Monday 23rd September. Whiria Pa goo.gl/maps/JcLtI Another marvellous day. I was quite sad to hand my ‘reserved’ sign back at the reception desk, I rather taken a shine to it. I’d enjoyed my stay at Ahipara and would like to go back again, but it’s pretty busy through the summer (when I’m next this way). From mid December to Late January it’s always full… people book their family holidays there a year in advance… still… it is possible after that. I just have to keep an eye on that other date. The America’s Cup racing this morning was awful, two more wins to Team Oracle. Today I was heading south, to the Hokianga Harbour. This is an important location for the Maori part of the story. The explorer Kupe is credited with being the first to settle in New Zealand, and his people establish themselves right here. After a while Kupe goes home to Hawai-iki, but most of the people stay. It is more correctly called ‘Hokianga nui a Kupe’, ‘The great returning place of Kupe’. Kupe’s grandson, Nukutawhiti comes back to Hokianga in Kupe’s old boat the Matawhahaorua, (now renamed ‘Ngatoki- Matawhahaorua ‘) along with another vessel, the Mamari. Eight generations later Chief Rahiri is a direct descendant of Kupe and Nukutawhiti, and he was born in a place called Whiria Pa (a Pa is a hilltop stronghold), and I’m going there. I’m particularly interested in Rahiri because he was born in the early 17th century. He was chief at the time of Tasman’s visit, and is the only individual that I can positively name that actually saw Tasman’s ships. It’s not too far to the Hokianga from Ahipara, a couple of hours at most, and the journey is lovely. There are no ‘shake, rattle and roll’ dirt roads today. There’s also virtually no traffic. When I reach the northern shore of the Hokianga Harbour I roll into a tiny place called Kohukohu. I’d never heard of it, and didn’t even know it existed, but loved it straight away. It’s a real ‘Sleepy Hollow’ type of place. The main street had 11 buildings on it, and the picture on the ‘Town Hall’, taken in 1923 looked exactly as I saw it today apart from the cars. I was ready for a coffee and crossed the road to a picturesque place with outside tables set among big pots of flowering something or other’s. I had a BLAT (Bacon, Lettuce, Avocado and Tomato toasted sandwich) with my coffee as I sat looking across a reserve to the harbour and Jetty. I had a good nosey round the place. In the reserve was a sundial, and it immediately took my attention. It will feature in the book and I won’t over-do the detail here, but this sundial was special. The way they work is they cast a shadow onto a marked plate. As the sun advances through the day, the shadow moves. The marks on the plate, arranged in an arc, indicate the time. On this dial the divisions are; on the Hour, quarter Hour, and per 5 minutes. This device worked fine for everyone until the expansion of the railways. The difficulty is that if you travel east, then noon gets earlier. If you travel west, then it gets later. When people travelled on a train eastwards for example, their watches would be wrong! At midday by their watch it was already a few minutes past at their destination. Critically this made the railway timetables not work properly and lead to an idea called ‘railway time’. Clocks outside English railway stations had two minute hands. One indicated the local time (sidereal time), and the other hand indicated the ‘Railway’ time (time in London), which the train timetables were standardised to. I’ve included a photo of old one in the post. In due course, as personal time-pieces became more common, this lead to adopting a single time zone for the whole of England. All clocks then showed the same time, and the additional minute hands were removed. Why do I care about this?... Navigation. Longitude was a real problem for Tasman as he had no instrument or method by which to measure it. This problem wouldn’t be solved until Cook’s day. The trick with knowing how far east of west you are is all about time. For each hour of the day, the sun moves 15 degrees through the sky. If you have an accurate clock, set exactly at midday at your point of departure, then you can figure out your longitude by the difference between that clock and the time that you observe noon (when the sun is highest) at your present location. If you observe ‘noon’ at 11:00 a.m. on your clock, then you are 15 degrees of longitude to the east of your origin. Cook had an experimental ‘watch’ on his first visit to New Zealand. It was set to the time of midday at Greenwich. On his Voyage to New Zealand he showed that this new system for determining longitude worked, and midday at Greenwich was adopted as a standard for the British Navy. It has endured. The UK’s time zone is set to ‘Greenwich Mean Time’, and all other world time zones are set in exact hour offsets from this. And this sun-dial, why is it special? It allows you to calculate New Zealand ‘Standard Time’ from the local (sidereal) time according to the sun. There is an engraved plate under it inscribed with a grid of months across, and days down. In each square is a number representing the time offset for that day (varies between summer and winter). In order to find the correct NZ standard time you took the time from the sundial, then added the number of minutes from the plaque shown for today’s date. I simply had to do it to check… and, yes! At 12:45 by the sundial, plus 7.5 minutes for Sept 23rd… and that meant… that I’d just missed the ferry! I had too, but I was having too much fun. They ran every hour, so I’d just get the next one. There was sobering side to Kohukohu, their War Memorial. In my whole time in Kohukohu I didn’t see more than a dozen people, and that included women and children. The memorial listed the names of the men who had left this tiny settlement to go to the Great War; there were 90 names. What were they thinking? I pushed on to the ferry terminal. I was taking a 10 minute ferry instead of driving for four hours around the perimeter of the harbour because… it would be really nice! You have to see the photo of me parked in the queue at the ‘terminal’. ‘Terminal’ is a grand way to say parking zone. The Hokianga ferry has no buildings at either end. There is no ticket office, attendant, waiting room or café. There are just some lines marked on the road indicating where you should queue up. You bought your ticket on the boat, just like in the days when railways and buses had ‘ticket collectors’. It was a beautiful day for the crossing. The sun wasn’t fully out; a little high cloud muted it, but it was pleasant regardless. The water was like a mill pond and the only sensation felt through the deck was the tremor from the engine; there was no pitching or rolling. At Rawene I parked and walked around. It is another ‘sleepy hollow’ place; tiny and picturesque the way that little seaside ports can be. There was a really pretty café with a deck that hung out over the water looking back towards Kohukohu. I didn’t need another coffee, but I had one anyway just so I could sit there for a while. Next up was my main event for the day… Whiria Pa. I’d checked it out thoroughly on Google Maps (did I mention I like maps?) but hadn’t seen any sign of a track going up it. There didn’t appear to be any car park or layby either. It was bounded by the coast, the main road to Opononi and a little road leading to a cemetery. Finding nothing that Google maps hadn’t shown me I parked by the cemetery and set about making picnic; nothing grand, just a beef sandwich, mandarins, fresh orange juice and of course, mint chocolate. As parting gesture, on leaving the van I gave it a good squirt of fly spray… I couldn’t find the air freshener! I still saw no signs, but there was a stile into a paddock, and from there I could make out the faint line of what had once been a path trailing up the hill. What a hill! It didn’t look that big, indeed it wasn’t that big really, but what a grunt it was to get up it. It was steep and unyielding. As I approached the top the ground all around changed and I crossed tier after tier of levelled terraces. This had been a huge fortress. From the top I had a clear view of the Harbour entrance and the sea beyond. I could see across the harbour and up miles of its inwards course. This was a magnificent place for the Pa. Anyone entering the Harbour could be seen, and danger signalled. Boats would go out from both sides of the harbour to meet the strangers. Anyone able to land and storm the Pa had to run up the hill first. You don’t run up that hill and fight a battle, you run up the hill and collapse sweaty and breathless at the feet of the defenders. Rahiri was born here. He would have been in his twenties when they saw Tasman’s ships go past, and first son Uenuku may might have been born. Uneuku famously flew a kite from this hilltop, and next time I come here I would like to do the same. Happy with my afternoon I headed down the hill. Incredibly, Whiria hill is a ‘two step’ hill. Even though it rises from the plain, steep on all sides, the ground was boggy and puddled. I have no idea how this works. By the time I got back to the van I had two wet feet and muddy shoes… and I had added the aroma of bog and cow pat to my already malodourous footwear. It was late afternoon and time to get myself to the campsite back in Rawene. Swinging back onto road there was a thud as the Fly Spray left the bench top for the floor, where it rolled around the floor before finally clattering into the step well. More later.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 05:01:46 +0000
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