An East Cape road trip
You’ll need a hearty appetite for this stunning part of the country, writes Deborah Coddington.
The road trip heading north around East Cape wasn’t intended to be a week of gluttony, but two previous months of crippling pain, drastic weight loss, culminating in smart detective work from a specialist physician and accurate diagnosis, saw me, just before Christmas, eating my way back to health in Ngati Porou country, from Hawke’s Bay up to Hicks Bay, around to O¯ po¯ tiki, down through the Waioeka Gorge back to Gisborne, Taira¯ whiti, and home to Wairarapa.
If you’re vegetarian, vegan, pegan, and/or keto then you might prefer to stop reading now. I dined at places where you eat and enjoy what’s put in front of you – battered kai moana, beef in pastry, local baking made for people with healthy appetites.
At Te Kaha, the cafe´ displayed an array of irresistible cakes including custard squares at least 8cm high with wafer-thin pastry and glace´ icing. We took ours down to the water, sat on a log and watched a fishing boat manoeuvre onto its trailer – and then licked the sugary remains off our fingers like two labradors.
At Ruatoria we relieved the pie warmer of several Ruatoria Pies then drove to the base of Mt Hikurangi, ate our breakfast under a tree and then drank Coke instead of long blacks. If you’ve never eaten a Ruatoria Pies pie, you haven’t lived – steak and cheese complemented by gravy (not vice versa), hot enough to warm your tum but not sear your tongue.
A friend remonstrated I was the only person she knew who ate pies all day to feel better, chased down with a packet of MallowPuffs. What would she know? As a GP, I bet clients didn’t tell her the truth about their diet.
I’d not been around the Cape so my husband took the wheel. He’d lived in Gisborne as a child and knows the area well. With gorgeous weather, I channelled George Ezra and rode shotgun, underneath the hot sun. But there was no chance to feel like a ‘‘someone’’ because the landscapes, from pretty Esk Valley north of Napier, suck all self-absorption out of any involved traveller.
That Mo¯ haka viaduct south of Wairoa, rearing from the bush, it pulls you up, craning out the window for a better view. More than 80 years old and the tallest viaduct in Australasia, it was mothballed when the Napier-Wairoa trains weren’t running, but could for all time be admired for engineering mastery, and magnificence as an outdoor industrial sculpture.
In Gisborne we find the house on Stout St where my husband lived as a small boy. He moved here in 1950 from Papatoetoe where he was born and remembers his early primary school years at Maungapapa Primary; days playing on the river; the butcher shop on a sharp highway corner with the sign ‘‘No Bum Steers Here’’; before his family shifted on to Hamilton then back to Auckland.
I silently ponder the effect on children when they have to pack their belongings and move along. I stayed in the same home from the day I was born until I first married. But I remember
angst as an adult when forced to leave several houses behind because banks foreclosed on mortgages. Is that how children feel when adults find new jobs in another city?
But we were busting to get out of the city and up the line, a place where around every corner is another marae or historic church – something interesting on which to feast your eye.
It’s not just the natural landscape that is so attractive – the 600-year-old spreading po¯ hutukawa at Te Araroa, winding down to wee bays at silent Lottin Point, the sweep of the empty beach, watchful Mt Hikurangi. There’s the wharf at Tolaga Bay marching out into the sea like Reginald Perrin in David Nobbs’ novels. Built nearly 100 years ago to carry merchandise, wool, meat and livestock to waiting ships, now it’s a tourist attraction. You have to wonder the point of walking to the end and back – to look at the lamp at the end perhaps, solar-powered with no bulb?
At Tokomaru Bay, the freezing works ruins and sturdy 19th century buildings like the Bank of New South Wales – established 1817 but now abandoned by commerce and unpainted for decades – have lost none of their majesty and handsomeness but faded into a different glory. Vegetation squeezes through the cracks in their walls. In cities they’d be eyesores, condemned for demolition. Authorities insist perfection is the sole criterion for beauty, in humans, gardens, houses, fruit and veges, arrogantly seeking control.
Dinner is at Tokomaru Bay’s Te Puka Tavern; sun sinking behind us, delicious scallops and chips, a variation on pies, before driving 10 minutes to our little room at the old Te Puia Springs Hotel (doors close at 8.30pm).
We didn’t have a hot swim, but a sign in the corridor advises no hot water: ‘‘Ran out of gas. Alternatively please use the hot pool instead’’.
It’s worth staying at the Te Puia Springs Hotel just for the privilege of watching the sun set through the glittering chandelier suspended in the stairway.
I can’t squeeze every memory into this essay. The aunties who appear in charge of the accommodation, hospitality sine qua non. Tukutuku at Tikitiki’s St Mary’s Church, explained to us by young women oiling the altar. Horses everywhere, grazing with ropes around their necks, many of them Naati horses, renowned for their courage, resilience and willingness to go anywhere.
It’s patronising to say East Cape is like stepping back in time, but I returned home understanding why my husband had always promised to take me to this special place in Aotearoa.
Weeks later he was talking to a Ma¯ ori Land Court Judge who said he’d been sitting behind us while we ate dinner at the Te Puka Tavern. ‘‘You were there with some blonde woman,’’ he remarked. Actually I’m his wife and grey but clearly a week of pies, fish and chips and cakes rejuvenates and restores your health, so I’ll take that as a compliment.