckon they could turn it into a spa, like in Rotorua, and earn big money. The tribe can’t agree on what to do, so they’ve let it drop for over a year now.’

‘That’s a long time.’

‘Not for us.’ He steps back from the bar defiantly. ‘Our people are patient.’

Peter at the backpackers lodge had told me that the outfitters, tour operators and lodge owners were impatient for a decision one way or another, so they could plan what to offer tourists and market it. For them, the impasse was the least desirable outcome, worse than being told they could no longer use the springs.

I repeat what Peter had told me: ‘Many pakeha are upset about the Waitangi Tribunal’s decisions in favour of the Maori. For example on fishing stocks that are caught miles out at sea, and at depths where Maori never could have fished traditionally before. They say this reflects the absurd lengths the tribunal is taking to make amends and that it’s not fair.’

The bartender smiles as he leans towards me, fixing his eyes on mine. ‘That’s OK, let the pakeha fight for it back in court. Now they know how it feels.’ He laughs but his eyes flash anger.

Return to beginning of chapter

Black clouds hang low to the ground, hiding the mountains from view. I catch a ride to Whakapapa village up the Bruce Road, which ascends to the Upper Bruce parking lot. The ski-resort’s upper chairlifts are hidden in clouds, the grey and black summer landscape a lunar jumble of volcanic rock boulders, sharp pinnacles, deep cracks, bottomless gullies and cliffs. There is nothing green, growing or alive. The ski-lifts are a bizarre sight, their steel pilings sprouting from volcanic boulders the size of houses. Admittedly it is summer now, and during the winter this confusion of broken rocks would be covered in snow, but it is difficult to imagine anyone skiing here. Ski chalets, accessory shops and rental facilities have mushroomed amidst the mass of tumbled boulders. I walk up to the mist-shrouded chairlift, take a seat and am whisked effortlessly into the fog. There is nothing visible as I ascend until I break above the clouds into a clear blue sky.

Nearby, Ngauruhoe is a perfectly shaped cone, protruding out of the solid mattress of cloud. I jump off the first chairlift and climb onto another, which carries me over a tumble of massive rocks that have been dynamited to form a ski run. I ascend so easily and quickly to 2000 metres that I must equalise my eardrums. From the top, a T-bar lift operates in the winter, shuttling skiers another 700 metres to the summit. I am only a short distance below the top of the volcano and tread through fresh and increasingly deep snow up to the Notch, which overlooks the huge crater and the Whakapapa, Mangatoetoenui and Whangahu glaciers. From Glacier Knob, I look back towards Tongariro and Ngauruhoe, and regret not climbing up from the bottom of this volcano as well. Within a short time, I have climbed the ridge separating Whakapapa Glacier and the Summit Plateau, a carved-out cirque which itself resembles the centre of a huge crater. At 2072 metres I am slightly above Dome Shelter, looking down into steaming Crater Lake, which is surrounded by ice-cliffs, snowfields and old lava flows.

Atop Ruapehu on this dazzlingly clear day, I can’t help but feel a niggling sadness that the mountain has been debased by chairlifts, dynamited ski runs, chalets and ski villages. It has been turned into a commercial ‘snowmanship’ playground, when the original intention of the Maori chief in offering the volcanoes as a gift was that they be turned into a national park, to preserve their
mana
.

Return to beginning of chapter

I am picked up by a tour outfitter to canoe down the Whanganui River. DOC market it as the Whanganui Journey, one of New Zealand’s nine ‘Great Walks’, although strictly speaking it is not a walk at all. The Whanganui River was the historical route to the interior, transporting goods and people until the railway and then the road were constructed.