In Darwin’s Footsteps

We really wanted to stay at the treehouse in Paihia another night, but it wasn’t available, so we decided to drive across the Northland and down the west coast, known as the Kauri Coast, and break our journey back to Auckland with a one night stop along the way.

En route, we decided to visit the Te Waimate Mission House and Church, one of the oldest missions in NZ.

There are several missions and historic buildings to visit in the area of Kerikeri, but we chose Waimate because Darwin had visited it in 1835, and we love Darwin and liked the idea of following him across the North Island.

In 1815, Hongi Hika, a powerful Māori chief, granted 1000 acres of land for the first inland mission station and though it took until 1832 for the mission house and its English style farms and fields, intended to supply food for missions at Paihia and Kerikeri, to become established, so it was quite new when Darwin visited.

 Darwin was accompanied by James Busby and a Māori escort, of whom Darwin wrote:“Although the scenery is nowhere beautiful, and only occasionally pretty, I enjoyed my walk. I should have enjoyed it more, if my companion, the chief, had not possessed extraordinary conversational powers. I knew only three words: `good’, `bad’, and `yes’: and with these I answered all his remarks, without of course having understood one word he said.”

But Darwin was enamoured of Te Waimate’s English style farm  with “well-dressed fields, placed there as if by an enchanter’s wand” and made him nostalgic for home. “It was not merely that England was brought vividly before my mind … the domestic sounds, the fields of corn, the distant undulating country with its trees might well have been mistaken for our fatherland.”

Today, there are two remaining buildings—the restored mission house and the church, both of them very interesting and worth a visit.

The mission’s farm failed after a few years (the English farming methods Darwin so admired exhausted the fields). The mission itself only remained operational until 1845 when the Māori wars made it impossible to continue, and the churchyard contains many graves commemorating those who fell in battle.

The entire mission house was built of kauri wood- the NZ native tree that holds so much meaning for the Māori both practically and culturally. Kauri have many similarities to California redwoods- they grow incredibly large, tall and straight and the wood is resistant to insects, water and dry rot. It is dense and hard, has no knots and does not bend or warp, so it makes excellent construction wood.  

Darwin admired the Kauri and on a forest visit, “I measured one of the noble trees, and found it thirty-one feet in circumference above the roots … and I heard of one no less than forty feet. … The forest was here almost composed of the kauri; and the largest trees … stood up like gigantic columns of wood.”

The Māori use kauri for their waka (canoes), carvings and marae, and it is easy to imagine 19^th century Europeans seeing these straight-trunked trees and instantly thinking ‘ship masts.’Like the redwoods, nearly all the massive old-growth kauri Darwin saw were felled for lumber, and vast kauri forests destroyed during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Apparently large amounts of kauri lumber was even shipped to San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake to help with rebuilding. Kauri is now very protected and no new kauri wood is allowed to be cut or milled.

After admiring the kauri panelling of the mission house, we were anxious to get to the Kauri Coast to observe these trees in the wild, but ‘Hal’ had other ideas…Once again, we found ourselves facing 15 km of gravel washboard when the planned route was changed without notice.

We ended up following the Waipapa river to Ōmāpere on the Hokianga Harbour, where we had a nice picnic overlooking giant sand dunes on the far bank. Legend has it that Kupe, the first Polynesian to discover NZ arrived here from Hawaii.

From Ōmāpere we turned south and were soon driving though the Waipoua Kauri forest-miles and miles of tree fern, palm and tropic forest above which towered stately Kauri. Unfortunately, kauri in the North Island are suffering from a fungal disease called Kauri die-back, and the bare branches of dead Kauri can be see above the forest canopy all along the coast.

Because of the spread of this disease, most forest walks are closed, and those that remain open have cleaning stations that you must pass through before entering and upon leaving the forest, where you brush, wash and disinfect your shoes, all without taking them off!

Fortunately it is still possible to visit Tāne Mahuta,  the lord of the forest in Māori legend, and one of two remaining kauri that are over 50 meters tall and more 2000 years old. It is a truly magnificent and awe-inspiring tree. We weren’t really prepared for how huge and stately it would be and spent quite a bit of time admiring and photographing it. Its thick upper branches and crown support large numbers of bromeliads among its own foliage.

We spent the night in a B&B near Dargaville, a farm town that would not have looked out of place in California’s Central Valley with its stockyards, feed silos, slightly shabby awning-fronted main street shops and wide, slow river flowing nearby.

Dargaville held few attractions for us, so we headed for the coast to glimpse the Southern Pacific Ocean, ending up in Glink’s Gully, which was a tiny collection of holiday homes perched above what looked like an endless beach stretching to infinity in both directions, with powdery white sands, the roar of low waves and virtually no one else in sight.

We were only minutes from drab, dusty Dargaville, but it felt worlds away, as if we were in a deserted tropical paradise. Not for the first time in NZ,  we felt slightly disoriented and suspended in time and place.

Like Darwin, NZ oftens reminds us of other distant lands, but unlike Darwin, we have found New Zealand’s wild scenery both beautiful and  enchanting.