23. Holiday Ghosts





Whale Bay




The poor holiday weather this year reminded me of some weather ruined holidays of my own over the years.

Opononi, Northland, January 10th 2003
Have just driven over with Sharon from the Sands Motel on the beach near Tutukaka, from a washout of a day of strong north easterlies, very heavy rain and flooded roads.

The outdoors have dominated my summer holidays and I hate it when the weather packs up and I'm forced to find other amusements than those provided by sea, beach and bush. Twenty years ago in January 1983, Stuart, Lewis and I, having delivered Sacha to Ekatahuna for a farm holiday with plenty of horse riding, had booked to go on the Milford track. They were fit teenagers and I was in reasonable shape so we were looking forward to the experience immensely. We camped in Te Anau the evening before our departure but there was a huge storm in Fiordland that night. In the morning we packed up our sodden tents and reported to the DOC office at the scheduled time only to be told that the track was closed, one of the huts was under water and the trampers already there were being helicoptered out. We drove back to Queenstown where the locals were busy sandbagging the lakeside shopping and restaurant area to hold back a rising Lake Whakatipu. After a couple of nights we moved on towards Haast and the west coast and stopped overnight at Makarora in the Mount Aspiring National Park. During that night the road back was closed by a washout and the road ahead blocked by flooding and debris on the Haast River Bridge. So we played table tennis and indoor games for a couple of extra days in Makarora. We did finally make it up the West Coast and over to Nelson where Lewis broke a bone in his foot by treading on a tennis ball that we were playing soccer with in the campground. It was a memorable holiday. We picked up Sacha who had had a wonderful time and drove home.

But it is not merely the weather now that can play havoc with holiday plans. As I grow older and less physically active I have discovered some of the self-imposed limitations of traditional New Zealand holidays. Last year, 2002, I was in Queenstown with Anne-Marie, an old friend visiting from Brighton, England. While I attended a conference she walked the Milford track, something I was no longer capable of. Later in that holiday we took the coach trip up Ninety Mile Beach to Cape Reinga. Anne-Marie tobogganed down the sand dunes while I stood and watched. When we arrived at the Cape she walked down to the lighthouse and I, pathetically fearful of disclosing the respiratory challenge of the uphill walk back, stayed in the coach park. Some years earlier I had the same experience when holidaying with friends in the Coromandel. When they walked down to Cathedral Cove, I sat with the view from the top.

Other limitations are from my Ghosts of Times Past, the haunting memories of other times and other loves in these places. I came to Opononi with Pat and the children in the early 1970s not long after we moved to New Zealand from London. Little seems to have changed here physically or economically since that time. Perhaps the local Maori in the Hokianga have some residual memory of when their communities were thriving but I have little sense of things on the improvement. The coastline places are scratching to hang on to some of the crumbs of tourist traffic and I imagine life in the hinterland is equally difficult. I have changed however and view it all with less excitement and less interest in the local history and culture than on previous visits. Perhaps I am spoilt by the knowledge of the many other beautiful places, bays, beaches in New Zealand, or perhaps it's time to abandon this kind of holiday and seek something with more intellectual stimulus or more social activity - Wellington! or a cruise? or a golfing holiday? or stay home and do a summer school course like last year's photojournalism. Or toy with the idea that I could make it over to England next summer and spend time with family there.

Then there's the ghosts of relationships to deal with. Staying at Omapere with Pat when the children were little. At Tutukaka fishing with Mary and enjoying the beautiful Whale Bay. Through this way too with Mum and Elizabeth in 1982. Again some years later with Linda, Kate and Harriet. So difficult to make sense of it all in the context of the separate histories of Sharon and I. It's hard not to trip over your previous selves when holidaying in New Zealand, the kaleidoscope of pieces from your past that you shake and scrabble together to find some pattern that makes sense of the present.