Skip to main content

Totaranui

Totaranui Beach from the Headland Track, looking South to the string of beaches, ending in Awaroa.
 The Abel Tasman National Park is a large block of native forest in Golden Bay. It is best known for the string of golden sand beaches on its Eastern edge, stretching about 65 km in a line from Marahau in the South to Separation Point in the North. A track follows this coastline, winding along the beaches and over headlands between them, providing a 4 day walk of exquisite beauty. There are huts and campsites spaced along the track, and a winding, single lane dirt road leads to Totaranui, a beautiful beach about 10km from the Northern boundary of the park. Totaranui has a large Department of Conservation campsite.

Clemency's family arrived in New Zealand from England in 1962 and in 1963 went to Totaranui for the first time, when the national park was only 15 years old and the programme of reforestation from farmland had only just begun. They returned annually and spent about a month there, camping, like everyone else, on the beach in old canvas 9 x 9 tents.

Totaranui was a place of growth and safety for Clemency. As a newcomer to this country it became for her a spiritual and emotional home. I met her at the end of 1972. In early 1974 I went there for the first time, to the delight of most of Clemency's family and to the disappointment of  one or two of the other young, hopeful male campers. I too was captivated and charmed and smitten with this sublimely beautiful corner of Aotearoa. We returned annually, and after our children arrived, took them to this place so dear to us. When we moved to Hamilton in 1985 the trip South became too problematic, so we found other remote and beautiful spots: in the Ureweras, on the Coromandel Peninsula, in Northland and on the East Cape, but nothing could compare to Totaranui. Nothing had that perfect mix of golden sand, forest, warm weather and solitude.

We came back to the South Island in 1998 and eagerly returned in the first summer holiday, but were devastated by what we found. Our beloved Totaranui had been discovered, and during January was packed to overflowing with caravans and camping trailers. There were speedboats. There was a waterski lane.  There were stereos playing loudly and the burbling throb of generators. There were jetskis. F*&%$ing JETSKIS! in Totaranui! It was like discovering a hot dog stand in the Sistine Chapel. We quickly left, and never returned to camp there, although on 3 or 4 occasions we took packs and a tent and walked the track. We stayed a day or two in the trampers' area of Totaranui, but never longer. It was just too depressing.

Then last year my brother Alistair told me he had gone there in mid March and it had been just like the old days. The weather was warm, the sea clear, and the campground sparsely populated. We decided to return this year.

The weather was warm. I swam every day and we walked all the day hikes. In all the time we were there I never once heard an outboard motor. There were perhaps 50 occupied campsites in a space designed to accommodate 800, but there was a steady stream of young people on the track, speaking a variety of languages and carrying packs. We went to bed and rose again with the sun, fought the sandflies and watched the birds.  We were home. It was wonderful.
Labels:

Comments

Merv said…
May it be like that over Easter weekend for our family reunion!
21 March 2017 at 17:23
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more