Giveaways
Updated 12 November 2021.
AFTER the Coromandel, I decided to drive around New Zealand’s remote East Cape. The East Cape area’s quite remote from the country’s main areas of population. Travellers on city business tend to go through the middle of the North Island, or fly. And most tourists also stick to better-known parts of New Zealand, such as the mountains around Queenstown.
So, the East Cape’s got a long coastline with lots of beaches, and yet it’s also ‘off the beaten track’ even for tourists: which is perhaps getting close to a unique combination in today’s world. It’s a really good place to visit if you want to have an un-pressured sort of a holiday. Just two weeks by the seaside in a small hotel or cabin or under the canvas of a big old tent listening to the booming surf in your bunk at night. The kind of holiday a lot of New Zealanders had as kids and remember all their lives.
The East Cape is also an area with strong Māori traditions, as old-time European settlers also left it alone for the most part. In Māori the region is known as Tairāwhiti, which means almost the same thing, namely, ‘East Side’. If you drive around the cape in a clockwise direction, between Tauranga and the adjacent Mount Maunganui there are no cities until the very end of your journey at Gisborne.
The first part of the journey is along the sweeping, sandy shores of the Bay of Plenty or Te Moana-a-Toi (the Sea of Toi, an ancestral navigator), where there are two sizable towns, Whakatāne and Ōpōtiki. After Ōpōtiki the coast of the cape itself is quite rugged and there are no big towns, just villages, until you get to Gisborne, which is actually quite a long way to go. It pays to keep well gassed up.
Gisborne is located in a bay officially called Tūranganui-a-Kiwa / Poverty Bay. The Māori name means the great (or long) standing-place of Kiwa, an ancestral hero or demigod associated with the ocean. The Pacific Ocean is sometimes called Te Moana-nui a Kiwa, the great sea of Kiwa.
The English names Bay of Plenty and Poverty Bay also demand explanation. They were bestowed by Captain Cook, who was impressed by the fertile shores of the Sea of Toi and disappointed by a failure to obtain provisions in the long-standing-place of Kiwa. Yet Poverty Bay is also quite fertile. Even Captain Cook didn’t get everything right.
There’s a great Ebook guide with maps at the end called Explore the East Cape. And you can get printed tourism maps and fliers along the way as well, which are probably more convenient to use in the car. I-sites are one-stop shops for all tourism information. The national i-site website tells you where to find the local i-site in each town. Here is a PDF map of where all the i-sites are, along with driving routes.
Coming down from the Coromandel, I decided to pass through Matamata where the Hobbiton film set from the Lord of the Rings films is located. Hobbiton isn’t part of the East Cape. But if you set out from the Coromandel — or Auckland — it will be on the way, so it makes sense to stop in.
Here’s a map of the Hauraki Rail Trail I saw in Matamata, which shows where Matamata is in relation to the Coromandel — namely, at the southern end of the trail. It’s accessible by road too, of course.
Hobbiton costs NZ $90 to get in as an adult, in but it’s well worth it! It verges onto the streets of Matamata, rather incongruously. Then again, if all our country towns were like this, they might be a bit more pleasant.
It’s better to go in the morning because it gets rather crowded in the afternoon, and you can book online for an early morning tour. They limit the numbers. And while $90 may seem steep, but it also means that the numbers are limited. You’re able to take photos and videos. The Green Dragon pub is the highlight: it’s fully furnished inside. Here’s a video I made of Hobbiton outdoors, followed by a scene in a blacksmith’s, and then inside the Green Dragon.
There’s a backpackers just outside of town, if you want to stay there. From Matamata you drive over the Kaimai range to Tauranga and Mount Maunganui, a sort of mini-Gold Coast.
At Tauranga you can also visit the site of the famous battle of Gate Pā, fought on the 29th of April 1864, in which the British suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of Māori who were barring a gate on the main road out of town by way of a pā, or fortification, which they had created around the gate. Today, Gate Pā is in the suburbs, near a shopping mall!
The proper geographical name for the site of Gate Pā is Pukehinahina, the hill of the hinahina or māhoe, a type of tree.
The band Alien Weaponry has composed a song about the battle of Gate Pā called Rū Ana te Whenua, meaning 'the trembling earth', and there is a good summary of the battle on a webpage about the song at folksong.org.nz.
You can also visit The Elms, the modern name for an old mission house and gardens buiilt on a site known in Māori as Te Papa Tauranga. In the old days, The Elms was called the Te Papa Mission Station. What follows is a brief November 2021 update by a friend of mine, who also supplied the material about Gate Pā above. And who was kindly guided all around the The Elms by himself after paying the small sum of NZ $7.50 for the privilege (usually, of course, there's a group).
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The old mission house is famous in New Zealand. You can see it the opening scenes of a 1946 documentary about housing in which its owner at the time, Alice Maxwell, descends a beautiful kauri staircase tipped with mahogany that is still there in the lobby. Those scenes run from 1:18 to 1:40 in the first part of the documentary, called Housing in New Zealand.
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But perhaps the thing which makes The Elms most famous—or notorious—has nothing to do with its architecture or carpentry, and more to do with the fact that on the night before the Battle of Gate Pā nine officers were entertained in the dining room: nine officers, of whom just one would survive the battle to come.
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All the same, the Māori won admiration from the British for their proposal of a code of chivalry, a sort of forerunner of the Geneva Convention, which the defenders published before the battle and upheld during its course.
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In the gardens, there is a new pavilion which blends traditional Maori carving with the curiously similar styles of old-time Britons, styles known in Anglo-Saxon as Wiðowinde, which means Bindweed in modern English. In the photograph below, the designs on the left are mostly Wiðowinde, on the right mostly Māori. The design is intended to reflect the mixed heritage of many New Zealanders these days.
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You can find out more about The Elms/Te Papa Tauranga on its website, theelms.org.nz. Among other things, it is a popular wedding venue!
The next sizable town after Tauranga and Mount Maunganui, along the shores of Te Moana-a -Toi, is Whakatāne.
Whakatāne is the town from which people used to set out to go to Whakaari / White Island. I doubt that these tours will resume. But as of the time this post first appeared, they hadn't yet had time to change the signs.
But that isn’t the only tourism activity in this town, where I spent the night. I found that it was hard to get a cheap place on Airbnb or in a hostel, so decided to stay at the Whakatāne Hotel, which is central.
Here’s a video I made inside the hotel:
There is a huge rock in the middle of Whakatāne called Pōhatuora which has been consecrated as a war memorial. It sits in the middle of a town square, in a way that’s shown in the photo on this page. Pōhatuora makes it fairly easy to find your way around.
I had a full Turkish meal for NZ $16 at a place called Atatürk and spent ages chatting with the owner about Turkish politics, since I’ve been to Turkey of course and written about it elsewhere in blog posts and in my book A Maverick Pilgrim Way. He worried that the present times might be the beginning of the end for Turkey and that Turkey could end up becoming another Iraq.
There are amazing light-show experiences at the Mataatua Marae which you can take in for as little as NZ $15. The Mataatua Marae is also famous for having a meeting-house which has travelled around the world, on display and residing in anthropological museums in Australia and Britain for more than 130 years before being repatriated to Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and re-erected! Signs proudly advertise the uniquely peripatetic history of the local meeting-house, an unusually cosmopolitan world-traveller as buildings go.
Mataatua means ‘the face of God’ and it is the name of the ancestral waka, or canoe, which is said to have brought Māori to this part of Aotearoa from Hawaiki, the traditional ancestral homeland of the Māori: a name that’s cognate with Hawaiʽi but really refers to a part of what’s now French Polynesia, where the local dialects are similar to New Zealand Māori.
For such ocean-going craft, ‘canoe’ is a figure of speech. Though the word waka would later come to refer to single-hulled inshore canoes in New Zealand Māori, the original oceangong waka had double hulls and were quite formidable. Such vessels are sometimes called voyaging-canoes to make the distinction clear. One such voyaging-canoe from the early days of Māori settlement in New Zealand was unearthed in the summer of 2011–2012 at place called Anaweka. It was made from New Zealand matai timber but bore a realistic image of a turtle, more typical of carvings done in tropical Polynesia.
The eighteenth-century British explorer Captain Cook brought an inhabitant from that part of the Pacific, Tupaia, with him as an interpreter. Tupaia also possessed considerable navigation skills of his own and, on top of that, Cook was also amazed to discover that Tupaia’s translating abilities still worked as far as New Zealand, which was as distant from Tupaia’s island as England was from the Americas. Here’s a short video about Tupaia which begins by mentioning Rangiatea, another ancestral-homeland name with a cognate, or parallel, in the islands of tropical Polynesia.
Māori lore held that New Zealand had originally been discovered by a Polynesian navigator named Kupe, sometime in the early Middle Ages by the European calendar. And that Kupe made several voyages back and forth to build up the new Polynesian settlement. Cook recognized at once that Kupe must have been the equal, in navigational terms, of Columbus.
It was Cook who also first surmised, from similarities of language and culture, that Polynesians had come from South-East Asia. He learned, from Tupaia, that while the winds in the tropical Pacific normally blew from the east and were thus headwinds to anyone coming from Asia, for three months of the year they blew from the west.
The Polynesians were thus able to use contrary breezes to go wherever they wanted on the open ocean. The ability to navigate on the open sea using different winds was not mastered in Europe until the 1400s with the discovery of the trade winds, which blew from the west in the latitudes of Europe and from the east as you got closer to the equator.
As long as they stuck to the tropical Pacific, where the tropical easterlies periodically reversed, the Polynesians did have the advantage of having contrary winds in the same latitude. Even so, getting to New Zealand was still an amazing feat: not just because it was so far away, but also because the pattern of the winds was more westerly in New Zealand’s latitudes, so that Polynesians who sailed to New Zealand had to master the trade winds after all.
(There’s even evidence that the Polynesians made it to the Americas, from the DNA of modern Polynesians and of the sweet potato known in Māori as kūmara, a tropical crop that is a staple of Polynesian agriculture, yet native to the Americas. Somehow the Polynesians got hold of this plant, known suggestively in Peru as ‘kumar’, though precisely how has long been a good question.)
In any case, the revelation that Cook disclosed on his return — that a supposedly primitive people, brown in hue, had been five hundred years ahead of the navigators of Europe’s age of discovery — went quite some way toward conquering prejudice and encouraging a more sympathetic view of people who weren’t European. This is an achievement Polynesia can be proud of, and is at the same time, perhaps the most significant of Captain Cook’s discoveries.
Getting back to Whakatāne, the name of the town means ‘like a man’. It refers to an incident that is said to have happened shortly after the arrival of the Mataatua waka. By custom, only men were allowed to paddle at that time. The men went ashore to spy out the new land, and the waka then began to drift out to sea with the women on board. A female chieftain named Wairaka said that there was only one thing for it, “Kia whakatāne au i ahau” (‘I will act like a man’), and the women all grabbed the paddles and returned to shore. Which was, of course, just as well for the future of the new colony.
Whakatāne offers all kinds of wilderness and tourism experiences including walks and overnight stays in the Whirinaki rainforest and a visit to the Muriwai Caves. There are also several historic Pā including the Pā of Toi on the Nga Tapuwae o Toi, or The Footsteps of Toi, walkway.
NZ Pocket Guide, a useful website founded a few years ago by a backpacker couple from France and England, seems to offer some of the most comprehensive lists of trails and things to do. When it comes to walks, you might want to refer to its list of 10 Must-Do Walks in Whakatāne.
East of Whakatane I drove around Ōhiwa Harbour, an ecologically important lagoon with two sandspits guarding it from the sea, Ōhope and Ōhiwa. Both are popular beach resorts, and I visited the Onekawa Marae at Ōhiwa.
The next sizable town is Ōpōtiki. There’s the option, there, of a turn off to an inland road to Gisborne via the spectacular Wioeka Gorge, but I pressed on round the cape. Here I am on the beach, somewhere near Ōpōtiki.
Here’s a photo of downtown Ōpōtiki with a pouwhenua, similar to what’s known in the USA and Canada as a totem pole.
NZ Pocket Guide lists no less than 15 Ōpōtiki Walks you can’t Miss (so you might be there for a while.)
It’s around here that my cellphone reception died on Spark, not to revive till I was further along at Waihau Bay. Vodafone and Two Degrees are apparently a bit more reliable on this stretch of SH 35, but not Spark . The shoe is on the other foot in other places.
Crap cellphone reception in the more rugged parts of New Zealand is par for the course. Getting a signal at any given map reference is a lottery, depending on who you’re with. There are even suburbs of Queenstown where some people can’t get a signal. I wonder if the rival carriers should pool their efforts?
The largest iwi or tribe in the East Cape region is the Ngāti Porou, but the coastal area on the northern part of the East Cape peninsula is the traditional territory of an iwi called Te Whānau ā Apanui, which literally means the Apanui Family, after a comparatively recent historical founder of the clan who was named Apanui Ringamutu. Other iwi in the region are Ngāti Awa, who live in the vicinity of Whakatane, Whakatōhea who live in the vicinity of Ōpōtiki, Tūhoe who live near Lake Waikāremoana, and Rongowhakaata who live in the Gisborne area. Other Tūranganui-a-Kiwa iwi are Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri and Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti.
When New Zealand’s Covid lockdown was at its height, local iwi closed off much of the area to visitors with roadblocks that the Government supported, as there was a lot of concern that indigenous peoples might be extra-susceptible.
The condition of the coastal road was variable and there were slips in places, due to heavy rain that dogged me on the whole trip.
In fact, I only just made it through before State Highway 35 was closed, for reasons that are clear in this video:
A big attraction for trampers and boaties, once you get past Ōpōtiki, is the Mōtū River, which enters the sea at Maraenui, and the Mōtū Trails which partly run alongside. These trails form a loop that goes far into the mountains and then back out again.
The Mōtū’s sometimes called the Mighty Mōtū, as it’s a really wild river full of high — grade rapids and waterfalls that attract daring kayakers and rafters for a distance of 100km up from the river’s mouth. You can also go up and down the Mōtū by jetboat if you don’t feel quite so brave, physical, or keen on getting soaked.
Every other big river in the North Island, even the Whanganui, has had rapids blown up or been subjected to flood-control measures at the insistence of local farmers and townsfolk. The Mōtū is the only big river on the island that is still completely ‘wild’. It cascades through a total wilderness for most of its length including the final stretches, and nothing’s been done to tame it.
Decades ago, there were plans to dam the Mōtū for hydroelectric power. Fortunately, nothing came of that scheme and the wilderness character of the Mōtū is now protected by Act of Parliament.
Speaking of floods and wild rivers, about a generation ago, a geographer called Geoff Park wrote a book called Ngā Uruora / The Groves of Life, which explored tensions between settlers and Māori over the domestication of New Zealand’s rivers and the draining of the country’s swamps. The existence of swamps and flood-prone rivers never used to bother the Māori, whose villages were perched on hills and for whom waterlogged conditions brought fish and eels to their doorstep. Traditional Māori agriculture also took account of periodic (or permanent) waterlogging.
But for the European settlers who arrived in the 1800s, drainage and flood control were signs of the advance of civilization, along with gothic cathedrals, planned towns, and all the other signs of the general de-wilding of the New Zealand landscape in order to make it into a ‘Better Britain’.
Park wrote that the idea of drainage and flood-control as markers of progress wasn’t just a colonial thing. It was also the way that the Europeans thought about their own landscape.
The Dutch, who had the most experience in pushing back the waters, did a roaring trade helping the inhabitants of other European countries to drain their own swampy bits. In the German language, for instance, a flat paddock populated by cows is sometimes called a Holländerei: a place that must have been pumped out, at some time, by folk from over the border.
Well, the Mighty Mōtū missed out on being made into a placid European-style waterway surrounded by dinky little farms along most of its length. And it is just as well to have one river that did.
My journey from Hobbiton to Rocket Lab—Māhia Peninsula, to be precise—continues in Part 2 of this two-part post.
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