March 29: Paihia to Opononi

Previously: March 28

Today was a travel day, leaving for Opononi, a village by the sea where we’ll be doing some day walks and one Maori cultural experience, which will be an evening forest walk with a guide from Footprints Waipoua to see ancient trees. It’s about 1.5 hours from Paihia, through lush fields and pretty mountains, along a winding road. While in Opononi, we'll be staying at the Opononi Lighthouse Motel.

Our first adventure of the day was learning how to use the (unattended) gasoline pumps, since we wanted a full tank before driving out into the wilderness. I put the nozzle into the tank, then looked for some way to start the pump. Belatedly, I noticed there was a ATM-like machine mounted on the wall of the station that looked like it took credit cards. Sure enough, you had to prepay away from the pump and then return to the pump, but when I tried entering the pump number, it told me the pump was unavailable. Same problem with the pump beside it. Shoshanna solved the mystery: because the credit card machine wasn’t attached to the pump, the fact that the nozzle had been placed in the car told the computer that someone was already pumping gas, and thus, that the pump was unavailable. Restoring the nozzle to the pump before using our credit card solved the problem, and we hit the road.

About half an hour into our drive, we realized that we’d both spaced out and left our food behind in the hostel’s fridge. Not a terrible loss, and not enough to justify returning to Paihia and adding an hour to our drive. But we did lose the 2/3 bottle of white wine Shoshanna was working on, and a chunk of cheese and what was left of our coffee.

We arrived in Opononi without further incident, checked e-mail, and then headed out for lunch. I’d been craving English-style meat pies since we saw some advertised at a dépanneur (convenience store), but weren’t willing to chance the New Zealand equivalent of the eternally rotating hot dogs of doom commonly found at American convenience stores. When we found that the Opononi Hotel’s restaurant, about 5 minutes walk from our hotel, was serving home-made pies, I was sold. I had the mince (ground beef) and bacon and egg pies—the former excellent, the latter inoffensive—and Shoshanna had iki mata, a raw white fish dish in a “chowder” of coconut milk, lemon, bell pepper. Plus, of course, tastes of the pies.

Back to our motel for a nap, then off in search of coffee, as we’d be up until 10 PM or so doing a twilight-to-evening tour of the local Kauri forest. There’s a café right beside the Opononi Hotel that transforms into a Thai restaurant in the evening, so we set off a little after 5 PM to grab some coffee, have time to drink it, and be back at the hotel with plenty of time to organize our stuff before the tour began. As we were walking across the parking lot bearing coffee and a Thai veggie pie to consume after the tour (food and drink and not permitted during the tour), a Maori man walked up from behind us and called our names. Turns out it was our Maori guide, Charley, who’d arrived nearly 40 minutes early and just happened to guess that we were the couple he’d come to pick up.

Why tour Kauri forest, apart from my well-known weakness for anything to do with walking in the woods? Kauri are gorgeous New Zealand trees, with straight trunks and wonderfully complex crowns, and are now critically endangered. First, they have the misfortune of producing long, dense, strong stems with few knots, which makes them highly desirable for the rigging of sailing ships and for construction. As a result, 98% of the Kauri forest had disappeared (i.e., been harvested by the British Navy, then by European farmers and ranchers) before anyone except the Maori realized that it might be a good idea to start protecting the forest. The government has been protecting the trees for a few decades, but it’s an uphill battle because of a second problem: a disease called Kauri dieback has been spreading rapidly and killing the trees. It’s caused by a fungus in the same Phytopthora genus that was responsible for the infamous Irish potato famine. (“Infamous” because Ireland was a net food exporter at the time. The famine mostly resulted from the fact that the Brits didn’t care whether the Irish starved, so long as England (in the guise of its representatives in Ireland) could grow rich exporting Irish crops.) Any time you enter an area where Kauri is protected, you’re asked to pass through a gate where you can use foot-brushes embedded in the walkway and sometimes disinfectant solution to clean your boots so you don’t bring soil containing fungal spores with you.

Pronunciation note: According to Charley, Kauri is pronounced “koh-ree”, and Maori is pronounced “more-ee”. We're not sure how much this is personal or regional accent.

It’s hard to know just how much to say about the Kauri forests, since I could write a book. (I can hear Shoshanna snickering at the thought.) So I’ll focus on the Maori aspects of our trip and mention a few forestry facts along the way.

Before entering the forest, Charley sang a prayer to Tane Mahuta, the Maori god of woodlands, to say that we were coming for a visit and ask permission to enter. He has a quiet speaking voice, but a beautiful, booming singing voice. And he’s a very good story teller. He told of the three main elemental gods (for wind, water, and land) and the Maori creation story (in which the child gods were trapped in darkness between earth and sky until they agreed to force their parents apart to let some light in., though at the cost of permanently separating the parents. (I did not ask whether that was the moral of the story.)

Along our way to the “special” Kauri trees that were to be the highlights of the trip, he explained much about the different forest species and how forest succession works in these woods. As in most aboriginal cultures, the Maori learned about the natural pharmocopeia surrounding them. Two particular plants that he focused on were one that can be boiled to extract the medicine and used as a poultice for internal injuries such as bruises and broken bones; he claimed that this remedy was one of the contributing factors to the two consecutive victories by New Zealand’s mostly Maori rugby team, the beloved “All Blacks”. He also showed us some small orange berries that act as a powerful laxative and another medicine that is good for the heart. Other products, when burned, are natural mosquite repellants.

The special Kauri that were the highlights of our visit merit their names, as they’re among the oldest and largest living things on Earth. The one named "Te Matua Ngahere" (the old man of the forest) is on the order of 3500 years old, and has a girth of 16.4 m (nearly 55 feet) and a height of 30 m (about 100 feet), of which about 10.2 m (35 feet) is clear stem; the rest is a wonderfully ornate tangle of branches that support hundreds of species of plants and animals. The other star is named "Tane Mahuta", after the god of forests. "He" is a relative youngster, at 2000 years old, but towers 51.5 m (160 feet) above the forest, and has a girth of 13.8 m (45 feet). There’s also a group of 500-year-old trees called “the four sisters", each a good metre in diameter (more than 3 feet) that grow almost touching each other; they're siblings from the same parent. One of the group wondered why, given that Kauri are monoecious (have both male and female flowers on the same plant), the Maori called them “sisters”. Charley, tongue only partially in cheek, noted that if it had been four brothers cooped up together for 500 years, one of them would surely have killed one of the others.

Before leaving the forest, Charley poured us all cups of local herbal tea made from the leaves of the Kawakawa bush, which is related to pepper trees and mint. As it’s a bit bitter, he also added a smidgen of manuka honey (obtained from bees that pollinate the manuka bush, also called the “tea tree”, whose leaves have a lovely smokey smell). Delicious, and given the unusual taste of the honey, we may just bring back some manuka honey as a souvenir.

Charley told us that one of the problems in the forest has been the near-elimination of many bird species by predators such as rats and feral cats, which also means elimination (pun not intended) of their inputs of guano to the forest floor. This means much less phosphate, and some researchers believe the Kauri dieback may be exacerbated by the decreased phosphate availability, which weakens the trees. There are plans to begin replanting Kauri once some of the ecological balance has been restored, and once they can be sure they’re not just providing more food for the pathogenic fungus and facilitating its spread. The government has made surprisingly good progress; Charley was the second person to tell us that they hope to have the problem under control as early as 5 to 6 years from now. Ironically, as he was telling us this on the way home, a possum ran into the middle of the road and got smashed flat by our van. Somewhat morbidly, he laughed and called possum “the national speed bump”. Apparently, the government encourages drivers to hit the possums whenever possible, as the millions of these varmints on New Zealand collectively consume an estimated 40 tonnes (metric tons) of vegetation daily. Perhaps 5 to 6 years is an optimistic estimate.

After Charley had dropped the others off at their hotel, we told him how grateful we were for his sharing his stories with us. People tend to say “it’s just a story”, as if a story is something trivial, but stories speak of what we consider valuable and worth preserving through the generations. And stories are the one thing nobody can ever take from us. Given Maori history, and that of aboriginal peoples around the world, I’m reminded of the stories of Jews in Nazi concentration camps celebrating the Passover seder—one of the stories nobody can ever take from us. I was going to mention this to Charley, but he’d been telling us how he worked all day on his recently deceased father’s cattle farm, then worked until 10 at night giving tours. Somehow it didn’t seem fair to keep him out longer, and this would have turned into a longish conversation. But it reminded me of another importance of story: stories are how we can learn not just to tolerate the history and beliefs of others, but rather to actually celebrate them and delight in the fact that others have different stories we can learn from.

Next installment: March 30