Freewheeling to Taranaki
By Karen Goa
Helmets? Check. Leathers and boots? Check. Maps of the back roads? Definitely. The main routes are no place for a decent day’s motorbiking. We - my rider husband Ken, the Harley and I - are Taranaki bound.
Only our leathers and helmets stand between us and the light and the air, the smells and the sounds. As pillion passenger I have the best job – leaning against the backrest, thinking a few empty thoughts and watching the whole of the passing world enfold us into the landscape.
The Harley putters past goats bleating into their beards, paddocks aflame with red-hot pokers, ditches full of dancing daisies, so close I could stretch out my boot and tickle them under their chins. A whiff of cow sneaks under my visor.
But after a while I’m thinking we’re destined to spend eternity burbling through these green fields. We come up for air at Ngaruawahia, blunder our way out again across the railroad tracks and press south.
The valleys sink lower and the hills push higher. This is limestone country, near Waitomo’s grottos and within a whisker of a kiwi’s snout at Otorohanga. Further down the track Te Kuiti’s Giant Shearer bends forever to his task.
Onward to Piopio. The awning of the Mustard Seed Opportunity Shop on the main road is, I note, a good ‘rainy-day’ shelter for the bike. Piopio also has the Piopio Blacksmith Museum.
The museum is the best kind; the Marie Celeste of blacksmith shops. Here’s a pile of rusty horseshoes, there’s a heavy old whetstone, and in the back a couple of horse-drawn carriages. Inside the blacksmith’s cottage wedding photos of the blacksmith and his wife fade to ivory on the bureau, and kitchen chairs sag in memory of long-gone bottoms. Time has hitched itself to the hitching rail and refuses to mosey along.
Running south from Piopio along the ridge it’s so clear I glimpse snowy Ruapehu from afar. The art deco-style Mahoenui Memorial Hall - honouring Mahoenui boys who fought in the Great War - sits on its own beside the highway. A young woman tending her garden tells us the population of Mahoenui is ‘about ten or twelve.’
Past Mahoenui the limestone rocks are tossed like old bones in the paddocks. At the Arorangi Scenic Reserve near the start of the Awakino Gorge, it’s as if someone’s flipped a switch and all the nikau palms and pongas popped up over the rocks. A tunnel burrows through rock melting down the cliffs in chocolate and vanilla swirls. The Harley rumbles through the tunnel. It’s satisfyingly dark and spooky and the bike is rip-snortingly loud.
The Awakino Gorge can be wet any time of the year, but the sun’s warm on our leathers. We zizz and zoom around bends and over hills. We may think we rule the road, at least for a while, but the Awakino River rules the gorge. It capers across the rocks and out to sea at Awakino, where the North Taranaki Bight shears into view. On a clear day Mt Taranaki levitates in mid-ocean from this distant point, but low clouds hide the mountain from us.
Jenny and Graeme Maston run the Whitebait Inn a few kilometres further down the coast at Mokau. The Mastons know all the whitebaiters. After we’ve hoovered up a tasty meal of whitebait fritters, Graeme takes us to the far and secret reaches of the Mokau River. It’s a mystical, mysterious place. Whitebaiters’ stands dot the river’s ‘golden mile’ in a setting more akin to Southeast Asian jungles than New Zealand bush.
Una Watty’s been whitebaiting for fifteen years. She’s pegged out a restful possie beneath a kowhai tree. Neither venerable age nor diminutive size stops Una from heaving up the unwieldy set net and tipping the wiggling wonders into a bucket. I ask Una if she whispers sweet nothings to the whitebait to lure them into her net.
‘It’s luck,’ she laughs, ‘just luck. But I got up one day and said, oh, it’s an easterly wind blowing. I got sixty-five kilos that day.’
Whitebait can fetch more than per kilo. ‘Gold,’ chuckles Una, peering into the bucket.
On we ride, past driftwood flung up along the estuary, above the black sands, past the bach community at Tongaporutu and over Mt Messenger, shooting through the last few hills to Urenui. From here the land flattens away from Mt Taranaki’s broad foot to New Plymouth on the coast. The mountain has shed its cloudy cloak and stands provocative, bare and bold. At journey’s end, we spin our wheels in its shadow.
