Dinner with Charlotte
wielding, the stunning views enticing those around us to wield their selfie sticks in appreciation.
Our guide Chris from Russell Mini Tours ferries us to the equally pretty Tapeka Point and Oneroa Bay.
He points out Russell’s quirks, its socalled ‘‘electric chair’’, the first church built in New Zealand, the pensioner flats, and the wonderful 1940s Adobe cottage, hand built from clay and sand by Charlotte Larkin when she was in her 60s.
A smart piece of panoramic lawn
Time for the main event. Whatever the word Waitangi conjures in your mind in 2017, the beauty of the spot will always wash away any negativity.
Busby and Hobson chose a smart piece of panoramic lawn to birth New Zealand.
There’s so much been written about the Treaty Grounds, but let me start with this.
It’s a shame it’s no longer free for Kiwis to go, sit on the grass, and reflect on the importance of what happened here on February 6, 1840.
For me, a trip to Waitangi is an important rite of passage for all of us and I’d hate for a $20 surcharge to put people off doing it.
Like much of the Bay of Islands, things are changing fast at Waitangi. And most of it is brilliant.
The new Waitangi museum, included in the ticket price, is a worldclass experience. Everything about it is great – the collections detailing early Maori-European encounters, the interactive Bay of Islands explorer, the screens shaped into a waka.
The only thing missing is the Treaty itself, which these days hangs out in Wellington’s National Library.
It was good to see the museum give a big nod to the importance of Dame Whina Cooper and the hikoi she lead, the Maori land march.
Waitangi’s history, like far too much of world history, is full of men making the kind of cock-ups that only men can make. Cooper is a nice antithesis to that. The infamous rickety bridge over the Waitangi River rumbled as we made our way back, past Te Tii Marae and down to Pahia for dinner.
We dined at Charlotte’s Kitchen at the tip of the rapidly-growing tourist town’s jetty.
It’s a restaurant that celebrates Charlotte Badger, another strong woman in New Zealand’s history, albeit with a little less mana than Cooper.
Badger was a thief and was loaded onto the ship the Venus for Tasmania in 1806 when she inspired a mutiny of the crew and set sail for the Bay of Islands.
One of the first white women to settle in New Zealand, it’s not clear what happened to her or her daughter who was on the boat.
It’s rumoured she caught the eye of a Maori chief who protected her before she left him and sailed off into the Pacific again a few years later.
A whirlwind visit
Over the next day we took a boat to Motuarohia. It’s where Cook first anchored and named the Bay of Islands and it’s also where the country’s first murders, which led to a hanging, occurred.
We explored fisherman and author, Zane Grey’s hideaway at Otehei Bay and then took a trip to Kerikeri’s historic basin.
We admired New Zealand’s first stone house, exquisitely renovated, and picture-postcard pretty on the shores of the Kororipo-Kerikeri basin (kororipo means swirling waters in Maori).
We took a cursory glance at the country’s oldest building, Kemp House, then climbed up to Hongi Hika’s striking Kororipo Pa, a masterpiece in Ngapuhi defensive design.
Minds racing, we made our way through the chill of a clear night, back to the Duke of Marlborough.
The Milky Way blazed across the sky in the soft light of Russell, the Southern Cross, which helped the first settlers get to Kororareka Bay, burning the brightest of them all.
The yellow light of the Duke called us in. We opened the door to bubbling laughter, the old warmth of history enveloping us.
The writer travelled with assistance from the Bay of Islands Marketing Group.