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Published: February 13th 2009
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Monday 9 February This morning it started raining and I’m not sure it stopped all day until just after I pulled into my site on the Bay of Islands.
I’d had breakfast and was just getting myself organised to go, when Judy from the van 2 doors up stopped by to invite me over for some fish. The people in another van had been fishing and had been very successful, and couldn’t manage everything and had passed some on to them; they in turn couldn’t manage everything either so she was looking for people to feed! It was a King fish, which is a game fish, and quite common in the waters around this area, and they are huge, and also very, very tasty. We got chatting and it turns out that John, in his younger days had spent some time on a farming exchange on a farm near Ellon, so, small world! (For the non North Easteners my house is about 10 miles from Ellon). They were both retired NZ’ers and have spent many holidays camping and campervanning, and are now doing even more of it in theire retirement; they gave me some good hints about things to do
and some places to go (and a couple to give a miss!).
So, well fed, I set off for the Bay of Islands with a couple of stops along the way.
My first stop was at the Gumdiggers Park. When a kauri tree is damaged, the sap will flow to it to heal it, just like with any other; when that hardens it becomes kauri gum, which looks a bit like amber when it is polished up. It became another prized commodity and so something of a goldrush began, with gumdiggers flooding in to dig it all up. The park lets you follow around a couple of trails through the bush where they have found some of the original holes dug by the gumdiggers and others which they have re-excavated, and they have set up a mini gumdigger village to recreate what life must have been like for them. It must have been a difficult life - many of the kauri areas are in swamp type lands, and that coupled with the heat and humidity, would not have made for great working conditions. Many kauri were cut down as it was found that often there would be pools
of gum in the hollowed out trunks. They have also found in the swamp lands many ancient kauri that have lain where they fell, preserved for perhaps thousands of years and also the stumps of others that had been cut down or fallen, showing again just how huge they could be.
After this I headed to Waitangi and to visit the Treaty Grounds. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed on 6 February 1840. The treaty was signed by the Maori tribal chiefs, and in it, they agreed to hand over their sovereignty to the British crown; in return they were granted the protection of the crown. Of course, there was opposition to the treaty among many Maori people who did not want to be handing anything over to the
pakeha, and this raised tensions between the tribes even further - just like the Scottish clans, the Maori tribes were always fighting. In the end, there were enough signatories from the Maori chiefs to make it stick. I think there might have been some sweeteners involved, although that wasn’t in the official information at the site or in any of the things I’ve read, just a feeling; even some who
had been opposed to it originally signed it - if you can’t beat them join them I suppose! I think there are a few parallels here with out own history and the act of union.
For the centenary celebrations in 1940 a ‘whare runanga’ (meeting house) was built. Every wall and ceiling on the inside is covered with intricate carvings which are significant to the major Maori tribes (this is an unusual marae because they usually are purely for a single tribe, so this is seen as a national marae); there is also a huge war canoe which is named after Kupe, who is the Polynesian navigator who discovered NZ (it wasn’t Cook and his crew after all! - here, they are very careful to say, when referring to Cook that he “re-discovered” NZ) - if I’ve copied it down properly, the canoe is called ‘Ngatokimatawhaorua’; it is 35m long and takes a minimum of 76 people to row it. They bring it out onto the water during the Waitangi day celebrations around 6 Feb, so I was a little late to be seeing that, but there were other things still going on, like concerts of traditional songs -
the Maori are a very tuneful people!
The rain seemed to have stopped by the time I got to my campsite, which meant I was able to cook my tea on my little gas stove - even pasta and veggies and sweet chilli sauce can taste quite gourmet when you’ve made it and eat it outside!!
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