Woman missing at site steeped in tragedy
The area where Kim Bambus was last seen is an idyllic place, with cliffs rising high above the Auckland skyline.
But it’s also a place steeped in tragedy and legend.
It was last Friday morning when Bambus told her flatmates she was headed to Piha for a run.
Her car was found at the entrance to the Mercer loop track, above Mercer Bay near Piha, her believed route of choice. Her mobile phone was still inside.
The area is guarded by the wooden statue Te Ahua o Hinerangi, whose own tragic tale is the stuff of local legend.
After days of scouring the area below the Mercer Bay cliffs and along the nearby shoreline, police scaled back their search for Bambus on Wednesday.
The cliffs are high and steep and the rugged trail has a number of caves.
What happened to Bambus after she got out of her car is not yet known.
And she is not the first to vanish there.
In 2012, Cherie Vousden’s car was also found at the entrance to the Mercer Bay loop track.
Like Bambus, extensive searches of the area never found a trace of the 42-year-old.
The statue of Te Ahua o Hinerangi, on Te Ahua Point, symbolises tangata whenua Te Kawerau a Maki’s spiritual guardianship of what was one of the oldest settled places in the Waitakere Ranges.
Historian John Diamond recalled the sorrowful tale of Hinerangi, the Maori chief’s beautiful and only daughter, in his 1966 book Once . . . The Wilderness.
The Ngaoho woman’s husband, a young chief from Karekare, was part of a fishing party on the rocks below, when a large wave engulfed them.
While trying to rescue a friend he was battered against the rocks and taken by the ocean.
‘‘Hinerangi could not be consoled,’’ Diamond said.
‘‘On the point near the Hikurangi pa she would sit everyday, gazing out of the restless ocean. Thus she pined, until one evening her spirit also went westward over the golden pathway of Tane to join her lover, but even today, from a certain position on the cliffs, one can see her life-size figure sitting there gazing out to sea, a sculptured form carved by the restless elements of Tangaroa, the ocean god, and Hauauru, the west wind.’’
Ahua means ‘‘likeness’’ in Maori and the legend was Hinerangi was taken and her face imprinted on the rock, he said.
The coincidence of the missing women and the Maori tale is ‘‘bizarre’’ and gives the place ‘‘a haunted past’’, former Waitakere City mayor Sir Bob Harvey said.
Harvey said he has seen the unmistakable face of a Maori woman many times on the cliff face while running the track in the early morning light.
‘‘The whole place is steeped in tragedy and legend.’’
Nearby in Piha, just north of Mercer Bay, Iraena Asher, 25, went missing without a trace in 2004.
The trainee teacher and parttime model had struggled with bipolar disorder and was last seen near Piha beach in the early hours of the morning.
Coroner Peter Ryan in 2012 ruled that Asher drowned accidentally.
Harvey said he was mayor of Waitakere City at the time Asher disappeared and helped with the search in a helicopter and inflatable rescue boat.
‘‘I have never believed that she went into the sea. I simply don’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense.
‘‘It was 6 degrees that night with raging surf. I don’t believe a human being, a person of creature comforts, would walk into the sea at 2 o’clock in the morning.’’