“I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure the Maoris were here first”
We headed to Opunake in the mistaken belief that warmer weather must be on its way as we headed further north. It wasn’t really but our house was pretty beautifully located, on the corner of a sea front road. It’s around 45 minutes drive from Mount Taranaki which I’ve just discovered was the backdrop for The Last Samurai film.
Our front garden was a favourite for playing boules with the children…or at least our version which involved William stealing the jack and running away with it while we pursued shouting “Come back with our jack!” He would then throw himself on the floor which was our signal to freeze while he looked from side to side grinning. One morning our neighbour from across the road came over to see us. She started a conversation and we mentioned we were going to see Mount Taranaki.
“Mount Egmont, ” she quickly corrected me.
“Oh? I thought it was called Mount Taranaki.”
At this point I made a perhaps unreasonably quick assessment of what was going on here based on scant information.
“I’ll bet, “I thought to myself, “that it was called by a British name after it was essentially nicked by the British and now it’s been returned to its proper Maori name. And furthermore, judging by this lady’s age, I’m guessing she’s not a big fan of ‘this kind of thing’.”
Unfortunately, I had got it bang on. On 11th January 1770 Captain Cook came across a rather pleasant looking mountain and called it Mount Egmont, after John Perceval, 2nd Earl of Egmont, a former First Lord of the Admiralty who had supported the concept of an oceanic search for Terra Australis Incognita.
The Maoris weren’t impressed and any reasonable person can see why.
In 1986 it was ruled that Mount Taranaki should be as much its name as Mount Egmont and from this year (2020) it’s officially Mount Taranaki again.
Really?
No.
I can understand for someone as old as this lady (she was in her early 80s) she had known it as Mount Egmont for most of her life. But if someone comes up and nicks your land and gives your house a different name then at some point you’d like to think that you could have this wrong righted.
Mount Taranaki is pretty spectacular and the Egmont National Park that surrounds it (whose name must be on borrowed time…) did a good line in waterfalls.
New Plymouth was about 45 minutes away so we took a sojourn there to watch Frozen 2 for the third time because, you know, you need to stay razor sharp on the plot in case there’s a quiz. There was a pretty major meltdown from Amber on the way out of the cinema which led to us reflecting on what we had done that was so bad that deserved so much rage.
Hanging around the house was fun. We had a hammock (which when I look back was shamefully underused) and there was a circular running route that could be made of the kitchen and the lounge which led to hours of distraction and fun.
Slinging the ball the length of the kitchen between Amber and I while William played piggy in the middle was another winner.
Katie needed a break from both me and the children. One of the reasons we’re together is because she stands up to me and doesn’t let me get my own way all the time. This has always meant there’s been a manageable level of conflict in our relationship. This is entirely appropriate as it’s what I need under normal circumstances.
Travelling the world with two small children can not be described as normal circumstances.
When you’ve been together without any outlet or other adult company for so long, the healthy conflict magnifies and the things that irritated you about each other suddenly become a bigger deal.
I’m quite judgemental. She’s quite moody. Am I judgemental because she’s moody or is she moody because I’m judgemental?
The answer is of course the former. Well done to all of you who got that right.
Until I get my wish of having an independent adjudicator filming our every interaction we’ll never really know. Tony Benn famously recorded everything he ever said during interviews so that if he was ever misquoted by journalists he had access to the ultimate rebuttal. However, I suspect the real reason was that Mrs Benn often claimed that she hadn’t in fact told him that he was a pipe smoking pillock in the height of an argument and he loved being able to say, “Oh really? Well, let’s see what the tape has to say, shall we?”
With this in mind, I took the children to Taranaki Pioneer Village. This was a great little place which was essentially a mock up of how life used to be between 1850-1950. They have a couple of streets upon which you can find examples of the courthouse, the various artisanal shops and the hospital, all circumnavigated by the model railway which does a few laps every half an hour or so.
As good as these shops were (apart from the hospital: bit eerie) the highlight was most definitely The Chicken.
After we’d looked in a few shops (very quickly-the children’s attention span is smaller than even mine) we noticed a chicken roaming the streets.
William was relatively uninterested, Amber was not a fan. She was convinced the chicken was out to get us.
And, amusingly, she may have had a point. Every time we crossed the threshold of a shop, I could see the chicken in the distance stopping what he was doing, seeing where we were going and immediately changing pace and direction to make a beeline for us.
Every time we exited a shop he’d be somewhere unexpected and the same would happen. He was definitely hunting us down and, as he was getting nearer each time, Amber became increasingly tense. While in the spooky hospital, I began to subscribe the idea that he may have been plotting our demise.
Which really made the whole experience a bit more interesting for me, frankly. We were on the run from a chicken with an axe to grind. A chicken that didn’t play by the rules. A chicken on the edge who had nothing to lose.
We made plans to leave. As every sensible parent knows, no exit is complete without a quick visit to the conveniences. The toilets were on the other side of the compound meaning we had to cross open ground to get there. We were sitting ducks.
Of course we ran into him afterwards. We were hemmed in and that was exactly where that fowl mastermind wanted us. He started bearing down on us. Amber realised that it was now or never to be brave and headed straight for him. At which stage the chicken bottled it and the hunter became the hunted.
This was a plot twist that no one was anticipating, least of all the chicken.
The child that had previously been petrified of him and making all kinds of excitable noises was now enthusiastically trying to befriend him. And he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit.
A cracking end to the outing and we headed for home in fine spirits.
Nearby to the house was a lookout with great views over the sea. I took the two of them down the boat-ramp to watch the crabs running all over the shop. Entertainment which, under the current lockdown state of play (summer 2020), seems like heaven.
COVID-19 data was becoming more readily available. I’d listened to the WHO press conference from China which I was pretty disappointed with, in that the first hour of it seemed to be an advert for the Communist party. I had serious doubts that we would ever be able to trust the updates coming out of China. I was starting to feel a bit more uneasy about the whole thing: although we felt very safe in New Zealand with its copious space and modern facilities, we didn’t really want to get trapped there…
We had one last stop before Auckland.
And it was a very original one too. We spent a night in a railway carriage in a field just outside Waitomo. We stayed at a novelty glamping site where we could also have picked a Hobbit Hole or an aeroplane had they been available.
Deciding to take on Waitomo Caves the following morning, we had to make our own fun. After showing the children the other places we could have stayed, fun involved helping them walk along the picnic bench and jump off 1500 times that afternoon. Still, we were in the sun and they were having fun.
Which is what this is all meant to be about.
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." 