Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri,
Quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.
Not bound to swear allegiance to any master,
wherever the wind takes me I travel as a visitor.
— Horace, Epistles
WanderjahrAt the end of 1984, bored with my lifestyle in Wellington, I declared 1985 a wanderjahr, quit my job, stuffed my life into a pack, and walked off to see New Zealand.
The adventure actually began on the 3rd of January, when I headed south from my hometown of Wanganui. By the beginning of March, I had completed a circuit of the South Island and had arrived back on the North Island ready for stage two.
After two months of winnowing, my pack was down to a manageable 20 kg, 11 kg lighter than when last I was here. An hour with my thumb out beside the central Railway Station in Wellington, and I had a lift north. I was on the road again, and I had a clear run at my next objective: Cape Reinga. I had no worries, and I was determined to enjoy myself.
The East Coast
The western side of the North Island was familiar territory for me: I wanted something new. So I waved on the first lift offers in Wellington, finally accepting one that said she was going to Masterton. But I had no plans of going so far so soon, for while in the South Island I had heard good things said about YHA’s tiny Kaitoke Hostel and had determined to check it out.
The hostel was not actually at Kaitoke, but was a few kilometres north, near Pakuratahi. The Manager did not live in the Hostel but ran the Post Office and Store a couple of hundred metres away, around the corner. Mrs Lyons was very friendly and gave me a key to get into the hostel, even though it was still officially meant to be closed for the day. Kaitoke was everything that had been promised, and made a good start to the “holiday” leg of my trip.
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I have strong recollections of the Sunday hitch to Napier. I had long waits for cars in Carterton, Masterton, and Waikikamukau. In short, everywhere that one ride would drop me became the place I would wait for an hour or so, unless I walked on in hope that such apparent determination would touch a passing driver’s heart. For the first part of the morning the traffic comprised new cars filled with well-dressed farming families on their way to Church. For the rest of the morning it comprised similar families on their way home from Church, all so filled with the spirit of Christianity that they had no time to stop for hitch-hikers. I recognised some of these cars when I passed them later, parked in driveways up to seventy kilometres further on.
Three days in Napier. I had fun. I fell in with other travellers and went out to pubs and restaurants. Once I braved the large pebbles that make up the beach near the hostel, and fell into conversation with a bikini-clad local. She had travelled the world over and had sought out the local beaches everywhere she went She found, after a while, that she liked the pebble beaches best because only the most determined sunbathers would use them, so that they tended to be less crowded than sandy beaches. She also liked to make love on them after dark, because you need to be less careful about sand in delicate places.
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Gisborne, “The First City of the Sun” — NZ’s easternmost city, and the most easterly large centre of population in the world. (Except for Suva in Fiji, which is both larger and more easterly — but nobody mentions that in NZ.) I stayed with long-time friends, the Chandlers. I visited 50’s fan Bruce Burn at the radio station where he was employed as a DJ. Huon and Bruce drove me to various points of interest around the town, and then, after two days in Gisborme, I tore myself away and moved on. Reinga was in my blood: my spirit ached for the north.
§
Whakatane for two days of rain and resting. More on this place later. I set out for Tauranga, but my second ride (picked up in Te Puke — again, more about this place later) was going to Auckland. Obeying serendipity, I went to Auckland. Two days at the Mt Eden YHA hostel, pleasant days which have left nothing in my memory, and I was on a bus north. It dropped me at Silverdale. I hitched to Whangarei. After a night there I hitched to NZ’s northernmost town, Kaitaia, arriving, oif my count is correct, on the afternoon of the 13th of March.
The Fun Bus bounced down the dirt track and onto the beach. Ninety mile beach stretched ninety kilometres northwards from here. Rangi, our driver, pressed the accelerator to the floor and turned the bus right and north. Soon we were flying across the hard-packed sand, turning gently every now and again to avoid softer areas or to approach points of interest more closely. Rangi was full of jokes and gags.
A bus appeared ahead of us and Rangi slowed as we came abreast. It was another Fun Bus, one wheel buried in soft sand and obviously badly damaged. After a shouted discussion, we took some of the other bus’s passengers aboard and went on. The rest of the passengers would be distributed among other buses behind us.
We slowed down again. “Good spot for Toheroa here,” said Rangi, “Not allowed to take them out of season, but we’ll dig some up, eh?”
Half an hour later we climbed back aboard the bus. The Toheroa had eluded us, but we had captured a couple of buckets of pipis and tuatua. Rangi declared he would cook them for lunch, eh! And everybody said, “Eh!” for Rangi’s very Kiwi manner of speaking had not gone unnoticed, even by the other Kiwis aboard.
North again, and then we tuned up a stream. This stream, Te Paki, was notorious for its quicksands. The trick, Rangi explained as he swerved us along its course, in and out of the water, was to cross the sand at just the right speed so that the bus didn’t sink in but not so fast that the water damaged the bus. Just after he finished pointing this out to us he swerved out of the water to cross a small out- jutting sandbank. The bus bounced a little on ripples in the sand under the water, and then the front right corner of the vehicle dug into the bank with a whrrrummpphhhh and a shudder. The bus came to a sudden stop and canted to one side. Rangi turned off the engine.
“Oops,” he said into the abrupt silence.
§
The outcome of this accident was a lost hour or so. Another bus came up behind us and the driver got out to help Rangi with our bus. I left them breaking bushes to shove under the back wheels for traction, and walked away up a nearby sand-dune.
The dunes were huge. I have no way of judging their true size, but the one I climbed first must have towered fifty metres or more above the stream. From it I crossed a spine of firm sand to the top of the next one, which was a gigantic plateau. I walked across it until I found myself gazing across Ninety-Mile Beach at the western side. The view was superb. Out to sea, clouds were pushing in from the Tasman and their shadaws were playing on the waters, making a fascinating dappling in green and grey and blue. North the sand-dunes marched, a row of giants. Southward stretched the beach. Far down the curve of the coastline was a tiny dot that moved: another bus. It moved very slowly, so even allowing that it was heading almost directly towards me I guessed it was several kilometres distant.
Back to the bus. It was still stuck, so we filed aboard the one that had stopped to help. Some people wound up standing; some chose to wait for another bus or for our own to get free. I stood, being impatient and not trusting the weather I had seen coming in from the sea.
[By 2015, the very spot where we bogged had become a regular stop for the buses. People would climb the dunes with boogie-boards in hand and skate down the vast slopes, arriving at the bottom in a storm of sand and sliding out across the stream-bed. I sometimes wonder if I was there at the inception of this tradition. I climbed the same dunes, walked out to the same spot — everything clicked with my memory of 1985.]
We turned onto a strip of road, left onto the main road at Te Paki (not Highway 1. I had reached the northern terminus of NZ’s “Main Street” at Awanui, seven kilometres north of Kaitaia. State Highway 1 does not reach NZ’s northern tip), and on to Reinga.
§
The bus pulled up, I climbed out with the other passengers, and followed their flow. I was in a daze. My recollection of this final stage is patchy and achronological. I remember the lighthouse, the Post Office, a winding track, and then — a lookout.
Below me the ridgeline sank into the sea. A scrap of green was the lonely Pohutukawa tree beneath which Maori spirits rest before entering the underwater paths north. I yearned to go that way myself, for I had achieved the second major “first” of my wanderjahr. Near the lighthouse there was a weatherbeaten international distances sign, one arm pointing roughly southwards, bearing the legend: “Bluff — 1401 km.” *
I had travelled the length of my home country and found it too small. I realised then that there would be no rest for me if I stayed in NZ: I needed a broader horizon to explore. Some day it would be nice to choose a place to settle down, like a mussel spat to a rope, but not until I had purged the itch from my feet. If ever I could.
Somehow saddened, I turned away. As the first sheets of rain drenched me I walked back up the path, back past the lighthouse, to the shelter of the bus. Now I must go south again, to keep a promise.
Another night — the 15th of March — in Kaitaia, and then south to Auckland. Three days in Auckland, and I took a bus south to visit my parents in Wanganui.
* The modern Reinga sign says “1452” km. I found a Flickr photo dated July 2000 that shows “1401”, which is consistent with the Bluff sign that said “1401” in 1997 and with my own memory (“1400”; I may be misremembering). At some time after 2000 it seems the Bluff arm was broken off and eventually the entire signpost was replaced.
I grew up in a single-storey three-bedroom house about half a mile from the beach in Wanganui. At night I went to sleep with the sound of distant surf in my ears, which may explain why I feel so at home in large cities with the sound of distant tyres in my ears.
I went to school just across the road. The park beyond the school, seawards, once had a hilltop on which grew a single gigantic tree. This tree had been used for decades by ships navigating their way into Wanganui’s river-mouth. It blew down in the 1969 hurricane — commonly known in NZ as the “Wahine Storm” but better known to me as “the storm that blew the tree down.” More recently, the City Council decided to make a park out of that area of ground, so they bulldozed half of the hill into a disused quarry next to it and by this achieved the total ruination of my childhood playground. The bland result of their efforts lacked the mysterious, somewhat scary atmosphere of the wilderness they destroyed.
But that is not the story I’m telling now. I returned to Wanganui to help my father put a second floor on the parental home, and this is the current storey. I won’t go into detail — the hammering and carrying, the groans when the ends of the two big beams holding the roofline didn’t meet, the laughter when something went as planned. I spent two and a half weeks at home and saw the first, worst part of the job through. Then I decided that the time had come to look for work again.
But first, I went to Auckland to attend Orcon ’85, NZ’s disputed 1985 National SF Convention. I spent the 4th to the 11th of April in Auckland for. I enjoyed the con, but it’s out of scope here.
Kiwifruit ParadiseI arrived in Tauranga on the 12th of April, my money once again starting to run low. I booked into the local YHA hostel and bought a copy of the local newspaper. I wanted to work on the Kiwifruit, but I had arrived too soon.
I soon found work with a firm that specialised in contructing insulated buildings. With the Kiwifruit season coming on, they had too much work on hand to waste trained men on fetch-and-carry. So they employed me to do that. The job paid quite well and involved country trips as far as Kawerau in one direction and Katikati in the other. After a few days I was attached as an extra pair of hands to one of their tradesmen and spent quite a lot of time helping with some work out at the Pulp & Paper Mills in Kawerau. Caxton or Tasman, I’m not sure which now. Memories of huge buildings and vast machines, endless rolls of paper, and mazes of concrete.
All too soon they were up-to-date with their work, but the money I had earned with them carried me comfortably through to the start of the picking season for the Kiwifruit. After an initial couple of days as a picker, even though I had demonstrated a knack for picking, I decided that I needed a more certain income. I switched from picking to packing, which is how I started work at “Bay of Plenty Fruitpackers,” the largest Kiwifruit packing firm in the world.
BOP employed up to 1100 staff during the five- to six-week Kiwifruit season which began in May. Somewhere I have a booklet which told how much volume this workforce handled. Memory is they packed more than two million trays of fruit the previous season, and when I returned the next year (see next issue) to pick, I heard they did three million the year I was there.
I won’t go into great detail about Kiwifruit packing here. I came back for the 1986 season (though in 1986 I worked as a picker, not a packer), so when originally writing this I figured I could hold over a description of the industry until I copuld tell the whole thing from (as it were) stem to cargo hold, the way I had with the mussels. Well, I didn’t get around to it and at nearly 40 years remove, my memories aren’t good enough any more.
I stayed at the Tauranga Hostel for several days, and then several more days. It was running mostly empty still and so the Manager had no particular incentive to kick anyone out. When I started work with the insulation contractors and looked set to become a long-term fixture on the hostel scene, I had already become friends with him. One day he surprised me by mentioning that a previous Manager had done up a small room in the back of the Managerial garage for one of his teenage children. Would I like to rent that room for the same rate as I was currently renting a dormitory bed? The money would disappear into the hostel’s overnights register and there would be no question of the three-day-limit on stays. On the other hand, I would have a room to myself in return for occasional favours such as standing in when the regular relieving manager could not be available when Neil & Leslie took a day off.
Serendipity! "Yes."
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Neil, the Manager, was a former butcher. He decided he didn’t like his trade and took up hostel managing instead. Leslie, his wife, was a head nurse at the local hospital. Together they ran a happy hostel, although Leslie was quite firm on the point that it was Neil’s job and he could jolly well do the hard work himself. There was an active local YHA Branch which helped out on many major and minor projects, and the whole situation demonstrated what an organisation like YHA could do when it was run cooperatively rather than as an employee-oriented or volunteer-oriented operation. The hostel itself was clean and well maintained. The Branch raised money and supplied labour for many building jobs (such as relief manager’s quarters, paving around the hostel, etc).
Towards the end of May I started to wonder what I was going to do next. The Kiwifruit had another week or so to run but I had no idea what my next step was to be. I was comfortable, but I had not saved enough money to get me out of NZ, and I could not face another dreary job such as I’d had with the PO. So you cam imagine my surprise when once again Neil came to the rescue. Whakatane YHA Hostel needed a new Manager. Would I like to take the job on on a pro-tem basis?
By this time I had relieved at Tauranga several times, and apparently Neil thought I had done a good job. When Whakatane came vacant he suggested my name to the Tauranga Branch (which was responsible for Whakatane as well as Tauranga) as a possible replacement. I had been getting on well with the Branch members, so it had been decided to give me a whack at the job if I wanted it.
I had enjoyed relieving and, after thinking the matter over carefully, decided I could afford a couple of months (with the chance that it could become permanent) to find out whether I would like managing a hostel. So on the 3rd of June the Branch Secretary drove me down to Whakatane and settled me into the hostel there. He spent a couple of days showsng me the ropes, then went back to Tauranga, leaving me to deal with the job as best I could. Make or break.
I made.
The hostel was located in King Street, a fair walk from the centre of town. The building was an old two-storey wooden structure, long overdue for demolition. But the nature of YHA’s tenancy on the site was such that if it attempted to replace the building, the land would revert to the local council — which was unlikely to grant a new lease on terms which would leave the hostel a financially viable proposition. Since the hostel was already losing money just about as fast as YHA could afford, Whakatane hostel drifted along from year to year while necessary work piled up because the Tauranga Branch preferred to put its effort into the local (and profitable) hostel.
The hostel provided 24 beds, in six rooms, but rarely had more than half a dozen travellers at any one time. Whakatane was regarded as a dead spot tourist-wise: a way-stop for travellers exiting or entering the scenic East Cape region, or benighted on their way from Gisborne/Napier to Tauranga/Rotorua.
This attitude that there was “nothing to see or do” at Whakatane was mistaken. In fact, there was an excellent beach at nearby Ohope (a five-kilometre walk), there was a good walkway with several Maori sites along it, and Whakatane was a natural gateway for trampers wanting to get into areas not much frequented by other trampers. In addition to this, it was a good base for exploring the coastal side of Mt Tarawera and its little cousin Mt Edgecumbe, provided you had access to a car.
Whakatane itself was the landing-place of one of the seven great canoes of the legendary Great Fleet (circa 1325 AD). It took its name from an incident connected with that landing. It seems that when the canoe landed, all the men jumped out and rushed ashore, leaving the women and children aboard. The canoe, inadequately beached, started to drift away. But Maori tradition made it tapu — sacred or forbidden according to context — for women to paddle the canoe. Problem! But a chief’s daughter grabbed a paddle and, crying “I will act like a man!” quickly brought the canoe back to shore. “Act like a man” in Maori is “whakatane,” and so the place was named. (This naming of places after events rather than people was usual Maori practice, leading to such intriguing names as “Kai Hau O Kupe” — Where Kupe Ate The Wind.) One of the Maori sites in the area, mentioned earlier, was almost the earliest pa (fortified village) site in NZ, and the whole Whakatane area was spotted with historic places.
However, I remember relatively little about my time at Whakatane — except for details that are just as true for my next hostel and hence, perhaps, best left for now. Every attempt to dredge a single memory of everyday life at Whakatane also brings up several similar but better memories of the later hostel. On the other hand, a few distinct events do stand out.
One day the hostel had a single visitor — a German, Kurt. I am unable to place the memory precisely in time: the YHA person who had brought me down to Whakatane was there, but it was a later visit. Anyway, we had been sitting round talking about exciting things to do the next day, and the suggestion was made that we should make an excursion to nearby Mt Edgecumbe, for Kurt’s sake.
Mt Edgecumbe is a solitary mountain, almost directly inland from Whakatane and about 35 kilometres away by car (a trifle less by pigeon — if passenger pigeons were not extinct and therefore unavailable for taxi services). It is only 821 metres in height, but the absence of tall nearby peaks allows it to command the rolling hill-country that surrounds it. As is usually the case with such mountains in New Zealand (and in this area of New Zealand in particular) it is a volcano. A dormant one.
In the morning, we all piled into a car and headed off down King Street and left onto Highway 2, six kilometres and right onto Highway 30. Twenty kilometres and we took the left turn to Kawerau, a town mentioned briefly earlier in relation to the temporary job I took while waiting for the Kiwifruit to start. It was a town of heavy industry, boasting two major pulp & paper mills — Caxton and Tasman. The former produced most of NZ’s toilet paper; the second produced the bulk of NZ’s newsprint. Both were hulking complexes of concrete buildings and mazes of noisy machinery, employing thousands of workers between them, and they were the main reason the town existed. Because of this, the town looked a bit different to most NZ country centres, with its grid of uniformly utilitarian company houses and its odd lack of other signs of personality.
The town was set in — or surrounded by, if you prefer a better term — the great pine forests that provided the wood for the great maws of the two mills. Hundreds of square kilometres of Pinus radiata. Dull, dull, dull to drive around in. The older plantings stood in rows and columns; more recent plantings straggled in a less boring randomness. Here and there, there were sudden areas containing trees of uniform height: legacies of clear-felling or fires. Elsewhere, sections of tall and short trees alternated — the result of strip-logging.
We went through the town and took a side-road towards the mountain on the far side. Somewhere around here we stopped to check in with the Forest HQ, since Mt Edgecumbe was located in the forest, most of which was privately owned by the mills. The mountain loomed over Kawerau like an enormous pyramid, drawing the eye towards it as an escape from the endless rows of spiky trees.
The forest road led us partway up the mountain, then ended in a parking lot. A wide gravel road continued on the far side of a locked gate, and we walked up the road. The day was warmish, despite the increasing height and the fact that it was mid-winter. Kurt later sent me some photos he had taken at the top. They show me wearing T-shirt and thin trousers. Some clouds were scattered around, but not so many as to shut out the warmth of the sun.
We eventually crossed the edge of the crater, but the highest point of the mountain was across from where we did so. So we got to walk around the small weed-grown lake that filled the lowest section of the crater. The entire interior of the crater was heavily overgrown, and it was hard to reconcile all this life with the aridity that must have prevailed in the days when the volcano was active. I said earlier that Edgecumbe is dormant. Extinct would probably be a correct description, but Kiwis have become wary of that word since the time “extinct” Mt Ruapehu decided it had slept long enough, and proceeded to drop ash on towns hundreds of kilometres away.
We finally reached the top — actually the highest point on the rim of the crater. From here the mountainside dropped away in a grand sweep, down into the dwarfed foothills carpeted with their peculiar spiky green “grass.” Kawerau was a grey blot, details blurred by the steam and smoke from the mills. Spires of this smoke rose above it, some overtopping us where we stood atop the mountain.
Looking up from the mountain’s foot to the horizon, above and left to the town, I saw a huge green lump. Mt Tarawera, 1111 metres tall, twenty-five kilometres away. I once reviewed Alan Dean Foster’s novel Maori (I was not kind), which contains a description of the eruption of Tarawera in the late 1800’s.
Turning right and looking along the coastline of the Bay of Plenty, I thought I could see the distant pimple of Mt Maunganui, 232 metres, near Tauranga, but I may have been mistaken.
Turning right and looking out into Bay of Plenty, I could see another mountain — this one low-lying and well up on the lip of the horizon. A pall of white cloud was rising from it. White Island is an active volcano about fifty kilometres offshore in the Bay. Once it was used as a quarry for sulphur, but increasing volcanism in the early years of this century rendered it too dangerous for anyone to reside and work there. Today it suffered occasional forays from planes and boats filled with curiosity-seekers. In 1985 the price for a boat-excursion was, if I remember rightly, $55, with a $10 surcharge if you wanted to actually go ashore there.
Turning right and looking towards East Cape, the land broke into a jumble of woolly green hills — the Ikawhenua Ranges, covered by native bush. This green land was quite distinct from the “grassy” pine forest; NZ’s native trees tend to the blobby, not the spearhead pine shape.
Turning right again brought me full-circle.
I found myself looking at a spine of rock extending from the mountaintop. It rose a little higher than the rest of the summit. Not being afraid of heights, I immediately clambered out onto it and had my photo snapped, standing astride the end of the spur and pointing grandly in the direction of Whakatane. “There are some hostellers waiting on the front porch of the hostel!” I shouted back to the others, jokingly. Actually, although the town was quite distinct, it was too far away for me to make out more than a couple of the bigger buildings — and those only as minute patches of different colour. The hostel was quite invisible.
Five kilometres from Whakatane, over a sizable hill, was the white-sand beach of Ohope. It was a long crescent in shape, about four kilometres long, washed by gentle waves and shelving quite slowly in many places, so that the water warmed quickly on sunny days. Elsewhere it shelved more rapidly and provided good if rather insipid surf. Backing the beach was the resort town of Ohope Beach, and backing the town were high cliffs. These were bush-covered and dotted with cottages.
My main memory of Ohope does not actually date from my hostel days, but rather from a fortnight’s holiday my family spent there many years ago. I still possess a small phial of water and another of sand, collected during that visit. (The water, by the time I wrote this, had lost enough substance through the small cork used to close the bottle so that it is brine rather than water. But who cares? [40 years on, it’s dry.]) My father worked for the NZ Post Office and had managed to secure one of the PO’s many holiday cottages for this vacation.
Ohope in summer was paradisiacal for the younger me. I would spend the long days exploring the beach and the surrounding area, and paddling and swimming, and building huge sand castles with this strange pale sand. (The sand in Wanganui is black (well, grey when dry) and heavy because of the presence of large quantities of iron. Remember the physics demonstration which involves a magnet and a handful of iron filings? We didn’t need iron filings for that — just a pail of sand.) I was very sad when the time came to leave, back to school and homework and “Get up, you’ll be late!” (I never have liked getting up early.)
Perhaps that holiday stayed in my memory so long because of a gimmick my parents used to reduce the monotony of the homeward trip. We waited, car packed, until dawn lit the sky at the right-hand end of the bay. When the sun rose above the peaks of the East Cape, we all piled into the car and started the homeward trip. We drove across the island via Rotorua, Taupo, and National Park, arriving in Wanganui before sunset. Then we went down to Castlecliff Beach and watched the sun go down into the sea. From water, to water.
After a somewhat uncertain start — I needed time to adjust my viewpoint from that of the hosteller to that of the Manager — I got the hang of the job, and even began to feel that perhaps this job provided an interesting new slant on the Youth Hostels and the way that they operate. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself worrying over the future of the hostel, even though my own time there was likely to be short.
As I’ve said many times, all things end. At the end of July, the new permanent manager arrived and I had to go. But where? I liked the life; I didn’t want to stop being a hostel manager just yet. Fortunately, my work with Whakatane had found enough favour so that I was offered a chance at running another one, as a permanent position.
The Mountain
On 1st August I left Whakatane and hitched to Tauranga. I stayed a night in the hostel there, renewing my friendship with the managers. I also talked with the other hostellers staying that night — Kurt from Germany (already met at Whakatane) and Karen from England. (I have decided, after some thought, to use the names of the people I meet in this section. Privacy across 40 years will be maintained by withholding most surnames.) The next day I travelled on by bus via Waihi and Paeroa to Te Aroha.
Te Aroha was a small dairy-farming town, about 3,500 people and several hundred thousand head of cattle. It perched on the knees of Mt Te Aroha at the eastern edge of the Hauraki Plains. It was in an old gold-mining area of the North Island. There were hot mineral springs there, and many good tracks for tramping in the Kaimai Ranges behind it. The town was established in 1880.
The mountain after which the town was named stood 953 metres tall, and its peak was the site of a TV/radio retransmissions tower. The summit could be reached by either a long 10 km winding dirt road, or a short 2 km bush track. From the summit the successful climber could see for hundreds of kilometres around: as far as East Cape and White Island out to sea, to Mt Ruapehu, Tarawera, and Edgecumbe south, to Mt Pirongia west, and to the Coromandel Ranges and the Firth of Thames and Little Barrier Island north. (The view north was hindered somewhat because the Kaimai Range became the Coromandel Range in that direction. Te Aroha being part of the Kaimai Range, vision was blocked by the tall peaks in the distance.) Mt Te Aroha stood a little way out from the ranked ridges of the Range, and was a conspicuous landmark for anyone approaching the town. It was also, incidentally, the highest peak in the Kaimais. The nearest higher mountains were Pirongia (962 metres), 85 km away on the far side of Hamilton, and Tarawera (1111 metres), 100 km away on the far side of Rotorua.
I came into Te Aroha from the north on a cloudy day. From my bus seat I was able to look out through the driver’s window, craning for my first glimpse of the town that might become my new home. The weather south looked unpromising: there was a huge black cloud directly ahead, its base apparently resting on the ground. The wind being in the west, I guessed that the cloud-mass was squeezing its way through a gap in the Range. Never mind that my open map-book did not show any such gap. It was only as the bus approached the phenomenon that I realised my error; for suddenly I noticed a slender silver spire atop the cloud’s height and realised that my “cloud” was a mountain — the very mountain, in fact, that the town took its name from. A kilometre doesn’t sound like a great height for a mountain, but the Hauraki Plains were low-lying swamps when the pakeha came to New Zealand, so Te Aroha’s modest kilometre of height measured something like 900 metres rise from the plain to the summit — a bulk many a “taller” mountain might envy!
The size and prominence of the mountain, in fact, was responsible for its name. A long time ago, a Maori chief named Mamoe left his home near Mt Maunganui to go visit relatives near the modern site of Hamilton. On the way home, he and his party became lost in the boggy plains. Winning through the swamps, they made their way instinctively to the highest mountain in sight in order to locate themselves in relation to their homes. From the summit of this mountain they could look over the ranges and into the Bay of Plenty. There they saw the unmistakable silhouette of Mt Maunganui. So happy was Mamoe at this sight of home that he named the mountain he was on “the great love of Mamoe,” Te Arohanui a Mamoe. Nowadays this was shortened to “the love,” making it Te Aroha (also known as “the Mountain of Love” to the poetically-inclined).
Once off the bus, I followed my hostel handbook up the slope of the mountain toward the hostel, approaching my new home for the first time as if I was a newly-arriving hosteller.
Te Aroha hostel, when I ran it, boasted ten hosteller beds in two rooms. My accommodation consisted of a single room off the kitchen area and the run of the hostel during the day. Since Te Aroha was traditionally open all day, and I had no objection to the idea, I usually shared that day with any hostellers who were staying and who did not feel like going out to see the local sights.
Staying in was not unpopular. To see much of the local area you need walk no further than the front door. The hostel was located on a knee of the mountain, on the northern outskirts of town. From the hostel’s porch you enjoyed an almost uninterrupted view across the plains. Distant landmarks visible from the hostel included Mt Pirongia and the marching ranks of the Kaimai Ranges. Spectacular sunsets tended to be routine rather than unusual. One artistically-inclined visitor watercoloured a lovely picture in the visitor’s book (see illo), and I photocopied it when I left. Sadly, the town had no colour photocopier; I had to satisfy myself with shades of grey and colourful memories.
The hostel was very homey. The local YHA Branch had put a lot of work into making it so, with help from the fact that the building was originally a house anyway. NZ had what appeared to be an unusual habit: often, instead of building a house on a site, they would load it on the back of a truck and bring it in from elsewhere. (Big houses might be cut in two or more pieces and transported severally.) The typical NZ house being a sturdy wooden structure supported on piles, rather than a brick structure or one built half into the ground, with a basement, this was quite a convenient way of avoiding spending on building costs what you save in land price by buying an out-of-the-way block of land. In the case of the Te Aroha hostel, the house was about sixty years old. But such is the nature of the town, I met a member of the family that once owned the building and whose parents built it. If memory will serve me again, the hostel building cost YHA £64 to buy and transport, back in the 60’s. The land was on a perpetual free lease from the town. [2024: Alas, it is no more; it closed in 2014.]
I ended up running the Te Aroha hostel for 14 months, but my arrival there definitively ended my wanderjahr. Whakatanae had been a temporary assignment, but I was the new permanent Manager at Te Aroha. Like a mussel spat settling on a rope, my wandering days were over — until the time came for me to be stripped from my comfy perch and re-seeded elsewhere. I remember many pleasant adventures there (the climb, the hot pools, Waiorongomai Valley, Halley’s Comet, cycle touring on my time off) — but those belong to another story.
