New Zealand -1500 miles on foot through- The Land Of The Long White Cloud

Wendy and the Composting Long Drop

The day out from Te Kao began with rain showers.  It was Tuesday 24th February and my destination was Motutangi, which should have been an easy 23 miles down the long grey road.  Leaving Te Kao though, I was just a little sad, as Anna Karena, Aileen Babbington, Old-Jacky, Riti, and all the children at the school had made me feel so welcome and it was hard to leave.  As I walked on through the rain, and cars passed me by, a strange mixture of emotions was going through my head.  The long road and whay lay ahead called out to my nomadic nature.  For me, staying in one place for any length of time was something just a little too close to being dead.  My chequered ancestry explained a little about why I had the feeling that only by travelling could I feel truly alive.  My grandfather on my mother's side had upped and disappeared when my Mum was only a year old, and my great-grandfather on my Mum's side had allegedly been an itinerant Cornish tinker, who also disappeared shortly after fathering my grandmother.  On my Dad's side, my great-grandfather had been a miner from Barnsley, in Yorkshire, and had travelled all the way to Kent in the South of England to find work, but had then travelled even further to Russia to visit mines there, as a union delegate, just after the Russian Revolution.  And yet, my Dad's other grandfather was a baker and all his family had lived in the same area for generations: many of my Dad's relatives were builders and craftsmen who worked on building homes.  In me there lay the conflict of needing to travel and yet, at the same time, wanting a home to return to.  That conflict was made all the worse by the fact that the woodland, where I had played as a small child, had been cut down to make a parking lot for imported Japanese cars: it had been destroyed forever.  The first tree I had climbed, an old wrinkled white elder, had been taken.  The small hill where we made camps and drank cherryade on warm summer's days had been levelled.  The area of old discarded slates, where lizards basked to get warm, had been cleared.  At the age of seven, the place I had considered to be home had literally been destroyed and a piece of my heart had gone with it.  A part of my wandering nature came from trying to find that place again.  In reality my 'home' now only remained in my memories.

So it was that I was glad to be moving down the road, but sad to be leaving friendly people behind once again.  As the miles slowly passed I gradually settled into the walk.  The showers stopped and the day became sunny.

Between Te Kao and Motutangi there were two schools that I would visit.  The first was at Ngataki.  As I approached the small town I spotted a car just ahead of me, stationary by the roadside, with a man undoing the bolts on a wheel.

'Hi there, how's it going?'  I greeted the man as I approached, so as not to startle him.

'Bloody tyre's gone flat.'

'You ok to change the wheel?'

'Yeah, no probs.  What you to to?'

I quickly told my tale.

'Struth! That's a way to go.  You say you're looking to visit Ngataki School?'

'Yep, how do I get there from here?'

'Ah, you can't miss it, just head into town.'

I wished the man luck with the wheel and headed off.  In no time I found Ngataki School.  My contact there was the headmistress, Margarite Wedding.  Margarite introduced me to Colin Gover, a teacher, who was in charge of the school computers.  The visit went well, with me taking pictures of the excited kids and us sending an e-mail to the folks at Scholastic to let them know that Ngataki School was interested in using the Internet to contact schools in the U.S.  In just over an hour, i was back on the road, this time with a big smile on my face.

With glorious sunshine now flooding the land, the road led onto Houhora Harbour.  The most perfect of natural harbours showed ahead of me; with a long spit of land to the east to stop the seemingly endless waves of the Pacific Ocean.  Exposed yellow sandbanks lay amongst brilliant blue water and the protective spit of land to the east was covered in deep green native vegetation.  Mount Camel, a 236 metre hill, rose at the end of the spit, looking like a miniature volcano that had become covered in a verdant green, somewhat lumpy, baize cloak.  In Maori legend, the first Maori to find New Zealand, a man called Kupe, saw Mount Camel, but mistook it fro the hump of a whale and paddled on to land at Hokianaga Harbour, in around 925 AD.  It was James Cook who named the hill in 1769, as he mapped the entire coastline of New Zealand aboard his ship, Endeavour.  To me the piece of land was like a long arm covered in green cloth, with Mount Camel as the gloved hand:  the protective arm there to ward off the sea and leave a peaceful blue lagoon at Houhora.  The atmosphere of the place washed slowly over me and seeped into my soul.  There was no wind and small boats lay at anchor in the harbour.  Seagulls sunned themselves on a couple of old, derelict boats and a flag pole carried the Union Jack.