This Dark Sheltering Forest by Magi Nams

Author:Magi Nams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Zealand travel guides, books about New Zealand, family travel adventures, New Zealand, travel Australia & Oceania, traveler and explorer biographies, travel books
Publisher: Leaf Rain Books
Published: 2015-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

We sit on a bench and stare, awestruck, at this relic of New Zealand’s ancient forests. The display also informs us that Tāne Mahuta may have sprouted from a seed during the time when Christ walked on the earth.

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Camp in Waipoua Forest

After we leave the gigantic tree, we set up our tent in a campground at the edge of Waipoua Forest. Then we hike to a look-off with a panoramic view of the surrounding hilly, rain-shrouded landscape. As we begin the downhill tramp from the lookout, I’m caught by an insane impulse. “Let’s run!”

“Yeah!” Dainis shouts.

We whoop with laughter and bolt into action. In misting rain, the four of us dash down a narrow track through a forest of giant kauri, our hearts leaping with the thrill of treading among them.

During the evening, rain sings softly against the tent while Vilis reads more from Elsie Locke’s A Canoe in the Mist. This gentle night of our reality is a pleasant contrast to the stark reality of June 10, 1886, when Tarawera – the three-cusped volcanic peak we saw to the north of Lake Taupō from our vantage point of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing – erupted eleven days after the waka wairua (ghost canoe) was seen by boat tourists and a guide. That eruption destroyed the Pink and White Terraces and buried two Māori villages.

Dainis and Jānis don’t fidget, their faces sober as Vilis reads of tourists and locals who were crushed under the weight of collapsing buildings or suffocated in mud. Survivors were forced out into a howling, sulphurous wind that pelted them with mud and stones blasted into the sky when the mountain split wide open and heaved its fiery guts into the night.[49]

More-pork. More-pork. And the owl’s call returns my family to the safety of our here and now.

January 23

South of Waipoua Forest, the broad, murky Wairoa River parallels the highway through a flat agricultural landscape of dairy pastures and fields of corn and kūmara, the sweet potato Māori explorers brought to this land a thousand years ago. Vilis glances at the waterway. “It’s nothing like those big, braided rivers we see on the South Island.”

Clumps of pampas grass edge the roadsides. Forested Tokatoka Peak is an anomaly that juts up from the riverside plains. En route to Ōwhango, we angle eastward across the top of splayed fingers of rivers that empty into the Tasman Sea. Then we swing south to Ōrewa, where warm Pacific winds once again caress us and the boys collect kauri gum from the trunks of young trees growing in Alice Eaves Scenic Reserve.

Yesterday, in the Waipoua Forest Visitor Centre, we learned that Māori used kauri gum for starting fires (this is the attraction for the boys) to supply heat and light. Māori also used the soot from burned gum to make tattoo pigments. Interpretive displays informed us that Pākehā used the gum as an ingredient in varnishes, paints, and linoleum, making it Auckland’s biggest export during the 1880s and ’90s.

South of Auckland, sun-bleached hills mound against hazy blue sky.

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