We spent our first few days in New Zealand in an Auckland motor camp, settling into our new campervan. After lugging our heavy bags over Australia, always packing and unpacking and dreading stairs, the prospect of living in our own mobile space for twenty-five days was delightful. However, campervan touring also meant that we would be cooking and cleaning and fending for ourselves, and while the rental company had thoughtfully stocked the van with many things, I was sent into town a number of times on various errands. Groceries, a plastic tub for Kathryn's baths, a doormat for the cabin entrance, dishwashing liquid, salt and spices, a repair part for Mary's camcorder . . . the list went on and on and it was two days before we were ready to head out of town.
Our "van" was a bit bigger than that, actually. Built on an Isuzu truck chassis, it had a double bed over the cab, accessed via a small and precipitous ladder, a small enclosed toilet and shower, propane range, sink, water heater, and refrigerator. The rear table and benches converted to another double bed, and a boot in the rear held folding chairs and, later, wet fishing boots and particularly odorous diapers. The closets, cupboards, and other storage space easily accomodated our things, and there was a little safe hidden under one of the benches where we kept our passports and tickets. Large windows gave the cabin light and air feel and curtains provided privacy when we wanted it. We had brought a small 12VDC-to-120VAC inverter from home; after we figured out how to splice it into the camper's 24 volt electrical system, it allowed us to run our laptop and recharge camcorder batteries without being plugged in at a motor camp. This size of campervan was common throughout New Zealand, and was perfect for two adults and a baby. When one of us was up and moving about, it was more comfortable for the other to be seated but we could both maneuver in the interior at the same time, if we really had to. Mary and Kathryn slept on the upper bed and we found a wood board to block the ominous dropoff which drew Kathryn like a magnet. When we were driving, Kathryn sat in her car seat squeezed between us; with the cab set high and forward, it was the first time she had been able to see much of anything from her seat and this entertained her for a while. We consistently managed 19 miles per gallon on inexpensive diesel fuel (inexpensive relative to petrol, anyway), and although our Isuzu was a little slow and noisy on the open road, it always started instantly and proved a comfortable, convenient home on wheels.
During all the errand-running, we saw a fair bit of the city, courtesy of the convenient and understandable bus system. Auckland is the largest city by far in New Zealand, home to a third of the country's population of 3.6 million and many of New Zealand's offices, banks, business headquarters, universities, and suchlike. Mixed in with the hustle and bustle of the city were pretty gardens, posh neighborhoods, and interesting museums, and a tourist could probably find things to do in Auckland for quite a while. However, to us it was simply another big city. We had not come to New Zealand to park in a motor camp in Auckland, and as soon as we were ready, we left.
We found a lovely little motor camp on the banks of the Waiteti near Ngongotaha and the shore of Lake Rotorua. Our grassy site was tucked under shady willow trees at a bend in the stream. The camp was spotless, every building freshly painted and the gravel paths raked smooth. The manager liked to walk out to the stream with us and look for fish, and was full of tantalizing stories about the German guest who had caught an eight pound rainbow from this big hole or the big brown trout who lived under the trees over there. Flocks of ducks and swans had taken up residence in this stretch of stream, waiting out the local hunting season in the nearby hills. They slept in the bushes and sometimes waddled through the camp looking for handouts. A pair of young ducks, one black and one tan, visited us most days. Kathryn had many standoffs with these ducks, as they sampled her bathwater and quacked over her cereal bowl.
After so many weeks of eating skimpy meals from restaurants and take-out counters, we were happy to be cooking again, even in a tiny campervan kitchen. We made sumptuous breakfasts with eggs and ham and toast, pot after pot of coffee and tea, elaborate pasta dinners. Linguine with white clam and vegetable sauce, peppered with chunks of fresh garlic and doused with grated cheese. Chicken breasts simmered in white wine and cream, garnished with loose corn and capers. Bolognaise sauce made with kangaroo sausage, fresh mushrooms, and Australian red wine. Fruit salads with kiwi fruit, peaches, grapes and plums. Julienned string beans, blanched and braised in butter and shallots. Crispy fried rice, browned in the broiler and topped with lean bacon. Some experiments with mutton, all failures. Kathryn loved kiwi fruit and gouda cheese, and learned to suck in strands of spaghetti. We wallowed in food for a while, until the novelty wore off and we retreated to simple meals again.
The lake was only half a kilometer away, and in the mornings and evenings I walked down the bankside path along the slow gliding stream to try my luck at the big trout that supposedly gathered, like crops for the harvesting, at the river mouth. The path was narrow and lined with ferns and flowers and a few tidy cottages. A small crowd of ducks and swans were living in a small clearing by one of the cottages. They calmly made a path as people walked through their temporary home and ignored the dogs that barked at them through the wrought-iron gate.
Quite a few other visitors and locals fished the stream mouth as well, and often there would be six or seven other guys all casting into the same patch of water. In three days of this, I never saw a visitor catch a fish. We wore fishing vests with lots of gadgets and stood on the banks casting floating lines and whatever odd assortment of flies the shops had pressed into our eager hands. The locals wore waders with big nets stuck in the backs, and waded in the lake shallows working sinking lines tied to the flies that were actually working. Every now and then a local fisherman would pull out a two-foot trout and club it into a sack, grousing about how it was "skinny as an eel, a bloody eel". Even the locals were finding the shore fishing slow, though. The lake had stayed cool most of the summer, and the trout had less need to gather at the cold currents from the streams.
Perhaps the manager's wife had watched my fruitless comings and goings and had come to despair of me ever catching a fish, because one afternoon she took me aside and confided that there were some six pounder trout in the hole by our neighboring campsite and that I should try there one night, but on no account before ten o'clock. I had gathered that night fishing was popular in the area, and after another trip to the flyshop I set off one night, armed with black streamer flies and an odd sort of tube fly that glowed phosphorescent after a few seconds under a flashlight. I felt a little silly fishing two rod lengths from our campervan, but I was also afraid of stumbling off the footpath and falling in the water further down the stream, so I went to the designated hole and waded slowly in, pulled some line off my reel and stood shivering in the cold water, a glowing fly in my hand, wondering what in the world to do next. It was very dark. I remembered that the outside of the bend was about thirty feet ahead of me, there were some willows directly above me -- I knew that because they were brushing my head -- and more trees pushing out in the water to my right and left, and a tangle of submerged logs lined the tail of the pool about thirty feet to my right. I wondered how many other guests of the Waiteti Motor Camp had shivered there on previous dark nights, and then I remembered that at least one German fellow had apparently been rewarded with a large trout, so I made little swishing motions with my invisible rod between the unseen branches until I had figured out how to roll cast out to the head of the pool and retrieve the fly before it was swallowed by the sucking logs downstream. My deadly phosphorescent fly looked particularly silly, arcing through the darkness like a tracer before plopping like a pebble into the black water, so I tied on a black Wooly Bugger and began diligently working the pool.
Streamer fishing gives us the interesting opportunity to think like a fish, preferably a tiny, injured one. Here I am, a helpless little baitfish. See me struggle. I am slow, I am injured, I am tasty. Come eat me, I am real, see me swim a little. I am vulnerable, see me drift weakly. I will twitch and swim just a little, trying to escape, come eat me. Oops, here come the logs, good bye. Swish, plop, here I am again, magically flown to the head of the pool and sunken again, but still weak and helpless. Come eat me, damnit.
After a while of this I was very cold and my feet were numb. Everyone in the camp was long asleep, except, I thought, the manager and his wife who were in their quarters giggling about the tourist standing up to his waist in empty, chilly water. I cast and retrieved without thinking, a dull and bored little robot of a baitfish now. One one particularly deep drift through the bottom of the pool my fly snagged on a hidden log. I lifted my rod and tugged. My fly was solidly snagged, firmly hooked on something solid and unmoving. I decided to break off the fly and go to bed, and gave my line a hard yank. The log woke up, shook its head, and swam off, dragging my line deep into the hole. I panicked, broke the fish off, and pulled in the frayed little curlicue of tippet where my fly, and a very large trout, had recently been attached. This is, I thought glumly, what comes to unbelievers.
I did catch a few fish on the North Island, browns that tugged and fought to stay in the water and a rainbow that leapt and splashed. But none were big fish. In fact, by New Zealand standards they were barely even legal fish (the minimum here was 30 centimeters, about 12 inches) and eventually I started simply letting the line go limp and allowing the babies to shake themselves off. But I was fishing, which was better than a lot of things.
We drove through the area around Rotorua and the western North Island, through little towns with funny names like Tapapa and Piopio and larger towns with Western names, noisy with trucks and traffic. Kathryn liked to tear at the map as Mary struggled to figure out if we were still in Te Kawa, back at Te Awamutu, or coming to Te Kuiti. Eventually we were juggling sheets of torn map, peering at the ragged edges where we always seemed to find ourselves. The Maori names of the small towns were often unpronounceable to us, and often Mary would call out a village name from her scraps of map, or I would read a road sign as we passed by, and neither of us would have any idea what the other had said. Sometimes we resorted to spelling out the names. Outside of Auckland proper, there were no multi-lane freeways anywhere. Even the major arteries were winding, dipping two-lane roads, punctuated with traffic circles. The roadsides dotted lined with white crosses, marking spots where a loved one had died in a crash. We found this sobering. Some sharp curves were a forest of white crosses, six or seven deaths accumulated over the years. Some crosses looked recent, with flowers and wreaths. Others were faded and forlorn, long neglected and forgotten.
The countryside between Auckland and Rotorua was tranquil, tidy and, for the most part, thoroughly domesticated. There were farms and pastures, bales in the fields and a tractor dealer in every town. From Hamilton we took Route 3 south and west to the ocean. The farms and tractor dealers disappeared and the towns became fewer and further between. The hills were steep here, dotted with dark cliff faces and topped with protruding knobs of rock. Some of the hillsides were sheep pasture, thick green grass ribbed with hoof trails and grazed short. Sheep wandered the slopes, nibbling and cropping. They looked placid and cuddly. We saw thousands and thousands of sheep in New Zealand. Sometimes, walking along a river, I would be startled by the smoker's hack of a coughing sheep in the bushes. One night we camped in a field of sheep by the Arnold River. There is something pleasantly non-violent about sheep. They graze around in pretty green fields with a minimum of muck, taking care of themselves and looking decorative most of the time, and when the time comes for them to earn their keep, they get shorn rather than slaughtered. When Mary and I talked about the house in the country that we would have someday, there were always a few sheep grazing in the fields, never pigs wallowing in mud or cows waiting for the butcher.
Sometimes we drove in sullen silence. Life, navigation, and baby care in such close quarters took some adjusting, and it took a while to get our little family unit working smoothly. Our moods were usually dictated by Kathryn's. When she was happy, contently sucking her bottle or playing pattycake with Mary, everyone was happy. But when Kathryn fussed and wailed, squirming in her seat or crying in her bed, we became crabby and snappish. As we learned how to keep her happy, our squabbles became less frequent.
The rivers along our route were lovely, shallow glistening riffles flowing into mirror-like pools. They were also very low (it was late summer in New Zealand) and looked difficult to fish. I didn't make them any easier. My experience on the Mangaotaki, a highly rated stream outside of Piopio, was typical. After dinner and dishes, I put on my boots and vest and walked out on the nearby high bridge and looked down through my polarized glasses. There was a sizable submerged boulder in the pool below and, lying a foot or two downstream, a sinuous green-brown shape, three feet long, undulating in the current. I dropped to a crouch and peered over the railing. The shape hung in the slow water behind the boulder, moving slowly. Every now and then it moved lazily to one side or another, showed a flash of white at its nose, and then swung back to its lie. I fixed the boulder's position -- at the midpoint of a line between two bushes on opposite banks -- crossed the bridge, climbed over the sheep fence and scrambled down the hillside to the river. The boulder and fish were not visible from this low angle, but after walking softly along a small spit of weedy river stones and working my way upstream, without clanking stones or splashing water, I figured I was about thirty-five feet behind the lie. Since the water was fairly shallow and I was feeling optimistic, I had tied on a large dry fly and after pulling out the right amount of line and letting it trail behind me in the current, I picked up the line, false cast, and dropped the fly a few feet ahead of the boulder. The fly drifted past the lie and I repeated the cast. After doing this several times, I wanted to see if my casting had spooked the fish. So I slowly backed out of the pool, straightened out of my crouch, clambered over the banks, climbed up the hillside, scaled the fence and crept out onto the bridge. The fish was still there, holding behind the boulder, occasionally swaying out to the side and showing a bit of white. Clearly it was taking something underwater and would not be tempted to the surface, but at least I had not alarmed him. Smug over my casting finesse, I made my way back down to my position in river where I tied a few feet of tippet and a small gray nymph to the hook of my Royal Wulff as an indicator and repeated my previous casts.
My back was getting tired from all the hunching over, and I wanted another look at my fish. I backed out of the pool again, climbed the hill, puffing a bit by now, and walked out to the center of the bridge again. The long green shape was still there, and as it undulated tantalizingly I had a terrible thought. I tossed a piece of gravel into the water several yards from the boulder. Then I tossed another one a bit closer. Finally I heaved out the biggest chunk of rock I could find and watched it cannonball down into the pool, water fountaining, and confirming that I had spent the last hour drifting flies over a particularly lifelike piece of river weed.
After that I gave up fishing the rivers of the North Island altogether and we headed for the coast. We came to the ocean at a black sand beach south of Awakino, the first one I had ever seen. The sand was black as charcoal, with a fine matte grain, hard and flat. Smooth fragments of white seashell were embedded in the black sand. We walked along the dark beach among the white flecks, and it was like walking on the night sky.
From Awakino on south, the coast was pleasant, dotted with attractive small towns, pretty green pastures, and quiet motor camps. But we were anxious to reach the wilder, more rugged South Island, and we pushed on south to Wellington, where we hoped to get a space on the ferry across the Cook Strait.
Traveling On a Budget
Campervans are a very popular way of traveling around New Zealand, and campervan rental companies are everywhere. The biggest, judging from the number of vehicles on the road, is Maui Campervans; their vans were very new and plushly appointed. Then there are various smaller competitors, including Blue Sky which we used.
Campervan rental is not a particularly cheap way of getting around. In the high season (the New Zealand summer, basically), a four berth van like ours would cost well over $NZ200/day from Maui, and normally around $NZ180/day from Blue Sky. (But fax your requirements to several oufits and compare prices, as there are deals to be had out there: we paid only $NZ120/day.) Smaller vans are available, ranging down to Toyota minivans crammed with gas cooker, refrigerator, a narrow bunk and not much room for anything else. The smallest ones would be romantically cozy for two newlyweds or adventurously spartan for two free-spirited backpackers, but pretty hard to live in for a month.
Overall, travelling by campervan is often more expensive than renting a small car and staying in the "tourist cabins" in motor camps. But, for various reasons, it is a far preferable way to travel: see New Zealand's South Island.
Staying Connected
The tones generated from my modem would not dial the payphones, so we had to use manual dialing -- setting acCIS, our commuications program, to "dial" a null number, such as ",", while we manually dialed the local Compuserve number from the phone keypad. The local Compuserve nodes are very impatient: if they answered the telephone and did not immediately hear a modem tone on the line, they would not connect. We had to "dial" with the palmtop and then leave our modem looking for a connection, and only then manually dial the node on the payphone. After we figured this out, connections were easy. Compuserve has several local access numbers on the North Island.
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