Kiwis Might Fly: A New Zealand Adventure

Rocking the Cradle

SO, SIÂN, MY NEUROLOGIST friend, asked brightly, are you going to wear one of those motorcycle helmets that covers the back of your head up to your fourth cervical vertebra, so that if you crash you’re left quadriplegic, or are you going to get one of those higher-cut ones so that you’re killed outright instead?

My stomach lurched. I was deeply afraid.

It had all started a few months earlier, when I’d read a survey that claimed the ordinary Kiwi bloke was about to turn up the toes of his gum boots. He was, apparently, hanging up his sheep shears and moving to the city. A new masculinity was rearing its pretty, hair-gelled head. Men were waxing their backs. In ten years, said the survey, the traditional, hirsute New Zealand man would be dead.

The early New Zealanders had been virile and vigorous. The Maori were fearless warriors. Then the Europeans had arrived after arduous journeys across thousands of miles of treacherous ocean. The life that awaited them was hard.

New Zealand men grew up to be strong. They slaughtered whales, panned for gold, and felled timber. They learned to play rugby. Fearlessly, they drank home-brewed beer. Then something went wrong. The environment changed; the species had to mutate. Volcanic eruptions? Tectonic shifts? An overboiling of the primordial soup? No. It was none of these things. It had more to do with washing machines from Japan.

With the arrival of airplanes and domestic appliances, the fences came unstuck for the traditional New Zealand man. What did it matter if he could mend a tractor using three bits of old wire and a pot of distilled sheep dung when spare parts were lined up at the local Kawasaki store? The real Kiwi bloke was fast becoming redundant.

The curious thing was that nobody seemed to be making much of a fuss about his demise. When other creatures have faced extinction—when the tiger threatened to roar no more, or the red-legged frog looked fit to croak—the conservationists beat their chests like gorillas whose trees just got the chop. But when the Kiwi bloke, an almost-human species, began to shuffle off to the big brewery in the sky, nobody seemed much bothered. One or two insensitive souls even breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

There was nothing else to do. Somebody was going to have to travel to the other side of the globe, to delve deep into the New Zealand countryside, to sniff around on sheep farms and poke about in rural pubs and ask the question: Is the Kiwi bloke really about to breathe his last?

It was cold and raining at home in London; in New Zealand it was summer, the perfect time to hunt out a shy species on the verge of extinction from its spectacular alpine hideaways and wave-swept beachside lairs. It looked as though that somebody might have to be me.

I thought I’d tour New Zealand on a motorcycle. Kiwi men were known to be fond of machinery; these were the guys who were meant to be able to strip down the engine of their truck on a Sunday afternoon and have it working again by Monday. If I rode a motorcycle, I thought, and, better still, if I shoehorned myself into the tightest set of black motorcycling leathers I could find, I should stand a greater chance of luring these timid men from their hunting grounds and watering holes. If I was really lucky, I might even persuade one or two of them to speak.

I enrolled in motorcycling classes. Working on the basis that there are fewer maniacal cars out to kill a learner motorcyclist in the countryside than in town, I decided to take lessons in the depths of rural Derbyshire.

I shared my first day's training with two sixteen-year-old boys who had just been given their first mopeds. We learned that cool kids ride safely. The two boys set off around the traffic cones on their gloriously gearless scooters. I got less than a yard before the 125cc training bike coughed, gave a little shudder, and stalled. I tried again.

You gotta treat the clutch gently, Oz, the instructor, admonished me. He was a big, grizzled man with stubbly gray facial hair and well-worn leathers. Handle it like, well—now he looked embarrassed—we always say like you’d handle a woman.

He shuffled and grinned. I raised an eyebrow. Not only was I expected to ride this piece of killer machinery, now I was meant to build a meaningful relationship with it as well. I tried again. The bike hiccuped, coughed, and stopped.

I rented a 125cc bike—the largest I was allowed to ride without actually passing a test—for a week. My relationship with my clutch still had some way to go. On the first day I dropped the bike in a traffic circle, where I created an outraged, horn-tooting traffic jam. Half an hour later, I had some problem selecting a suitable gear as I turned right on a steep hill. I stalled—again. The bike teetered, toppled, and crashed to the ground. An elderly couple in a little red Peugeot 106 stopped at the intersection, he in his flat cap, she with a woolen neck scarf. They peered with some distaste out of their window at the helmeted figure lying on the pavement in distress and, quickly concluding they wanted nothing to do with such a creature, shot off, leaving me there all alone.

No, wait, it's only me, I wanted to shout after them from beneath my helmeted disguise. I don’t have tattoos. I have no idea how to do a wheelie. I don’t batter old women at bus stops or boil their bones into soup….

But they had disappeared as fast as third gear could carry them.

I went back to Two-Wheel Training for more lessons. Two characters called John, who was very round, and Kieran, who was very skinny despite consuming a remarkable number of pies, put me through my paces.

"What do you think you’re doing you’re going to get yourself killed get out of the path of that oncoming truck," Kieran would bellow with some excitement through the radio earpiece.

"Get up to speed get up to speed get up to speed if you wimp out like this you’ll fail your test," John would counter as the headwind buffeted my leather-clad limbs at a quite terrifying forty miles an hour.

One day I accidentally missed the road and drove up onto the sidewalk instead; another day I dropped the bike and snapped off the brake lever twice in one hour.

Test day dawned. I hadn’t slept. My palms were clammy. I could scarcely eat. I had entirely forgotten that taking driving tests was quite so terrifying.

The examiner's name was Simon. He was a small, mild-mannered man with blond hair. He looked like the type of person who would be kind to small children and cats. In normal circumstances, he would have seemed pleasant and unassuming. As it was, I viewed him with the same warm feelings I would entertain for a hungry grizzly bear.

Simon strapped a radio to me. He relayed instructions through my earpiece; I gingerly turned left out of the test center. Simon came behind in pursuit on his vast white steed of an examiner's bike. We turned left, we turned right, we turned right, and we turned left. I remembered to stop at the red traffic light. I managed the hill start without sliding backward into Simon's hulk of a machine. I U-turned without falling off the bike and executed a neat little emergency stop. We turned left, and then, just when I had almost stopped shaking with fear, I noticed: My blinker was flashing. That last turn had been at least a minute or so back—and motorcycle blinkers don’t cancel themselves when you turn, as car ones do.

Bugger bugger bugger bugger, I muttered all the way back to the test center.

I had failed.

I couldn’t retake my test for three weeks and spent most of that time trying to come to terms with the horrible reality: I had to go through it all again. I started to have nightmares about the diminutive Simon, whose body took on grotesque, outlandish forms. His short limbs stretched to inhuman, entwining, entrapping proportions; his gentle blue eyes widened to become garish cobalt orbs with the piercing glare of a wolf who thinks you’ve eaten his elk. The Simon of my dreams stood and snarled, orange lights flashing left and right about his diabolical, distended head.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, he cackled demonically through my anguished subconscious. You left your blinker flashing, blinker flashing, blinker flashing….

The problem was that I had already bought my ticket for New Zealand. I needed to pass this next test. I considered bribes, threats, body doubles, but had to conclude that Simon hadn’t looked terribly susceptible to corruption. There was nothing else to do: I had to try, once more, to do a U-turn without falling off the bike. I had to attempt to ride on the road and not on the sidewalk. I had to remember to turn the blinker off. It was a tough call. Vowing never again to undertake a project so high-risk that I needed to pass an exam before I could embark upon it, I returned to the test center.

John the instructor, usually a garrulous character, was strangely quiet as we rode there. As we waited for my turn to take to the road, even he was looking faintly green. It was Simon's day off, so another examiner took his place. We struck out for the country lanes, traffic-free. After ten minutes or so of winding rural roads, I was almost enjoying myself. We came into the city, sat in a rush-hour traffic jam for a while, and then it was all over.

I’m happy to tell you you’ve passed, said the examiner.

John's entire capacious body slumped with relief. I was so elated that I nearly—but not quite—hugged him.

To celebrate, I headed instead to the nearest Dainese gear shop and acquired a suitably fetching set of leathers and boots. I confirmed my rental of a 650cc Suzuki Freewind with Adventure New Zealand Motorcycle Tours on the other side of the globe. Clutching my license, newly inscribed with a little picture of a motorcycle, I packed my bags and boarded the plane.

Motorcycles are like twitchy thoroughbred racehorses or large dogs with big teeth: It's not a good idea to let them know that you’re scared. They can sniff out fear at a hundred paces. At the merest hint of adrenaline they become frisky jumpy and prone to bolt.

When I arrived at Adventure New Zealand Motorcycle's depot just outside Auckland to pick up my motorcycle, I was therefore determined to disguise the fact that I was consumed by terror. It wasn’t just the bike; I didn’t really want Ian and John, the two brothers who owned the company, to know how frightened I was either. I hadn’t thought it circumspect to admit to them exactly how inexperienced a motorcyclist I really was. There was something about the way their Web site proclaimed We are fiercely proud of our range of bikes … all of our bikes are in as-new, showroom condition that stopped me letting on that the day I picked up their glorious, gleaming blue-and-silver Suzuki was, well, the first day I’d ridden a motorcycle without learner plates. It was the first time I’d been on the road without an instructor in radio contact telling me how to stay alive. It was the first time I’d ridden a bike anything approaching this big.

I arrived in a taxi; as the driver headed off down the road, I felt my last link with the safe world of four wheels disappear. A man called Paul wheeled out the bike I was to ride for the next few months. I blinked. I let out a tiny squeak. I breathed a little faster. This bike was huge. It was a monster. It looked like the kind of beast that might just take umbrage with a bumbling novice motorcyclist and buck her from this world into the next. How on earth was I meant to build a meaningful relationship with that? It didn’t look like a bike that would like to have its clutch gently squeezed or lovingly massaged. It looked like a machine that would be more into wild animalistic pumping.

Paul looked happy delighted to be handing this piece of killer machinery over. Paul had no idea of the lunacy in which he was unwittingly complicit. I did my best to look cool, but underneath the tight black leathers I was pouring sweat.

Six hundred fifty ccs hadn’t sounded all that big when I was back home, safe and warm, sitting in front of my computer looking at online photographs of motorcycles and fantasizing about roaring along deserted roads, past hillsides covered in swaying golden tussocks, up winding mountain passes with panoramic views, alongside rugged white beaches thumped by wild, crashing waves. Six hundred fifty ccs looked rather more frightening in the flesh.

I tried to delay the inevitable as long as I could. I spent a good while unpacking my luggage and loading it into the panniers. I found the bike wouldn’t balance on its stand very well once it was loaded with luggage, because it was on a slight slope. I tried to wheel it over to a flat piece of pavement. It was so heavy, I couldn’t shift it. Paul blithely sauntered over to help. For some reason, he still didn’t look concerned.

That's it, you’re on your way. He grinned in a carefree manner. See ya.

See ya, I squeaked back. I was trying hard to sound relaxed, but my voice came out high-pitched and strangled. I put the key in the ignition and turned the throttle gingerly. The bike gave a mighty man-eating roar.

There was a little hill down the driveway onto the main road. I inched my way down, convinced that at any moment the bike was going to lunge into life and hurl me to my death under the wheels of a passing Volvo.

Urrrrrrrrrr, it purred, sounding frighteningly like a panther preparing to pounce.

Riding this bike was a ludicrous idea, it now occurred to me. It wasn’t just averagely silly—people actually die when they fall off motorcycles. Forget the extinction of Kiwi blokes; right now it looked as though I myself might be about to bestow a favor on the human race by removing my own insane genes from the evolutionary pool, by finishing myself off before I’d gotten around to reproducing. I was horribly vulnerable. I was grossly incompetent. I ought to have taken the bus.

But there was no bus. The taxi had left half an hour ago.

Come on, bike, I muttered, trying to sound powerful. You’re in my hands now.

And with that, I opened the throttle, let out the clutch, and stuttered off down the road.

I was heading north to Paihia in the Bay of Islands. From there I was planning to visit Waitangi, the controversial birthplace of modern-day New Zealand and, therefore, the cradle of Kiwi man. Then I’d head back down to Auckland before heading south.

I puttered slowly for the first few miles. After twenty minutes or so, I was forced to accept that the bike was spinning along quite effortlessly. As long as I didn’t have to do anything scary—such as stop at a red light—all was well. I started to look at the digital display in front of me in an attempt to figure out what the various gauges were trying to tell me. My speed was obviously that big number in the middle—a whopping forty-seven miles an hour at present. And that line down the side with notches on it seemed to be the gas gauge. Except that there wasn’t any mark on it. The bike, surely had gas in it. It was moving, after all. I screwed up my eyes at the display. Then I noticed: The three notches at the bottom of the red empty box had turned to two. The tank was nearly empty. Goodness, I thought, perhaps that purring noise had not been the bike preparing to pounce but the anguished rumbling of its half-starved tummy. Clearly, the beast had to be fed—and soon.

I had just a minute or two earlier passed through a small township called Warkworth. I turned around, managed to execute a successful left turn at the traffic lights, and found a gas station.

I stopped the bike. It didn’t crash to the ground. I swung my leg over. Still no disasters. I filled up with gas, paid at the kiosk, and left.

Things didn’t run so smoothly for long. At the intersection to get out onto the main highway, the traffic light was red. I stopped in the line of traffic. The light turned green. I can’t even remember what happened next: As tends to happen after traumatic events, such as when one witnesses the annihilation of one's entire family at the hands of a crazed gunman, my mind has obliterated the memory. But, somehow, the bike bunny-hopped, I let go of the handlebars, and the whole shebang crashed to the ground.

I stood and stared in horror at the vast machine lying prostrate on the asphalt. I’d had it for less than an hour and already I’d managed to drop it. My terror, which had in the last fifteen minutes or so subsided to a small puddle somewhere in the region of my toes, now welled up again and washed over me with the force of a tsunami. I looked around in desperation. There was no way I could pick the bike up by myself. Let's face it, an hour ago I hadn’t even been strong enough to wheel it across Adventure New Zealand Motorcycle's parking lot. There seemed little point in even trying. Surely one of these drivers would rush to my aid in a moment; they’d help me lift the bike so the traffic could move on. But the drivers just glared at me and waved their hands in flurried, impatient shrugs. There was a tooting of horns. I was entirely mortified. I felt physically sick. I willed the ground to swallow me whole.

Finally, after what was probably just seconds but seemed like about half an hour, a woman laden with shopping bags full of groceries ambled over.

Can I help you with that? she asked, dumping her plastic bags on the ground. A small bottle of bleach toppled out onto the road.

I grabbed the handlebar; she heaved from behind. The bike didn’t so much as budge. We tried again. We wheezed and we puffed. My sweat—a heady combination now of exertion, fear, and abject humiliation—had given up oozing and dribbling and developed into a full-force flood. And then, as if by magic, the bike lifted itself. I looked around. A vast Maori man, whose tattooed biceps bulged from his tank top, stood behind me. His vest stretched taut over pulsating pectorals. He seemed to have lifted the bike with a tiny effort from just one finger.

Er, thanks, I said.

I looked up at him fearfully. What was he going to say? I braced myself for his brutal, scathing observation that I shouldn’t be playing with dangerous boys’ toys, that if I must play with something, I should be riding a nice little girl's scooter. I winced thinking of the way in which he would growl that my incompetence was threatening the safety of everyone else on the road. I cowered and looked back down at the road.

Nice bike, he said, and laughed.

Er, yes, well, I only just picked it up from the rental shop, I stumbled, red-faced.

The man sauntered into the middle of the road. He was still beaming—he seemed to find the whole awful episode wildly entertaining. He held up his hand to the cars. The traffic stopped. And then, when it was completely safe, he waved me out onto the highway.

Ride safely now! he called as I wobbled away shamefaced and vowing that never, ever, however desperate the circumstances, not even if aliens dropped out of the sky and obliterated every other town on the planet, would I show my face in Warkworth again.

It took me five hours to ride the 155 miles to Paihia. Long lines of frustrated traffic strung out behind me as I puttered pathetically along, but I didn’t care; I just wanted to stay alive. Just north of Whangarei, I stopped for bacon, eggs, and coffee at a roadside café.

You want mulk un thet? asked the girl behind the counter.

I’m sorry?

Mulk?

I had no idea what she was talking about. The girl was of the plump, cheerful kind. Her hair was scraped back in a devil-may-care attitude, one that refused to be flustered by bobbly bits and wayward locks. Underneath the once-white apron, her clothes positively howled: I am not a fashion victim! The girl laughed at the strange foreigner, drew breath, and gave it one last go.

"Would you like mulk in your coffee?"

So it looked as though it wasn’t just the bike that would be giving me problems in this strange land twelve thousand miles from home. It wasn’t just the men—who were so laid back they wouldn’t bat an eyelid if a tractor grew wings—that were a little bit odd. It looked as though I wasn’t going to be able to speak to anyone in this peculiar aberration of English either.

When, eventually the tiny waterfront town of Paihia appeared, I was giddy with relief. I had survived day one. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I woke up with astonishingly stiff buttocks, that I realized what kind of workout five hours’ terrified bottom-clenching can provide.

Paihia is the main township of the Bay of Islands, a remarkably pretty place whose warm climate and array of water-borne activities today draw the vacation crowds. I had been here once before, when I came on vacation to New Zealand to escape the chaos of the magazine publishing office where I worked in Hong Kong. On that trip, I had gone out into the ocean on a small boat owned by a Kiwi bloke named Captain Bucko; we had dived amid the rusting wreckage of a ship that had met its end in these waters many years before. We had swum through crumbling iron doorways into decrepit caverns where packed shoals of tiny shimmering fish parted to allow us through. Back outside, as we moved slowly through the water along the length of the wreck, a huge, solitary stingray had undulated beneath us. From a crack in a rock, a moray eel had poked out its head and granted us a toothy grin.

Back on dry land, I had lain on the beach at the nearby township of Russell and strolled through the forest. I hadn’t, however, troubled my head with historical detail—and history is something that this part of New Zealand has in just as rich abundance as its rippling, wriggling marine life.

It was in the Bay of Islands that Charles Darwin first set foot on New Zealand soil in December 1835. He stopped here on his five-year voyage aboard the Beagle, during which he also visited the Galápagos Islands, whose fossils were later to lead him to his theory of evolution. Darwin was less than enchanted with what he found.

[New Zealand] is not a pleasant place, he wrote in his journal. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity which is found in Tahiti; and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society.

He might have had a point. From the 1790s onward, European and American sealers and whalers had been coming here for rest, booze, and sex with the local Maori women. Their ships were often crewed by escaped convicts, thieves, and thugs. Some of these stopped off in the Bay of Islands and opened shops and brothels. Drunkenness and debauchery pitched and rolled; the now-paradisiacal township of Russell became known as the hellhole of the Pacific.

With so many of those Kiwi blokes in need of spiritual assistance, the early Kiwi missionaries set up their first base here too. Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain of New South Wales, brought God to the Bay of Islands in 1814. He was frustrated by his failure to turn the Australian convicts and Aboriginals into good Christians, so decided to try his luck with the Maori instead. The gospel was first preached on New Zealand soil on Christmas Day ofthat year. Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, Marsden proclaimed before disappearing back off to Australia as fast as the wind would carry him and leaving his minions to sort out the mess. Marsden's legacy lasts to this day: The main street of Paihia is still named after him.

The missionaries did their best to spread the word, though sometimes the message was lost in translation. The chief was at this time rather notorious from having lately hung one of his wives and a slave for adultery. When one of the missionaries remonstrated with him he seemed surprised, and said he thought he was exactly following the English method, Charles Darwin recounted in his journal, The Voyage of the Beagle, after visiting a tribe at Waiomio with his religious friends.

In some unfortunate cases, grog got the better of God, and sex won over souls. In less than twenty years, three missionaries had been given the sack: one for adultery, one for drunkenness, and the third for what Marsden, with delicious prudery, mysteriously labeled a crime worse than either.

But the Bay of Islands was not merely an early settlement for lusty whalers and fast-succumbing missionaries. It has a more notorious place in history, for this was where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Waitangi lies just up the road, a mile or two from Paihia. It was here that, on February 6,1840, the British resident, Captain William Hobson, convinced a number of Maori chiefs to cede to British sovereignty.

It was because of the Treaty House at Waitangi that I had come north at all. This was, albeit controversially, the site where the Maori and British peoples joined together as one nation, the place where their cultures merged and where the country New Zealand was created.

The next morning, I was out of bed early and, after a fortifying coffee and muffin in a waterfront café, I wandered up the road to Waitangi. In contrast to the bitterness and bloodshed that the treaty has provoked over the years, the Waitangi Treaty House is well tended and squeaky-clean. At the visitors’ center, an audiovisual display tells the story of the founding of New Zealand as we know it. It is a rose-tinted, sugar-coated tale. The narration theoretically comes from a Maori and goes something like this: Once upon a time our people arrived in Aotearoa in a great big canoe. They had lots of nice sex, and after a few generations the country was inhabited by many different tribes of happy, cuddly brown warriors.

Then one day a big ship came along with pretty white goblins inside. It was like a dream. The white men brought pottery and pigs and sheep and guns. But as more and more white men came to hunt the whales and seals around our shores, things started to get messy. The white men were frequently drunk and took a