Gazebos, road trips and long-drops
Four writers share the stories of their most memorable New Zealand summer holidays.
By Kevin Norquay
Memorable summer holidays? Ours at Pa¯ pa¯ moa Beach over a decade were so memorable that daughter No 1 was moved to write a poem about them – entitled The Fight – it was about the only time she had witnessed her parents at war.
Nearly as gripping as a Siegfried Sassoon or Rupert Brooke in its portrayal of wartime horror, it is undoubtedly now in the Karori Normal School Hall of Poetry Fame.
At the core of the marital strife was a malevolent gazebo. Green and white striped, with four legs and a peaked roof, it cast shade over the opening day of every holiday at
Pa¯ pa¯ moa Beach Resort.
Quite simply, no matter which bit we put into which other bit, it emerged looking like a giraffe that had spent all night at a safari bar and was now too drunk to stand.
And so the poetry-inspiring events began. Year after grumpy green striped bloody year. Each of us had an idea just where we had gone wrong, when in fact we had no idea at all. Both were simply suffering Shelter Shock from previous battles.
Around us milled the girls. About 3 and 5 when Gazebo War I broke out, they were into their teens by the time the Drunken Giraffe revealed its secrets.
Each summer while construction, deconstruction and reconstruction were under way, they were forced to sit and watch other small holidaymakers heading for the waves. And coming back beaming. Or heading to the dairy. And coming back with icecream. Beaming.
Foolishly, they did the opposite of easing the tension.
‘‘Can we go to the beach? Can we go to the beach now? When can we go to the beach? Mum and dad, we want to go to the beach.’’
Here’s some context. Gazebo grappling always followed an eighthour drive from Wellington, a journey that started at 4am, only to be halted by a multitude of car sickness stops (once the first was in Karori, our home suburb).
We wrote a travelling song to pass the time, to the tune of Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer.
It starts out thus: ‘‘Whoa, whoa are we nearly there? Whoa, whoa we’re living in despair’’.
Those lines came from the back seat; the parental refrain was, ‘‘eat dried crackers, it’ll help I swear, whoa, whoa living in despair’’.
But of all the many memorable holidays at Pa¯ pa¯ moa with its sunshine, surf and sausages, one stood out above all others like a sparkling Sky Tower wrapped in twinkling lights of joy.
It was about a decade after the cursed gazebo entered our lives.
That summer, upon arrival at the camping ground, grumpy dad grabbed the bag containing all the gazebo bits and, in anticipation of the stress and poetry to come, flung the pieces out in one mighty swoosh, scattering them for metres.
And there it was, emerging amid the clutter; a piece of rolled up paper, never previously witnessed by the subset of human known as Norquay.
On it the word INSTRUCTIONS was written. Words, arrows and drawings indicated the pipe marked A should slide into the slot marked A, pipe B into slot B, then ever onward.
In just 10 minutes we had a proudly standing giraffe, straightlegged and stable. In 15 minutes we were at the beach. And THAT was our most memorable summer holiday. By Siobhan Downes
My classmates at Otago Girls’ High School always came back from their summer holidays with perfect tans. In the first week of term we’d have our class photos taken, and beneath the hemlines of the navy skirts would be a neat row of golden shins, beautifully ripened by long days under the Central Otago sun.
Then there were my legs, which stood out like glow sticks. I hated that I couldn’t tan. It didn’t matter how many hours I spent out on the deck of the crib in Naseby my family rented every year, attempting to toast my pasty body. I simply wasn’t built for summer. I was far more comfortable indoors, beneath the glare of my computer screen.
The summer of 2006 was the first year we didn’t go to our usual holiday spot. Instead, we embarked on an epic South Island road trip, driving up the east coast from Dunedin, along the top, and down the West Coast before taking the Haast Pass back across.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime holiday, and my younger sister and I were lucky to have parents who went to the trouble and expense of planning such an adventure so we had the opportunity to see our own backyard.
But I was 15 at the time. Too uncool to spend summer at the camping grounds, experimenting with booze and boys. Yet too cool to show any enthusiasm for the wonders of my home country.
That year, I had an excuse to be miserable. I’d dislocated my knee and was in a brace. While my parents and sister got out of the car to explore towns along the way, I would sit sulkily in the front seat, listening to The Killers on the iPod Shuffle I’d got for Christmas.
The weather was as angsty as my teenage self. It would be the coldest summer in decades and was grey and rainy for the majority of the trip.
Instead of experiencing the glorious beaches of Nelson, my sister and I spent the whole time in the motel, watching Hannah Montana on Sky.
We stayed in a beautiful little cottage overlooking the sea in
Po¯ hara in Golden Bay. I retreated to my bunk bed, curling up with
Sarah Dessen novels.
The West Coast was a blur of rainforest and fog and the interiors of Top 10 Holiday parks.
At Franz Josef Glacier, I limped along the walking track until the icy giant was just in sight, then complained my knee hurt and went back to the car.
The adventure concluded with hot chips in a pub in Haast, as the rain came down in sheets.
We had spent almost the entire trip inside. It might have been one of the worst summers ever, but for me it was one of the best.
The following year, I avoided the season completely by heading off on a school exchange to Japan, where my classmates complimented my pale legs.
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is the perfect summer holiday.
The family reunion at Matarangi By Lorna Thornber
My dad was a no-nonsense Yorkshireman who could be pretty strict with us kids, so when I arrived back at the bach one day to find my niece and nephew leading him around the backyard on a leash, I wondered if they’d somehow managed to spike his drink.
I’d been living in London for the past four years and it was my first trip back to New Zealand in that time – one he and mum had made possible by shouting my airfares.
We’d spent Christmas in their sunny Auckland backyard, before heading to a mate’s bach in the small Coromandel beach town of Matarangi.
Our old man had mellowed as an actual old man, my sister informed me, and it soon transpired that his first grandchildren could take much of the credit. At ages 2 and 4, they had him wrapped around their little fingers, painting his nails in pink, tying what remained of his hair in tight pigtails and, as I’d discovered that day, persuading him to perform like a giant puppy.
Mum had become another of their pliant playmates and before long I was, too. In place of gallivanting around Europe, I found myself building and busting down sandcastles, digging for ‘‘buried treasure’’ in the rock-hard backyard, and flailing about in the shallows with the kids on my back.
I was often exhausted and saw few of the Coromandel sites I’d wanted to, thanks to their easily tired legs and my nephew’s noon naps. But I hadn’t had such literally laugh-out-loud fun in a long time.
Watching dad with the kids, I realised he hadn’t actually changed all that much. Memories of him patiently teaching my sister and me to ride bikes and boogie boards and instigating thrillingly terrifying games of hide-and-seek tag came flooding back.
Dad and I hadn’t exactly been the best of friends during my terrible teens. Back then, I’d thought we had nothing in common and was quick to criticise what I dismissed as his crazily conservative views. Now, we were indulging our shared passions for photography, unfashionably big, buttery chardonnay, and rough-andtumble games with the kids like old mates.
When the kids were in bed, the grown-ups would go for walks along a beach so cobweb-clearing with its long stretch of surf-battered, tumbleweed-strewn sand that I made up my mind that I couldn’t spend much longer living beside the Thames.
Back at the bach, we’d pour big glasses of our off-trend chardie and tales of adventures and misadventures past would pour out with it. Moving up and down the space-time continuum with each anecdote, I felt like a time traveller of sorts – one on an ad-hoc tour of the big cities, small towns and wild Yorkshire moors my family had called home.
Dad’s stories of the old country, though, had changed. He hadn’t just mellowed in recent years, I realised, he’d spread out unrippable roots. Homesick for England for much of my childhood, he was now clearly content with the life he had built for himself and his family in New Zealand. And the grandkids could take much of the credit for that, too.
Chronically restless, I hoped that feeling of being settled was something I could learn to cultivate, too. Four years on – and just over four years after his death – I’m living back in New Zealand and, I have to admit, still working on it. Summer holidays here just don’t feel right without him, but looking at the unpublishable pictures of the kids leading him around on a leash the last time I saw him alive always makes me smile.
My job has taken me to the far reaches of the globe – from the Himalayas to the Maldives – but my happiest moment involves a longdrop toilet just down the road from where I grew up.
As a travel reporter, I’ve been fortunate enough to eat at an underwater restaurant in the Indian Ocean, stay at Thailand’s top resort and even travel to an island with nine million penguins on a National Geographic ship. So, if money bought happiness, you’d think one of these once-in-a-lifetime trips would be my most memorable summer holiday.
But, spoiler alert, money does not buy happiness. My happiest summer involved our old family bach in a little place known as Whangaruru.
Northland is pretty lucky to have an enormous coast, and most Kiwis have only explored a fraction of it.
Whangaruru Harbour was traditionally a haven for those travelling by boat between Whanga¯ rei and the Bay of Islands. In Ma¯ ori, it roughly translates to the sheltered harbour.
Right down the end of the harbour, as the bays get more remote and rugged, was a little waterfront bach our large family used to pile into. It was a rickety old pot of gold at the end of a very New Zealand-style rainbow: a gravel road.
Every year for the first 15 years of my life, without fail, our family would gather to celebrate summer. Nobody complained about the longdrop toilet, or having to climb a hill for cellphone reception. It was a time we all got together to talk, laugh and swim.
My nana, in her 60s back then, would be out skiing and showing us age is just a number. Us kids would spend the entire day in the water playing cops and robbers on bodyboards. My mum, who was probably a dolphin in a previous life, would swim for a kilometre across the other side of the harbour – we were convinced she’d become shark food.
Fresh fish would come home each night as the result of daily fishing expeditions. If the boat came home empty, there would be a Royal Commission of Inquiry over the barbecue as to what had gone wrong out on the water. In these situations, the ‘‘break glass in case of emergency’’ sausages would be rolled out.
I went to a family funeral a few weeks ago and something remarkable happened. Rather than talk about wealth or careers, the speakers recounted holidays with family and friends. I realised that’s what a holiday is about: it’s for creating moments that make life so special.
And if there’s one message I want to leave you with, it’s this: you don’t need money to create those memories. I’ve been to more than 70 countries, but my happiest summers were just down the road at a rickety old bach with a long-drop toilet.