In a bed-and-breakfast, run by the town’s lone policeman, Chris Pritchard is provided a delightful window to the unique and vibrant Maori culture
Here’s how to be really, really safe when visiting an unfamiliar place: stay in a policeman’s house. Such advice would make more sense were I not discussing Russell, a place so law-abiding that the lone village policeman tells me he has time on his hands.
This is fortunate because it allows Colwyn Shortland to run the policeman’s house as a homestay, a delightful window not only onto splendid countryside but onto New Zealand’s unique Maori culture as well. The spacious, timber house was his family’s home for five years until, seven years ago, Colwyn and his wife Kay decided to convert it to a stylish homestay. Three bedrooms for visitors, each with en suite bathroom,would not be out of place in an upscale hotel. Set on 4.86ha of lush bushland, the house overlooks – from near the summit of Flagstaff Hill lookout – forest, rolling farmland and an intricate coastline of bays and inlets.
Across the water is Waitangi Treaty Grounds, sacred to Maoris and on the edge of a resort town called Paihia.
The house, Pukematu Lodge, is unashamedly modern – but almost all New Zealand’s Maoris (one in seven of the country’s four million people) lead modern lifestyles even if reverence for age-old customs is undiminished.Many even have Anglosounding names. Shortland, for instance, boasts parents belonging to two important local tribes.
Pukematu Lodge is in Russell, heart of the Bay of Islands region of Northland, north of Auckland,New Zealand’s biggest and most commercially important city.Many visitors are lured to this thinly-populated part of the country by the white sands and safe swimming of Ninety Mile Beach (actually it’s a little shorter).Much of Northland’s climate is moderately sub-tropical, making it an all-year destination. Domestic flights and longdistance buses deliver some visitors but I discover a rental car’s progression through spectacular countryside and tiny towns is a pleasant way to get here (allow three hours to cover the 250km from Auckland). “I can’t tell a lie,” the Maori cop grins.
“There’s hardly any crime. It’s safe and sleepy.”
A rare brawl, an occasional burglary and the odd “domestic” – that’s about it for Shortland. Still, he is also the local marriage celebrant and scenic Russell is a popular place for weddings.
More visitors head south from Auckland to Rotorua, famed for Maori culture and sulphurous hot geysers but the Bay of Islands has lately become hip. Russell, its formerly rambunctious port, was a trading tavern-of-the- seas and New Zealand’s first capital before Wellington gained that role. The little town includes, among historic buildings along its waterfront, New Zealand’s oldest church with graves, from the 1800s, of Maoris and European settlers. Pompallier House, a French bishop’s home at a time when French Catholic missionaries upset Protestant settlers as both groups aggressively proselytised among Maori tribes, is a museum offering an insight into a bygone lifestyle. Next to Russell’s Duke ofMarlborough, New Zealand’s oldest pub, a giant fig tree shields a police station built in 1870 that has served successively as a customs house, courthouse and jail. It is now the police station and also the policeman’s official house. However, Shortland confides he and Kay don’t live there.His address is Pukematu Lodge, where he and Kay welcome paying guests. Russell’s history is heavily skewed toward early settlers. For more of a Maori flavour, I follow Shortland’s advice and hop aboard a ferry for a 10-minute ride to the twin town of Paihia, modern with abundant accommodation options, ranging from stylish boutique properties, mid-market motels to backpacker lodgings, and many restaurants. Shortland warns me not to make light of the hongi. Ignoring this sound advice tempts trouble. A hongi – not to be confused with a hangi,Maori-style cooking for feasts in an outdoor pit oven – does not require rubbing together of noses, just gentle pressing. A recent visitor from Europe sniggered at this traditional greeting.A tribesman decided revenge was warranted.He offered the stillgiggling tourist a hongi – but, instead of pressing noses, head-butted him and broke his schnozzle. The contrite offender told a court he often performed for tourists but such disrespect was rare and intolerable. A foreign TV team, encountering its first haka – a Maori war dance used as a customary welcome - feared the scary chant signalled some terrible fate and fled.
Such incidents are memorable only because they seldom occur. Few travel diversions are as welcoming and hospitable as brief and easily accessed immersions in Maori culture. Shortland acknowledges his house is contemporary “but that’s Maori life these days.We’re part of a wider community.” Guests are usually out all day, pointed by Shortland toward cultural experiences. Burly Hone Mihaka meets me in Paihia.He changes behind his van from T-shirt and jeans into tribal gear.He takes small groups on a waka (traditional canoe) to an island 300m offshore.Called Motu Maire, it is uninhabited but sacred. Brief prayers are said in Maori. Hone recites a short introduction to local custom.His tales are plucked from the oral history of his Ngapuhi tribe as we paddle across calm water.
Ngapuhi tribesmen preceded us to Motu Maire, hiding in a thicket.Hone appoints me leader, briefing me on how to respond to a looming greeting. I step forward on cue.A tribesman appears from behind a tree, recreating a scene common when foreigners first visited these Pacific islands.Approaching me along the beach, spear aloft and tongue thrust out challengingly, he flings down a leaf in front of me.
Hone has briefed me not to break eye contact with the challenger while picking up the leaf. I proffer the leaf to the Maori, who moves close.We press noses.We are friends.
I have come in peace. Tribesmen then perform a traditional welcome, a blood-curdling haka more fearsome than those preceding present day rugby games.
More storytelling follows,with Maori dances, before we paddle to a spot where Hone dives overboard, surfacing with succulent green-lipped mussels.We eat our fill until it seems cruel to send Hone down again.His team comprises five members of the local community. Ten tourists are also aboard this long, narrow but comfortable 20-seater old-style canoe.
No experience is needed. Instruction in rowing and use of the hoe (paddle) is given before we don lifejackets and set out. During this preparation,we feel faintly ridiculous marching in military fashion on the beach making rowing motions with our paddles and shouting appropriate Maori cries. The scene for this soft adventure is close to a revered slab of parkland on Paihia’s outskirts called the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Displays describe Maori and settler culture and history. Also exhibited is material about the Treaty of Waitangi signed here between the British and Maori chiefs in 1840. From Waitangi, an easy two-hour walk – mostly on boardwalks –slices through forest and wetlands to scenic Haruru Falls, a rushing of water alongside an old tavern from where cabs head back to Paihia.
Next day, it takes me three hours to cross from the east to west coasts because I choose to wander through the busy arts-and-crafts town of Kerikeri.At a coastal settlement called Omapere on the shores of Hokianga Harbour, I meet a group with a business as fascinating as Hone Mihaka’s Taiamai Tours.Koro Carman, Joe Wynyard and fellow Maoris run Footprints Waipoua, which takes torchbearing visitors on nocturnal walks deep into Waipoua Forest, an eerie expanse dotted with giant kauri trees.
Some experts estimate the biggest of these slow-growing arboreal oddities is 2,000 years old. Others contend they are twice as old. Most famous are Te Matua Ngahere “the father of the forest” (New Zealand’s oldest kauri tree) and Tane Mahuta,“lord of the forest” (New Zealand’s largest kauri tree). The latter soars 52m skyward – 30m is more common for a very tall kauri– but at its base lacks the five-metre girth of the older tree. Both are visited on an evening’s walk. Scuttling across my path in the moonlight is a kiwi,New Zealand’s iconic, endangered but flightless bird.“You were lucky,” smiles Koro. “We don’t always see them.” My luck holds. Moments later I see a native owl called a morepork – so named because its call sounds like a demand for “more pork” –on a branch. Soon afterwards our group sees another rare bird: a flightless weka, resembling a scrawny chicken, foraging in undergrowth. It is well after midnight when I arrive back on the Bay of Islands’ east coast.Next morning, the knowledgeable Fern Jobbitt collects me in her 4WD.Her Maori ancestry is useful in running Fernz Eco Tours, a company twinning cultural and scenic experiences. She takes me on a drive deep into rainforest where – along with live kauri trees – we see other kauris that have died or are in poor shape. Old incisions reveal these were targeted in the early 1900s by “gum diggers”who earned big sums gathering kauri gum, essential in varnish-making but now superseded by synthetic substances, either tapping trees or digging up rock-like clumps of hardened gum. This hard wood, now strictly protected, was prized for furniture. The tree, celebrated in Maori culture, has been saved from extinction. Now only “swamp kauri” – wood salvaged from trees that have died – can be used. Back at Pukematu Lodge, Shortland observes Maori culture has recently been resurgent.While the kauri may be growing rarer, the willingness ofMaori people to highlight their culture is increasingly commonplace.
FACT FILE
? Air New Zealand
(www.airnewzealand.com.au) and other carriers fly from Southeast Asian cities to Auckland, with domestic Air New Zealand connections to Whangarei and Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands. Rental cars are available in both towns, with Russell reached in about an hour. Express buses and coach tours are also available.
? Pukematu Lodge
(tel 64 9 403 8500, email [email protected], www.pukematulodge.co.nz), NZ$395 (US$242) per person per night (twin share) including breakfast and transfers to and from Russell’s shops and restaurants.
? Information about Maori cultural tours: Tourism New Zealand (www.newzealand.com), Destination Northland (www.northlandnz.com).
