Stepping Aboard Māui's Canoe

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Four weed-destroying, sheep-chasing and tangelo-squeezing weeks later, our time in Opotiki and at Te Aranga has come to an end. As well as being good exercise and a valuable opportunity to learn about many facets of New Zealand life, these four weeks have also been restful beyond our expectations. After some six and half months of constant movement - rarely sleeping in the same bed two nights in a row - it was wonderful to sit still, so to speak, for a while. To eat home-cooked food, to build friendships with new people, to be able to laze away a weekend reading trashy novels without feeling guilty for not being a culture vulture at every instant.

Thus it was that - complete with fetching farmers' tans - we hopped back on the bus which took us to Rotorua, some 130 kilometres from Opotiki. Rotorua, with its mudpools and thermal oddities, has been a popular resort for many decades, but it was not where we were heading. Indeed, our impression was that the place was something of a trap, presenting a sanitized version of Māori culture to the tourist hordes, and consequently we avoided it. The airport was all we saw of the place, before making the short hop from North to South Island and arriving in Christchurch a couple of hours later.

South Island is a wonderfully empty place, empty of humans at least. It is more or less exactly the same size as Java, an island you may remember from earlier entries as not being particularly empty at all. Indeed, while Java struggles to bear the strain of a population of over 124 million souls, South Island whistles along with less than one percent - one percent! - of that. You could fit the entire population of the island into Birmingham - not that you'd want to - with some room to spare. Empty, very empty. South Island is known in Māori as Te Wāhi Pounamu, The Place of Greenstone, after the highly prized jade found in parts of the island and for centuries a favourite material for Māori craftsmen. An alternative name is Te Waka a Māui, The Canoe of Māui: Maori legend has it that a hero named Māui hauled a huge fish from the sea while standing in his canoe. The boat became South Island, while Māui's fish - Te Ika a Māui - became the North. Māori must certainly be a candidate for the prize of most poetic and aesthetically pleasing language. Astonishingly, a certain Māui crops up in very similar contexts in the mythologies of Hawai'i, Tahiti and Tonga - these islands are thousands of kilometres from New Zealand across the open Pacific Ocean. Today, however, Māori culture on South Island is nowhere near as strong as in the North: indeed, the vast majority of New Zealand's Māori population lives across Cook Strait.

Christchurch is "the big city" of South Island - with a population of 400,000 or so, it is a metropolis by New Zealand standards. Perched on the edge of the Canterbury Plains and looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, Christchurch is well known as the most European of New Zealand's cities. We arrived in the late afternoon, and had put aside a couple of days to explore the city before setting off by car for our grand tour of the island. Christchurch provided us with our first taste of hostelling, New Zealand-style. Forget the dark, dank, regimented youth hostels of home. Forget curfews, lists of rules as long as your arm and dusty thirty-year-old back issues of National Geographic. Hostels in New Zealand are something else entirely, as I hope these entries will show. Our abode in Christchurch was Dorset House, a beautiful timber-built Victorian house dating back to the 1870s. Recently refurbished, the hostel is a member of BBH, a loose assocation of hostels we would come to know very well in the coming weeks. I won't bother describing how plush Dorset House was - suffice to say that the beds all had electric blankets. There can be nothing more to add.

I had heard, very vaguely and I don't remember where, that Christchurch would be reminiscent of Oxford or Cambridge. And indeed it was. As we walked into the centre of town on our first evening for a spot of dinner, we came upon a sight that certainly was familiar, and startlingly so: the River Avon runs through part of the city centre, and with its green and grassy banks and stone bridges, the area bears more than a passing resemblance to the famous Cambridge Backs. A little light digging shows that the city was actually named after that most famous of Oxford colleges, Christ Church. Most strange, most strange.

The following morning was sunny and warm, and we ambled back into town from the hostel to enjoy a well-known but rather bizarre Christchurch pastime that reminded us of College days in Cambridge. Indeed, the Avon is but a couple of feet deep as it runs through the city, and absolutely perfect for punting. We were glad to discover that in Christchurch they punt properly, with the till at the rear. We couldn't possibly resist the temptation. The Avon actually turned out to be much easier to punt on that the Cam: as well as being shallower, thus saving you from ending up with cold water down your sleeves, the bottom was considerably less sticky and muddy, minimising the risk of losing your pole. Or worse still, losing your pole and stupidly, inexplicably hanging on to it, thereby falling into the river...On our return to the boathouse, an astonished manager - I am admittedly not too bad at punting, after almost weekly practice at university - in all seriousness offered me a job punting tourists about...hard work for a couple of dollars an hour, but nice to know nonetheless. We lunched on the grassy riverbank before spending our afternoon wandering around Christchurch Art Gallery, a striking modern building full of even more striking - read "odd" - modern art, and the Christchurch Arts Centre, located in the beautiful neo-gothic former University of Canterbury buildings and abounding with workshops, galleries and cafés. Christchurch is certainly a very mellow, laid-back sort of place, with little of the hustle and bustle that you might expect from the country's second largest city.

After a delicious supper of gargantuan New Zealand green-lipped mussels, chips and Belgian beer, it was back to Dorset House to pack in preparation for our departure the following morning. We hopped on a bus back to the airport where we had booked to pick up our wheels for the next six weeks or so, a cute little Hyundai: not much under the bonnet but a nice big boot to cart our stuff around in. We didn't get very far before making our first stop at New World, to stock up on groceries for the coming days.

Our destination was the Banks Peninsula, a very bizarrely-shaped peninsula that juts out from the Canterbury Plain into the Pacific just south of Christchurch and is what remains of two large and formerly offshore volcanoes. With several large harbours, the peninsula now seems to be a favourite retreat for Christchurch inhabitants eager to escape the "city"...They should try London for a change. Our stop for the night was Barry's Bay, located in the middle of the peninsula at the very end of Akaroa Harbour. The drive to the bay from Christchurch took us on a circuitous route along the northern edge of the peninsula and over the hilly interior, much of it on unsealed roads perched on steep hillsides: the views of the endless bays and coves and out to sea were stunning.

Even more stunning was the hostel Alex had booked for us: Half Moon Cottage was a beautiful timber bungalow with a wide veranda running all the way around it, set mere metres away from the shoreline and surrounded by a lush, colourful and fragrant cottage garden. Hammocks hung between the trees. The interior of the house was no less comfortable, cosily furnished and much more like a sprawling old country cottage than a backpacker hostel. We were completely unable to resist the temptation of dropping our bags on the bed and settling into a hammock with a glass of wine. The owners of the cottage also had a supply of bikes you could use - for free, of course - to explore the area around the bay. This we did, discovering a beautiful winery-cum-restaurant on a hill overlooking the bay where we cooled down with a ginger beer, and tiny local dairy churning out all sorts of delicious cheeses. With dozens of small boats bobbing up and down, anchored in the harbour, the area had more than a hint of Mediterranean Riviera to it. That evening we dined al fresco in the garden of Half Moon Cottage and digested in our hammocks until we could bear the evening chill no longer and retired indoors. Bliss.

We were up bright and early the following morning and drove back over the hills to Le Bons Bay, a small bay at the easternmost tip of the peninsula and facing straight out towards the Pacific. The bay is home to another hostel, perched on a steep hillside with idyllic views out to sea, whose owners run regular small boat trips out into the bay, which is home to large numbers of Hector's dolphins. Also known as the white-headed dolphin, Cephalorhynchus hectori is one of the smallest dolphins in the sea, at a pint-sized 1.4 metres! Found only in the coastal waters of South Island, Hector's dolphins are critically endagered and only 7,000 or so are thought to remain, a third of the number alive thirty years ago. There are two very separate populations along the east and west coasts of the island: these dolphins seem unwilling or unable to cross stretches of deep open sea and thus cannot round the waters of Cook Strait. They don't venture far from the coast either, and sure enough, only a few minutes after we put to see the boat was surrounded by dolphins, their unusual rounded dorsal fins slicing through the bow-waves: they were beautiful creatures, almost close enough to touch, their bodies patterned with stripes and blotches of grey, black and white. One even treated us to an acrobatic jump right out of the water, although my shutter finger was, unfortunately, not quite quick enough...Much of Le Bons Bay is surrouned by sheer cliffs, home to colonies of seabirds that watched us pass as they sat on their nests. Such wilderness - and only a few miles from Christchurch.

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Photos

Bridge over the Avon
Could just as well be the Cam!

South Island's Mountainous Spine
The keel of Maui's canoe, perhaps?

Rotorua to Christchurch
A quick hop with Air New Zealand.

Belgian beer, Kiwi mussels
Oh how I had missed Hoegaarden.

Christ's College, Canterbury
One of New Zealand's best known private schools.

The Avon
Beautiful and peaceful in the Sun.

Look at the technique...
Not too hard when the river's only a foot or so deep!

Christchurch Arts Centre
Formerly the buildings of the University of Canterbury.

Too late!
This little dolphin jumped clear of the water - wasn't quick enough on the shutter.