After seeing about six people in the two days we spent driving around the East Cape, the busy and cosy hostel at Opotiki was a welcome change, even though the bed was so hard we could have bounced pennies off it! The town is a model of Maori tradition and the main street is lined with the works of master carvers. The Historic & Agricultural Society museum occupies an old general store on a corner in the middle of town and the vast display of bric-a-brac and kiwiana on display was fascinating and worthy of five minutes (with nose pressed against the window) of anybody´s time.
We hold our hands up to yet another walk on the beach - Ohiwa this time, just two minutes after leaving town on our way to Whakatane. It was as captivating as all the others. Whakatane was a lovely colourful little town that reminded me very much of Nelson - it was probably the abundance of craft shops and art galleries. We just happened (ahem...) to come across a fabulous shop that was like an indoor market of the art and craft work of dozens of local artists under one roof - like the Christmas Fair at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. We bought so much stuff that our next stop was the Post Office to send it all home!
As we walked down the main street we wondered why the road and pavement were rather inconveniently diverted around a large, fenced-off rock. A bit of research revealed that this site is where Maori warriors would once have come to be tattooed with moko and the rock is tapu and therefore inaccessible. Moko are traditional intricate face and body tattoos and each moko contains ancestral and tribal messages specific to the wearer. These messages tell the story of the wearer's family and tribal connections and their status within these social structures. The notion of tapu - complex rules of sacredness and prohibition is essential to Maori belief as is mana - personal spiritual power or prestige. Tapu applies to sacred and/or forbidden objects such as sacred grounds or the possessions of a chief and also to actions prohibited by a tribe. It can be temporary or permanent - canoe builders would have been made tapu in a ceremony prior to starting work. These beliefs are still very much alive in New Zealand today.
Our last stop before reaching Tauranga was Maketu, landing site of the Te Arawa canoe that brought the first settlers to the area from Hawaiki in the 14th century. I nearly fell off the wharf when I saw the hundreds and thousands of beautiful ostrich-foot shells on the beach. Uncle Alun used to tease Anti Ceri saying that she was like ´buwch mewn cae clover´(a cow in a clover field) when let loose in a shop and that was the perfect description for me as I darted around the beach, bobbing up and down, wishing that I had bigger hands and another pocket!
We stayed at Maketu until the crimson sunset then drove on to Tauranga where we needed to find a bed for the night. Remember what I said about places being quieter at this time of year? Well that doesn´t apply when there are two national events taking place in town on a weekend. We were turned away from four places and telephoned another four with no luck and were beginning to think that it would have to be the back seat of the car when we had the last available wooden cabin at a motorcamp on the outskirts of town. It was a wonderful little place with all mod cons and we got to see a whole new breed of people to the usual in the morning - chirpy happy campers wandering out of the shower block in their stripey dressing-gowns and fluffy slippers. What a pleasant change from bleary-eyed backpackers.
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