The plane touched down in the land of the long white cloud on the 17th of November 2022. I had spent the final hour of the flight with my forehead against the window watching oranges and yellows both sharp and soft stretch through the deep blue sky. The last 30 hours had taken me from London Heathrow on the 15th to San Francisco, where I spent four hours on the airport’s outdoor terrace as the sun went down, across the International Date Line1 to my arrival in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland just after sunrise (atatū in te reo Māori). I was bizarrely well-rested; following Lex’s recommendation, I’d booked one of Air New Zealand’s economy SkyCouches for my second flight and managed to sleep for most of it. With only carry-on luggage, a UK passport and carefully cleaned shoes2 , I was through the arrivals hall in an hour.
I had a desperately needed shower and breakfast at the Novotel attached to the airport, checked in with emails and the news, texted friends to say I’d landed, and started reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which I’d found on a shelf at a pub at my friends’ birthday party a few weeks prior. In the afternoon, I boarded a GoKiwi Shuttle to the Coromandel.
To the dismay of aunts, uncles, and basically everyone in the USA, I’ve never learnt to drive and don’t plan to. I grew up on the trains, tubes, and buses of London, where you don’t need a car if you’re able to use the public transport system and it’s expensive to take lessons. I usually walk or ride my bike to get around, but prior to this trip, I had broken my foot and had confronted first-hand the dire inaccessibility of many of London’s tube stations, which disabled people and other accessibility activists have been calling attention to for a long, long time.
The consultant at the hospital had told me I could still travel but to take it a little easier on the foot. I cancelled my planned five-day Alps to Ocean cycle. I deleted the Tongarira Crossing from my itinerary. Brutally, my travel insurance leapt to £260. But I could still go. That was all that mattered to me. A trip in the works for months to two countries I had wanted to visit for ages, seeing close friends I hadn’t seen for many years, and a double summer? I couldn’t believe it when I boarded the plane.
It was really a double spring/summer, two Vivaldi concertos, and the land of the long white cloud was looking a little grey as GoKiwi drove us from the airport through the plains, drizzle giving young lambs a rain shower. I thought: it looks so much like the British countryside in some places. I thought: oh god, of course it does. The Kauri trees, the largest in Aotearoa New Zealand and often hundreds, if not over a thousand years old, were heavily logged in the 1800s and 1900s and exported by the British Royal Navy or used to build ships and homes for the European colonial settlers. Much of the timber was burnt. As Linda Nathan observes, “Māori people had also utilised the wood of the kauri tree, notably to make their waka or long boats, but they had managed to leave most of the forest intact.” Today, the trees are nationally protected and declared vulnerable, with Kauri dieback posing a critical risk. Other conifers including rimu, mataī, tōtara, kahikatea and beech forest were felled. Swamps and wetlands were drained. Michèle Dominy writes about the colonialist role of grass, “The settler began to scatter grass and clover seed in the ash on a ground still warm with logs still smouldering.”3
The shuttle followed narrow and winding roads into the mountains of the Coromandel Peninsula, Te Tara-O-Te-Ika-A-Māui in te reo Māori4. The misty forest outside my window looked like something out of Jurassic Park, which the driver said—a little wearily—he’d heard many times before. John Williams’ theme played in my head. The Coromandel Range is largely protected now by the Department of Conservation, in part because attempts by European colonisers to farm lots on the land did not succeed and the forest reclaimed its stolen hectares. Extractive practices continue, however, with Australian company OceanaGold buying a mining interest and undertaking explorative surveys in the region despite a 2017 promise from the Labour-led coalition government that “there will be no new mines on conservation land.”
I enjoyed the shuttle’s few stops along the way: glimpses at where other people lived or were staying. The shuttle dropped me off in Hahei, on the superbly-named Lois Lane, where I had booked a hillside cabin from Thursday to Monday. The owners of the cabin left me a little blue bike, which I could ride the few minutes to the general store and the café selling bagels and, of course, to the beach. I would spend the next few days walking and cycling around the area, visiting Cathedral Cove, swimming in the bay, listening to birds and learning from strangers. But first, rest.
Flying via SFO meant I “lost” a day. I had no 16th of November at all. I will “gain” a day on my return flight. I keep thinking about the lost day
New Zealand and Australia’s biosecurity screenings are famously intense. Biosecurity is a bit of a contested term among migration and mobility scholars as the very legitimate concerns around invasive species and ecological conservation are mechanisms through which borders have been securitised, sometimes violently, to limit the mobility of groups of people and increase surveillance. I am a little sceptical of any use of the term “security” because it calls up so many questions about insecurity and who is considered insecure/a security threat and invokes the sweeping and often invasive measures put in place in airports and across borders after 9/11. The question is always: whose (bio)security is being protected/championed? And whose is ignored? Who is regarded as suspicious and insecure?
Dominy, M. D. (2002). Hearing grass, thinking grass: postcolonialism and ecology in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Cultural Geographies, 9(1), 15–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44250862
A name derived from a story about Māui using his fish hook to catch a huge fish, whose spines make up the mountains of the peninsula.
Rosianna, I am so glad you are able to go on this trip. That cabin looks like a wonderful place to relax, and watching the sunrise and listening to the birds in the morning is such a nourishing way to start the day. I look forward to further postcards, thoughts on colonialism, and beautiful photos!
Also the SkyCouches look so comfy! I mean, relatively speaking, of course. So comfy for a long range flight.
Thank you for the lovely post card! So nice to read while sitting here in frosty England.
Have a great holiday, looking forward to hearing more of your adventures!