Before we found ourselves in lovely Palmerston North, we drove from the town of Paihia on the Bay of Islands down to the airport in Auckland. We'd spent only one night in the Bay of Islands, with a short afternoon and a long morning on either side. As with everything we did over the weekend, we were sorry not to have had more time . . . there were a dozen things we would like to have done or seen there that we just couldn't get to, and we were hard pressed to do what we did.
The Bay of Islands is where modern New Zealand started. It was already a center of Maori settlement before the James Cook arrived there in the eighteenth century. I'd have to check, but it may even have been the point at which the first Maori canoes (called waka) arrived six hundred or so years before that.
Paihia was the site of one of the first successful missionary settlements on New Zealand. It's now become a slightly trashy tourist town, really the center of activity for anyone wanting to explore the Bay and its surroundings. Here's the view from our motel room in Paihia:
When the HMS Beagle put in at the Bay of Islands in 1835, Darwin first stayed at Paihia (which he called Pahia). He met James Busby (or Bushby, as Darwin has it), the British Resident who represented the Crown in New Zealand and who was charged with bringing some measure of law and order to the area. Busby would accompany Darwin on some of his explorations.
Just over four years later, in February 1840, Busby's home on the hill just across the Waitangi River from Paihia was the setting for the Treaty of Waitangi, in which the Maori may or may not have agreed to place themselves under British rule and the British may or may not have agreed to respect Maori land claims. The treaty has been much abused and is still much contested - in part because the Maori and English versions are substantially different from one another on a number of crucial points, including the meaning of "sovereingty"! - but it is considered the founding document of modern New Zealand.
We visited the Waitangi site, in something of a rush (pictures forthcoming, from Andrea's camera). We then hurried back into Paihia to catch a passenger ferry to the village of Russell, across the bay. There, we settled in for dinner at what was the first licensed pub in New Zealand, the Duke of Marlborough (seen here in a picture I took the next day).
Russell was once dubbed "the hell-hole of the South Pacific" because, in its hey-day, it served as the headquarters for the whaling and sealing fleets of the entire South Pacific. That means lots of sailors on shore leave, which means lots of men behaving very, very badly.
Part of Darwin's bad impression of New Zealand probably comes from the predominance of such conduct among the English inhabitants of the Bay. It also may have come from his encounters with Maori already degraded and demoralized by the various consequences of their interaction with Europeans, including alcohol abuse, European venereal and other diseases, and a completely irrational enthusiasm for European muskets. I've read elsewhere that prominent Maori men would press their slaves - and then their family members - into prostitution in order to have the means to acquire more muskets, which would in turn serve as the means to acquire mana (power and prestige).
(Another part of Darwin's bad impression may come from the fact that, to people used to European or North American landscapes, the native kauri forest really is uncanny, even alien. But that comes earlier in the story of our weekend.)
On Sunday, we took one of the tourist cruises through the bay and out into the open Pacific, finally reaching the famous Hole in the Rock before turning back. Along the way, as tourist cruises inevitably do, we looked for dolphins.
We came across a pod right away. Taking pictures in such circumstances is a compulsory exercise, and here are my two best contributions to that genre:
Dorothea set her little-kid camera to video mode and shot about eight minutes of continuous, low-resolution footage of the dolphins, some of which turned out fairly well. I may help her post some of that later - thought it may have to wait until I have the means to pick out the good parts.
Dorothea later told me that seeing the dolphins was the best part of the trip, though she was sorry she couldn't meet one.
I asked her, "Can you meet a dolphin?"
"Of course!" she replied. "They come out of the water and I say 'hi', then they tell me their name."
"How do they tell you their name?" I asked.
"They say it to me, and I can understand because I speak dolphinish."
We encountered a second pod of dolphins out on the Pacific, near a little outcrop called Bird Rock. I was more interested in the Australasian gannets sitting up on top than in the dolphins swimming down below.
And, of course, there is the compulsory image of the Hole in the Rock, out past Brett Point:
And one last picture, of my three sweeties on the return trip to the Bay:
When we arrived back in Paihia, we had time for a quick lunch before the long, winding drive to the airport. Driving in New Zealand is a story in itself, but one that also comes earlier in the tale of our weekend . . . so I'll write about it later.
As I said, there were many other things we could have done in and around the Bay. From Waitangi, there's a boardwalk through a mangrove swamp, leading to a waterfall . . . likely the same one to which James Busby conducted Darwin back in 1835. We could have spent several more hours at Waitangi itself, and several days over in Russell which, despite its past, now has a relaxed kind of historic charm about it.
Also, rather than the short, three-hour cruise, Andrea would have liked to have gone out for a day-long sail on one of the big catamarans that take more adventurous tourists out on the Bay. A day sail would include stopovers on small islands, a chance to swim in the bay, and perhaps even a chance to swim with dolphins. Who knows: we might all have had a chance to learn dolphinish.
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