My last day on the trail and I have more planned today than the organizers of D-Day. I’m up early. I slept soundly except for the part of the night when a big fat guy and his brood came barging into my cabin at 2am. I was awoken by the sound of a key fumbling in the lock; I pulled the sheet up to my nose, eyes became saucers, the door swung open, and then in marched this family of rotund-ness.
“Is this the right one?” The big fellow said.
“I think so,” said a large woman. The outside street lamp outlined her ghastly figure.
One of the chubby kids walked over and peered at me as if eyeing a rump roast over a spit.
“Dad, there’s someone sleeping over here.” His chubby jowls loomed closer. I closed my eyes tightly and prepared for drool.
“Oh, we must have the wrong cabin. Come on kids. Tommy leave the man alone and let’s go."
Thinking the coast was clear, I opened my right eye ever so slightly. Tommy was still there looking at me.
“Tommy!” His dad yelled. Tommy turned and scampered off slamming the door behind him.
The skeleton key to my cabin must be of the one-size-fits-all variety. I put my bag in front of the door and stacked some books on top of it as a sort of early warning system, and then went back to sleep.
It’s 7am now and I’m in downtown Gisborne in a café that has a breakfast menu consisting of one item, Scrambled Eggs with tomatoes and toast. It was the best I could find in a country not known for their morning fare. I order, and suffer the consequences; the coffee has a charcoal flavor to it, the eggs are runny, toast cold, and the tomato is just a lame freakin tomato.
The experience clouds my opinion of downtown Gisborne, which is a flavorless, yet functional, strip of shops. More the place you’d go to stock up on school supplies for the kids, and less the place to find the latest in fashions and techno-gadget wizardry. That said, the millennium countdown clock in the center of town is kinda cool, 42 days, 16 hours, 33 minutes, & 41 seconds till Y2K meltdown…Ha! (Gisborne was the first city in the world to ring in the new millennium).
I buy a couple of books on cassette to save me from myself and leap onto the 38. I’m driving straight inland now, my goal, Urewera National Park. It’s the largest national park on the North Island of New Zealand and the closest to Auckland. Its forests are virgin, it’s waterways unencumbered. The first European didn’t penetrate the Urewera until the 1840’s. The native Tuhoe Maori tribe that populated parts of Urewera were pretty much left alone until the 1920’s when the government of New Zealand reasserted its influence. Even today it is said the Tuhoe tribe lives much like they did before European settlement – if you don’t count Nike shoes or Vegemite.
The only access to Urewera Park is via a ridiculously winding dirt road that was built in the 1930’s and I would guess last maintained in the 40’s. It takes all my in-born driving skills to negotiate the road, when to apply the brakes, when to gun it, and when to throw my arms up and scream. My only encounters with other cars occur around blind hairpin corners. The road at its best can accommodate one-and-a-quarter cars; passing on some of the more exposed stretches requires an unbuckled seat belt and a car door slightly ajar so emergency ejection isn’t hampered.
The park headquarters are in a place called Aniwaniwa and with car and life still reasonably intact I pull into the lot at HQ. A dusty cobwebby Toyota Starlet is the lone car in the lot, if the owners got lost on a hike hoping someone would notice their car, it hasn’t happened yet, and I certainly wasn’t going to rock the boat. I walk into the ranger station looking for maps and hiking information. There’s no one behind the desk. After a lot of intentional raucous on my part, a middle-aged woman wearing a disheveled uniform emerges from the back room.
“Yea?” She says with a hint of annoyance.
“Hi, I’m looking to do a tramp, something no more than two to three hours. Are there any good loop tracks of that length?”
She puzzles her brow. At length she directs my attention to a large laminated map of the park on the far wall. “Well, there’s a loop track around Lake Waikareiti, but that’ll take you twelve hours. The other loop track is the four day tramp around Lake Waikaremoana.”
“Okay, so you don’t have a two to three hour loop track?”
“Nothing that short, no.”
I think as far as she is concerned the conversation is over, she even makes a move to return to the back room until I interject again and perhaps ruin her day of planned leisure. “What trail would you recommend for someone, like myself, who has only two to three hours available to tramp?”
“Well,” she once more directs my attention to the master trail map and rattles off all the trails listed with inane comments such as ‘xxxxxx trail is a nice one,’ and ‘trail xxxx is pretty.’
I narrow my focus, “Which trail is your favorite?”
She pours over the wall map like a gypsy reading a crystal ball. “Well, I rather like the tramp to Lake Waikareiti. Quite nice that one.”
“Isn’t that the twelve hour loop track?”
“Yes, but it’s only about an hour’s tramp to get to the lake.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “Do you have a map I can take?”
“No. Just there.” She once again points to the 8’ X 10’ wall map.
“Can I take that?”
Her mouth parts, brow wrinkles, eyes flash disbelief, until the obtuseness of my query penetrates the thick fatty mass that must envelop her brain. In the end a smirk is all I get out of her. I take a mental picture of *the* map and then set off in look of adventure minus my coonskin cap.
Thirty minutes down the trail and it occurs to me that rogue bears, wild-eyed moose, or mountain lions aren’t likely to appear on the path before me and fill my adventurous desire for a lively woodland encounter. I remind myself that I’m not in Yellowstone where grizzly bears smack their lips at the prospect of tourist season; I’m in New Zealand where the only danger lurks in the form of untimely bird droppings from above. There are no native mammals in New Zealand, there are no snakes, lamas, lepers, alligators, nothing that goes creak in the night, no cheetahs or panthers, no Tasmanian devils, and no Siberian tigers. In short, there is nothing that could cause you a moment’s concern in the wilderness. You could walk through the shady undergrowth wearing only a hat and nothing, apart from a few goose bumps, will hamper you.
So you can imagine my disdain when my only forest encounter is a small black cat with cute white paws. Little Boots has run away. I squat and slowly approach the kitty with my hand extended hoping to earn a friend. The cat doesn’t move, and instead of a purr it makes this deep raspy un-cat like noise. “Here kitty, kitty,” I extend my hand further, and then, as you have probably guessed by now, it attacks!
I snatch my hand back. The cat shrieks, claws and spittle fly. I fall over backwards on my ass into a hopeless defensive posture. Instead of going for the jugular the cat breaks off the attack and retreats into the forest. I leap up into a ready pose and scan the woods for signs of the jungle beast, but all is now quiet. Foolish cat, I would have shown it no such mercy. I check for wounds, but can find none apart from a few fresh snags on my sweater. It was a feral cat, ‘Fluffy’ gone wild. I wonder what would happen to me if I got lost, aided by my lack of a map; would I turn feral, or would they find my decomposed body hugging a tree with a piece of bark in my mouth.
I amble on down the trail taking in the profusion of ferns and towering beech trees. Birdcalls echo through the forest deep, lending an enchanting air to the place. Roughly 80% of the flora around me (you know, the trees and green stuff) can be found only in New Zealand. So to say a tramp in the New Zealand bush is an out-worldly experience, is not a great leap of the imagination, I walk soaking it all in.
The lake comes into view before me. On the lakeshore to my delight are several rowboats. What fun! The boats look like they’re intended for public use; I decide in an instant that I’ll go for a paddle. Only in tugging on a boat in an attempt to pull it into the lake do I discover that they’re chained, and only on examining the chain do I see a padlock and a small sign behind one of the boats, ‘Boat rental $5.00 to be paid at the Park Ranger’s office, key provided.’ I replay the brief but taxing conversation with the park ranger in my mind, at no place and at no time did the ranger mention anything about rowboats or rentals. Something along the lines of, ‘Gee, if you go on the Lake Waikareiti hike you can rent boats for five dollars, I have keys available,’ would have been appreciated, or even ‘Lake, boat, rent, key,’ would have sufficed given the ranger’s obviously busy schedule. I stand there staring at the sign and imagine several grisly ends to the park ranger.
I take this as my cue to turn around and head back from whence I came. After an hour’s return hike, I arrive back at my car. I exact my revenge on the park ranger by peeling out in the lot in a childish, though satisfying, show. However, the Starlet takes the brunt of my display.
The road out of the park is far more devious then the road in, it looks like it would be more at home in a South American jungle. Worse yet, it never ends. I drive for three hours and cover a fingernail’s thickness on the map. Rocks skitter into gorges; wheels rub against wheel-wells, knuckles ache, teeth loosen. Finally after four hours of driving I find pavement, you would have thought I won the lottery. My car looks like something from a ‘Mad Max’ movie.
I fly into and through the town of Rotorua. The time I set aside for sight seeing there was long ago consumed by highway 38. Out of Rotorua I hit the 5 and then the 1 and the final stretch to home. 7pm, my daughter is probably being put to bed right now. 8pm, I bet Denise is questioning my whereabouts. 9pm, I wonder if I should call? 10pm, I probably should have called. 10:15pm, the Honda Concerto arrives at home base alpha. 10:16pm, I walk into the house and five days of unbridled freedom come to a sudden and screeching halt.
“Where have you been? Why didn’t you call?”
“I…”
“You should have called! I had no idea where you were, or when you were coming home.”
“I…”
“Emma came down with something today. She threw up all over me this morning.”
“Oh.”
I was, undeniably and irretrievably, home.
Copyright 2000 Douglas S. Sassaman
About The Author:
Douglas Sassaman is a freelance writer, aspiring novelist, and self-described humorist (who some think should be self-committed). He writes the humor column, 'Life in the Cosmic-Burp' on the web at http://CosmicBurp.com.
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