The Idea of North
March 18th, 2008 by Thomas Maresca
An Auckland native whom I met in the ski town of Ohakune described New Zealanders to me this way: “The farther south you go from Auckland, the friendlier people get. The farther north you go, the weirder they get.”
It was an ungenerous way of putting it, but substitute offbeat or quirky, or maybe just different, for “weird,” and I’d have to say he was on to something.
There’s definitely something about the Far North. Even though New Zealand is tiny, the north feels remote, isolated from the rest of a country that itself already feels isolated. Driving through, I always had the sense that almost anything might be around the next bend in the road, that I was bound to meet somebody . . . offbeat . . . at the next place I stopped. And often, I was right. Transplants from Japan and Germany who were dropping out of their overcrowded countries; hostel owners eager to share salacious gossip from towns that seemed way too small to have so much salaciousness. I really liked it.
In a strange way, the attitudes somehow reminded me of the frigid, northern parts of the U.S. and Canada, even though you’d think it should be the opposite—here in New Zealand, the north is lush, abundant, the most temperate part of the country. Maybe a certain type of person is just attracted to heading as far north as possible, as if following some internal compass.
Anyway, there’s a real feeling of edge-of-the-world remoteness at Cape Reinga, the northern tip of the North Island. From here, you can look out over an unbroken expanse of sea and sky, and see the waters of the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet and churn together. This is where the Maori believe spirits of the dead leave this world for the underworld (Reinga means “underworld”, and the Maori called the cape Te Rerenga Wairua, the “leaping-place of the spirits.”) It’s an undeniably powerful experience.
A couple of practical points if you’re making the drive up to Cape Reinga yourself: One, you should fill up the car in Pukenui; there is a petrol station closer to the Cape in Waitaki Landing, but it doesn’t have a reliable supply of petrol.
Also: drive carefully! The last 21km of road to Cape Reinga is unsealed and very winding. My car was sliding all over the place, and I heard lots of stories of accidents. Driving extra-carefully is sound advice on the North Island in general; roads all over are narrow and winding and there are just so many distracting views.
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