Kiwi Tracks (28 page)

Lisa whispers into my ear, with the enthusiasm of the academic: ‘For the Maori, walking in the forest was sacred, because they believed they were walking among friends and relatives; they think we are all descended from a common source. Unlike the immigrant farmers interested in clearing the land, the Maori were hunters and needed the forest.’ She stares fixedly at the massive tree’s mottled surface. ‘It’s hard to believe that the North Island was once covered in these kauri trees. Kauri wood was ideal for building boats, so the European settlers cut down the kauri forests until, a hundred years later, less than half of a per cent of those forests are left standing.’

As we continue our walk, we are confronted by a sign: ‘You are in the heart of a small remnant of one of the Earth’s most ancient ecosystems. Breathe deeply and tread softly.’

We follow the Yakas Kauri track, pioneered by a Mr Yakas, apparently a gum tapper of some repute. Late-afternoon sun, that strong, bright southern-hemisphere summer light, penetrates the forest canopy, illuminating the dense bush in infinite shades of green. Occasionally, I catch sight of Lisa in front of me as she strides through the thick vegetation. Wading further into the forest, we find ourselves in a grove comprised of scores of kauri trees, six hundred to a thousand years old. Great untapered trunks, like columns, draw the eye up to enormous spreading patterns of leaves in the top canopy. This is what a kauri forest must have looked like before European settlement.

After the grove the path becomes narrow and muddy, winding like a snake through kauri, manuka, rimu trees, kauri grass, ferns and moss. We tramp through this thick, pleasant forest setting, the intense light growing weaker as evening approaches. The friendly atmosphere of the bush becomes sinister as the day evaporates and
the distinct shadows in the forest melt into a uniform darkness. It is with a sense of relief that we step out of the dense rainforest into a clearing beside a brook. We immediately set up the tent before swimming in the deep, opaque swimming hole. A cacophony of calls from hidden birds waft from the bush as the last rays of the evening sun cut obliquely down the length of the valley.

Unpacking, we work efficiently as a de facto team, and within minutes, we have a meal cooking; it’s a bit like setting up house together. By the time we have finished, the mosquitoes are out in force, huge vampire-like monsters that terrorise us with their bites. Soon after dusk, the air becomes so thick with them that we are driven to seek refuge without cleaning up in the tiny tent. A little voice in my head warns, ‘Bad move Andrew,’ but I ignore it. Despite the danger of encouraging the marauding possums, we leave out anything that does not need to be protected from rain, such as the dirty pots and pans. Lisa quickly opens the zipper of the tent and we push the packs inside.

‘You go first,’ she says. ‘Hurry, before the mosquitoes get in.’

I dive in to escape the miniature flying hypodermic needles, arrange the hefty packs along one wall of the tent, then lay out the foam mattresses and sleeping-bags.

‘You ready yet?’ Lisa asks, desperately.

‘Yeah,’ I reply, shifting around in the cramped space to give her room.

Lisa sticks her head in, but as I turn on my back, her oncoming face connects with my upraised knee. There is an audible crack and her body slumps to the floor of the tent. The mosquitoes take advantage of the opening to invade but she does not move. Considering her desperation a second earlier, this is definitely not a positive sign.

‘Are you OK?’ I ask idiotically. It is quite evident she is not OK, lying there immobile and probably unconscious.

She stirs, pulling her hands to her face. ‘I’ve broken my glasses.’ She rolls over.

‘I’m sorry, it was my fault,’ I say, hunched over her like a bush version of Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

‘No, it wasn’t.’ She is more concerned about the mosquitoes swarming in. ‘Can you close the zipper?’ Her hands hold the remains of her spectacles in place over her face. I crawl over her, close the zipper, and get out my flashlight.

‘You’re bleeding,’ I tell her. One lens of the glasses is broken and there is a gash under her eye where the glass has cut her. Already the cheek is starting to swell. I rummage around until I locate a water bottle and some toilet paper. Here we are, jammed into a one-man tent, crowded out by two large backpacks, with zillions of mosquitoes waiting for us on the other side of the netting and a couple hundred more on the inside happily gorging on our plasma.

‘We have to find the pieces of glass first, otherwise we’ll cut ourselves.’ She puts the broken spectacles back on, holding one hand over her wound. We grope around like a couple of mud wrestlers, as she leads the cramped search, on the floor of the tent and among the folds of our sleeping-bags. Eventually we find all the fragments of glass and I put them in a pocket.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I tell her.

‘It’s not your fault.’ She lies down on her back. I unwind copious amounts of toilet paper, shakily pour the contents of a water bottle onto it and dab the wet paper on the cut to wipe away the blood. I have to admire her stoicism and I feel guilty, wondering if she needs stitches. How will I get her to a doctor? I am not even sure where we are, nor how far we are from a road. She lies still as I wipe her face, replacing the paper several times until the flow of blood has diminished. It is unbearably hot and close in the tiny tent.

‘The bleeding will stop, it’s just the fleshy part of my face,’ she says, as if allaying my concerns rather than her own.

Eventually, we settle in for the night and lie on top of our sleeping-bags. Occasionally I give her a fresh wad of wet toilet paper, which she keeps plastered to her cheek. We watch the moon rise over the clearing through the mosquito netting. Over the buzzing sound of mosquitoes, I hear strange sounds, almost like the mewing of a kitten. ‘Kiwi,’ Lisa informs me drowsily, before lapsing into sleep.

During the night, hunting dogs bark in the forest across the river. The howls are menacing, the animals aggressive and excited; in hunting mode, on the trail of a quarry. I feel sorry for the poor, scared creature that has them at its heels. The frenzy of barks reaches a horrible crescendo and there is the grim crack of a rifle shot echoing across the valley, then silence.

I listen to the unfamiliar sounds, unable to nod off. My mind is too agitated, my imagination running wild with each unidentified noise outside the tent. Even if there aren’t any killer wild animals out there, there are plenty of people with guns and bloodthirsty dogs.

Later, a noise wakes me, and I see a devilish face peering down at me through the mosquito netting. I scream.

It is only a possum, not the Kiwi equivalent of an inbred Appalachian lunatic, and the poor harmless marsupial squeals a fiendish alarm back at me. My own hollering wakes Lisa up and she screams too, encouraging the frightened possum to emit more diabolical screeches before it ambles away.

‘Must have been a possum,’ I explain in the ensuing silence.

‘Just a possum?’ she asks, incredulous. ‘It sounded horrible.’ She does not realise I contributed my own terrified screams to the possum’s effort.

‘I think it has gone now,’ I add, recovering from my own fright.

Exhausted, we sleep well past dawn. In the morning light Lisa looks as if she has been badly beaten up, the cut not as visible as the swelling just below the eye. We pack up the tent and sleeping-bags and walk out of the forest to the road, where we stand patiently, thumbs out. Two young boys cycle up to us and stop, sitting astride their bikes, unabashedly staring at Lisa’s battered face.

‘What happened?’ one of them asks her.

She looks over at me, just the trace of a smile on her face. ‘Ask him what happened.’

‘Got attacked by a possum in the middle of the night.’

‘Possums don’t do that,’ the more vocal of the two boys exclaims.

‘Well, she walked into the door of the tent. How about that?’

He screws up his face, unsure what to make of the absurd explanation.

A car pulling a trailer with a motorbike stops to pick us up, thankfully cutting short any further questions from the two boys. We load our gear and some hours later are dropped off beside a lagoon, where the ebbing tide has left an expanse of mudflats and mangrove trees. Spying a treasure trove of gigantic oysters, Lisa and I slide through the slippery, oily mud to where the oysters cling to young mangrove stems. I pry one of them open with my Swiss army knife and pass it to Lisa. We shuck and lustily slurp down dozens of oysters, each the size and consistency of an uncooked egg yolk.

With our hands bleeding from the sharp edges of the shells, we plop out of the mud and return to the road. Our sandals and legs are caked with mud, as if we are wearing gumboots. The mud cracks, drying in the tropical heat of the day as we walk towards a backpackers lodge hidden in the trees.

Phil the owner is originally from Australia. He shows us around his lodge, which is built like a tree house. It looks like something out of
Winnie-the-Pooh
.

I ask him: ‘How do you like living in New Zealand?’

He waxes lyrical: ‘It’s so unspoilt here and the Maori are a wonderful people. There are so many things us pakeha could learn from the Maori.’

‘For example?’ I ask, as he shows off his library full of books on New Zealand.

‘Well, the
tangihanga
, their show of respect for the dead. It’s very moving. The funeral ceremony is three days long. The body lies in the
marae
building in an open coffin. Visitors
hongi
the deceased as a sign there is life after death, then greetings are shared and a feast of roasted pig or beef or sheep commences to celebrate
whakanoa
, the freeing of the spirit. They take it in turns
to hold a sacred stick and make a speech. Everyone ends up sleeping in the
marae
. The family doesn’t have to pay for anything: all the costs are borne by friends who come from miles around to attend the funeral and pay their respects. At the end of the three days, people have had time to accept the death. By the third day, many of the speeches have a humorous tone to them.’ He pauses. ‘Trouble is, they don’t give each other the same respect when they are alive. The physical and mental abuse of wives and children is terrible. I worked as a volunteer ambulance attendant for ten years before giving up in frustration. You would not believe the violence around here. And their other big problem: the infighting among themselves. You’ve heard of the tall poppy syndrome? That describes the Maori when one of them gets successful.’

Lisa elects to sleep in her tent in a pasture, avoiding my bony knees or any potential aphrodisiacal effects from the oysters, though she says it is to save money. I choose a more comfortable bed and Phil leads me to a spotless room with a view of the harbour.

He continues talking, while pointing out the landmarks. ‘There was a young Maori guy here. He started up a business taking tourists in kayaks around the harbour, the mangrove trees, old Maori sites.’ Phil indicates each area. ‘He did everything right. He checked with the Maori elders, got approval from DOC. He did his research, knew his stuff, and started taking European tourists out on kayaking excursions. The tourists loved it and he was successful. Then the green-eyed monster of jealousy raised its ugly head. The local
marae
told him they wanted a cut of his profits. He refused. They told him he wasn’t from their area, he was a Maori from East Cape, a different tribe and they wanted him to stop. He replied that at least he was a Maori. They stopped him operating anyway.

‘A year later, some highly paid consultants, whose salaries were funded by the government, came here from Auckland to study the area and advise the unemployed Maori on potential business opportunities. They did their research, then met with the community, to discuss with them how the area was an ideal place
to give ecotours; for example kayaking trips to old Maori sites. There was an uncomfortable silence in the hall. The East Cape Maori was there in the audience.’ Phil shakes his head at the memory of it all. ‘How do you deal with that kind of jealousy?’ he asks rhetorically.

He indicates a different area with a sweep of his hand. ‘Now a white man operates more or less the same tour, very successfully, but he doesn’t go into the Maori areas and he doesn’t pay them anything. That’s what I mean. One Maori pulls himself out of the morass of 80 per cent unemployment and the others are sitting on the sidelines just waiting to drag him down to their level again. It’s pathetic, but that’s the way it is. If the Maori could get themselves organised, they could start a
pa
, give cultural tours to the travellers passing through the area, especially for the Europeans, who seem to be the most interested. But they can’t seem to break out of this world of apathy, and so they sit there collecting the dole, losing their self-respect, drinking and abusing one another.’

I follow as he shows me around the property. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I love the Maori, I’ve a lot of time for them. It’s just such a shame to see so many opportunities lost because they squabble among themselves. It’s so frustrating to witness. We don’t create a product to cater to visitors interested in the history and culture of New Zealand, and so we encourage the kind of tourist who doesn’t care.’ We climb down the stairs out of the tree house to the main building.