Kauris and Kiwis

The first leg of our New Zealand tour takes us up and around Northland - the long peninsula north of Auckland. State Highway 1 (SH1) provides access to this area of the country, but unlike highways and motorways with which I am familiar, SH1 presents a single track for much of the way, apart from the odd passing lane up steep hills.

We made liberal use of the passing lanes, as the van doesn't have much welly up inclines and Northland has plenty of them. In fact, the van is full of idiosyncrasies - little rattles, and a fuel gauge that seems to leap up and down as we navigate the hills - but it's largely an easy ride with little other traffic.

We turned off SH1 to head west onto highway 12 and broke the journey at Matakohe, paying a visit to the Kauri Museum.

A felled kauri tree

Kauri is a very slow-growing tree that is a type of pine. It produces a gum that helps the tree heal, but which over time seeps into the earth and solidifies. The early European settlers dug up this amber-like resin and fashioned it into jewellery and other decorative pieces. Particularly prized were those pieces of gum that had trapped insects, Jurassic Park style. As is the wont of humankind, the earth was soon being probed with metres-long spikes to find the precious gum, which was dug up as though it were gold. After several decades, nearly the whole of Northland had been turned over and the reserves of ancient gum were depleted. Efforts to produce newer gum, by injuring the tree and harvesting the resulting resin, resulted in an inferior product.

Kauri gum

The story of the kauri timber itself is a similar one. The wood was logged and processed by the early settlers and exported to Britain. Owing to the slow growth, the timber is of excellent quality and was therefore used to build everything the pioneers needed, from shacks to ships. Unfortunately, it was also used to build fences and railway sleepers, as well as for firewood, without consideration that it was a finite resource.

Increasing mechanisation saw bullocks, which were used to pull the felled trees to the mill, replaced by tractors. Pit saws that sawed the trees on site were gave way to steam-powered mills. These innovations increased the rate of deforestation until the kauri industry was all but over by the 1940s. Now only 4% of the original trees remain, and the kauri was not a protected species until 1990s. Swamp kauri - those that toppled and were preserved in muddy pits - are all that remains to be harvested.

Sawmill equipment

Reforestation of kauri is being attempted, but it takes 100 years to reach maturity and several centuries to become a great tree.
Aside from the deforestation, the other tragedy of the kauri story is that the trees are sacred to the Maori. Few of the 'great' trees remain, and we were planning to enter the forest tomorrow.

Not far north, we arrived at Kaihu, where we stopped briefly at the 100-year-old Kaihu Tavern, before driving along the road to the Kauri Coastal park to park up for the evening.

Stone crossing to who knows where

This campsite again offered a cooking facilities, in which K prepared a delicious tikka curry of squash, tofu, mushroom with rice, which smelled wonderful cooking in the open kitchen and drew envious comments from the other campers.

Pushing the boat out

On the edge of Trounson Park, the campsite offered a night walk, which we took advantage of after dinner. The tour by red torchlight was ostensibly in search of the elusive kiwi - an endangered and flightless nocturnal bird. In the park there are approximately 150 kiwi in 586 hectares, thus making the chance of seeing one relatively slim. Despite hearing its call as soon as we entered the park, we spent the tour whispering and creeping through the kauri without a sight of the bird galumphing through the forest floor.

However, it was a wonderful atmosphere, charged with anticipation, and we did manage to see weta (a large stick insect) and rabbits, as well as possum, which, along with dogs, presents the greatest threat to the kiwi. Before the arrival of man and the species he introduced, NZ had no four-legged animals and so no natural predators for the kiwi. On return to the park, we also witnessed another nocturnal animal - a group of eels writhing in the waterhole, which, by day, offers the chance for a quick dip. However, having witnessed the nighttime dance of the eels, a swim doesn't seem quite so enticing.