After the visitor to the Rotorua Wonderland has seen the geysers and the hot springs, there remain the lakes and their beautiful shores and forests and the Maori life, and these features of the Wai-Ariki country are as attractive to many people as the thermal sights. In this article Mr. Cowan describes the pleasure of cruising and camping on Rotorua and Rotoiti, and the unusual interest of Mokoia Island, the Lakeland Holy Isle. (The illustrations accompanying the article have been reproduced from paintings by the late Mr. T. Ryan.)

Campers-out and fishermen are early risers. They need no daylight-saving legislation to rouse them out of their blankets at peep of dawn. Whether we sleep in a tent or in the good open air—and a tent is over-stuffy for my liking, and unnecessary in fine summer weather—there are many things that lull one to sound slumber. The soothing wawarawai, murmur of gently-lapping water on the beach, or the music of a cascade rising and falling on the night wind; little wandering breaths of air; scent of treebark and ferns and moss; the call of a night bird, sometimes the trill of the cricket; to my fancy, lying ear to ground, the vast inarticulate lullaby of Mother Earth herself as she spins on her eternal course all blend into the healthy opiate of dreamless sleep. But the camper's sub-conscious mind is alert to the first signs and sounds of awakening day; a louder note in the ripple-wash on the sands; a breezy stir in the trees above the bivouac; a shivery breath from the grey waters; the raw freshness of the world when nature yawns and stretches herself against the dawn.

It still wanted an hour or more to sunrise when Tamarahi and I stirred out of our blankets on Matariki beach, our snug camping place on the north-west corner of Mokoia Island, and made ready for the second leg of our boating cruise around the lakes, a long projected sail in company from Ohinemutu to Mokoia and then down through the Ohau Channel and around the many bays of Rotoiti. The morning star was dimmed by a little haze that floated above us; the water of Rotorua stretched grey and cold to the dim further shore.

“Night's candles are burnt out and jocund day

“Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”

Weather-wise Tamarahi had a look around at sky and lake, and when I suggested breakfast before we started he shook his head. “Better wait till we get to the Ohau,” he said; “the wind is getting up; let's start now before there's much sea on the bar yonder.”

A Morning Sail.

So, rolling up our flax sleeping mats and blankets—we didn't trouble about a tent on those simple-life camping cruises—we stowed our camp-gear under the thwarts, launched our boat, stepped the mast and set sail for the Ohau rivermouth three miles away. Our boat was a sixteenfooter, with a spritsail; small canvas, but, as it turned out, quite enough for our needs that cruise.

Once well clear of the mountain-island the westerly breeze caught us, and away we ran before it, sliding along at an page 28 exhilarating rate over the grey waters. We boomed out the foot of the sail with an oar, and our spritsail tugged at mast and tackle like a team of bullocks. Less than half an hour took us across and through the choppy little seas on the Ohau sandy shallows. We beached the boat on the white sand just where the overflow waters of Rotorua swirl into the Ohau River round a projecting clump of low willows. The billy was soon on the fire, with the frying-pan to follow, and we were busy with tea and bacon and fried bread when the sun came up over the far dark ridge of Matawhaura Mountain. And then the transformation: the mists swept away from the face of the waters; the grey lake became blue, the white beaches and the pumice banks glistened; the bird life of the creek and its sedgy shores woke to life. Presently we saw, too, coils of smoke go up here and there along the lake and we knew by that token that the “little villages that cuddle in the sun” were waking to thoughts of kai, and maybe another day's fishing with those long funnel-shaped hao-koura, the nets stretched on poles to dry on the creamy sand.

The Bays of Rotoiti.

That was the beginning of a long-ago cruise with a capital Maori mate, sailing or paddling from bay to bay, making the acquaintance of the small communities of the Ngati-Pikiao tribe who lived in the lovely indents of Rotoiti's in-and-out coast, camping where we listed, exploring little silent islands, and the grand old Maori forests. What glimpses of charm we had of wild life around the lakes! We came silently upon the wild duck and the weweiia, the little dabchicks, and the teal in the quiet waters; we even surprised a melancholy bittern fishing on the Ohau banks. Our sail easily wafted us along, and when the wind dropped and we had to take to the oars we moved almost as silently, so that we seemed to enter naturally into an intimacy with the things of Nature. In a noisy-power-launch we would have missed all those curiously confidential touches of the wilds.

There are some almost faery places about Rotoiti. There are some tiny lovely dots of vegetation seemingly floating on the lake; there are two islets, as pretty as a picture, with their flax bushes and shrubs and dangling creepers and flowers all mirrored in the smooth waters on days of halcyon calm. There is a rocky isle, Pateko, half-way down the lake, a place of legend and elegiac poem. Long ago it was a fort and a refuge; nowadays it is the burial place of the small hapus who live on the nearby southern shore of Rotoiti. Every little bay has its shining crescent of sand; and on the grassy terraces near the east end of the lake there are settlements with here and there a carved house.

The trail of modern progress is over most of those villages, but the communal house of meeting retains the old style, artistic in form, blending well with the landscape.

The Glory of the Cliffs.

The northern shores are very bold in parts, with their cliffs, pohutukawa-hung, rising from deep water, and the steep hillsides densely wooded to the skyline. Matawhaura mountain makes a grand finale to the procession of cliff and forest and glinting bays and beach. We can bring up close under this giant palisade of rock and look up through the branches to the heights eight hundred feet above. Fern trees droop their lovely frondage high up the rocky sides; mosses and lichens and all kinds of fragrant climbing things tenderly tapestry the precipice, and little springs and dew-like drips water the many-coloured vegetation that so closely mats the cliffs. And far above, reached by a secret trail—it must be a perilous trail too—is the immemorial cavern of the dead, where generations of Tamarahi's ancestors rest.

A Sylvan Spa.

Hauparu, Wai-iti, Ruato, Tapuwaekura, Tapuwaeharuru, Otaramarae, and here and there smaller hamlets still we page 29 called in at, one time and another. There is a place of unusual scenery even in this place of uncommon attractions, the hot spring of healing waters called Manupirua. The hot mineral fountain issues from under the roots of a great old pohutukawa tree, at the foot of a hillside on the south side of the lake, and fills three successive bathing pools on its way to the lake. The lowermost of these was formerly used by people temporarily under the mystic quarantine of tapu. Manupirua is still in Maori hands, it is the little arcadian spa of the Ngati-Pikiao tribe.

“The rain is o'er—How densely bright
Yon pearly clouds reposing lie … !”—Andrew Norton.
Clouds dispersing after rain, Lake Rotorua and Mokoia Island.

The Rimu Avenue.

There is a most lovely forest road, lovelier even than famous Hongi's Track—where by the way, the widening and straightening operations of the roadmakers in the interest of hurry-on motorists have robbed the route of much of its olden charm. This is a three-mile road from Ruato, on the south side of Rotoiti, to the northern end of Lake Okataina. It passes through a noble forest of rimu pines and other great trees, the bush called Waione. For most of the distance from lake to lake the ground is level, once you climb up from Ruato to the Waione plateau, and the road is a cool fragrant avenue quite overshadowed by the foliage of the most beautiful trees in the Maori forest. It is a glorious bit of the real unspoiled bush and long may it remain so.

And it is the gateway to a wonder-place of quiet waters and luxuriant tree-life; that vast mountainside of pohutukawa trees on the western side of Okataina is something that no other lakeshore can show, not even Rotoiti, fine as it is.

On Mokoia Island.

A few days spent in exploring the historic places and the slopes and hilltops of Mokoia Island was a perfect finish to a Lakeland cruise on which not a lakeside village was left unvisited. That leisurely voyage was rich in memories of beauty; it produced, too, sundry notebooks filled with Maori legendary and poetic data, gathered from the last of the old tattooed warriors and sages of the lakes.

But weeks instead of days could be spent on Mokoia, or rather could in the days of the past, for the old well-schooled people who were such mines of folk-lore and song have gone and the young generation will not live on the ancient isle of ghosts, remote from the cinema and the jazz hall. Thirty to forty years ago many families lived on that wonderfully productive Paepaerau Flat, on the northeast side of the island. What a garden of food it was! And it could be a garden of food again, for the volcanic soil is amazingly rich, and frosts and blights never afflict Mokoia.

A Fruitful Isle.

When food was scarce on the mainland, the tribes always had Mokoia to fall back on for potatoes, kumara and maize.

What a fruitful place it was when first I set foot on the Paepaerau beach! There were cultivations all over the levels and up along the lower slopes; and up yonder were the cherry-groves, richly laden. One summer I was at Rotorua, old Te Raiha brought over canoe-load after canoe-load of kits of cherries, for the township fruit shops and the hotels and boarding houses.

The “Waka Maori.”

There were many canoes in use then; every village around the lake had its little flotilla of dug-outs; it was a pretty sight to see three or four of the largest wakas from Mokoia bound for Ohinemutu on some fine summer day, with sail set, making a race of it across the sparkling lake before a beautiful north-east breeze. Long ago they used raupo-reed sails, closely interwoven, very light material; but in my day at Rotorua the popular sailcloth was flourbags, which were deftly cut to shape and sewn with a sackneedle.

Here on this happy little island with its contented industrious community I heard several haka songs extolling the fertility and fruitfulness of the soil and the abundance of food from land and lake. These were often chanted by a merry company of girls and women as they came carrying baskets of food to visitors at a feast. One I have translated thus:—

“Bring, oh bring
Your calabashes to Mokoia,
To the isle of food and life!
In the fruitful summer time.
In the good harvest month,
Gather here, O ye people,
Come to the isle of the full calabashes.”

The Fishermen.

Here there is a reference to the abundance of whitebait or inanga, which was caught in great quantities in the old days, in fine-meshed nets, before the voracious trout became plentiful. The inanga was dried and preserved in taha, or calabashes—the hue and vegetable gourd—and in bark containers. Koura or crayfish too were in plenty, and there were scores, in fact hundreds, of posts sunk in the shallow lake bed as mooring places for the nets. They catch koura there still, in many places, each of which has its special name and its owners.

From the Island Top.

One day I climbed to the top of Mokoia with my friend Tutanekai the tounga, a lineal descendant of Hinemoa and Tutanekai of romantic memory. We pushed up by overgrown tracks, where the ancient homes of man are covered with shrubs and flax bushes; past the earthworks of immemorial forts, along little gullies and through witchy thickets. My companion pointed out this tapu place and that, and told how in the long ago this fruitful isle was “covered with people.” On the open breezy summit we came to a little square redoubt-like enclosure, nearly six hundred feet above the lake. It was once a fort, now a burial place. Tutanekai gave its name, which translated is “The Pinnacle of the Place of Abundant Food.” The name giver of ancient days likened the whole island to a great pile of food. What a picture from that green and lofty lookout! The lake lay all round us, as smooth as if polished. Ferny and wooded spurs radiated from our citadel down to the bright waters. Blue ranges rimmed the skyline; we saw the glimmer of little lakes; the woolly, curly steam columns of far away, and four miles south across the lake the white page 31 buildings and the green groves and parks of Rotorua town. We watched a trail of smoke emerging from the bush on the Mamaku Range—the incoming train from Auckland.

It was hot on this hilltop; Tutanekai and I presently sought the shade of the small woods on the south side, and loafed there awhile in great content, and the learned man told some of the tales of old. How sweet a retreat this day, so near and yet so far from the busy spa town:—

“A soft air lifting like a sigh
Some tree-fern's fan, as if in sleep
It stirred in the noon stillness deep,
Then sank in drowsy trance profound.”

The Holy Isle.

Beauty of landscape all around. But the feature of Mokoia's life and scenery and atmosphere that has always impressed me most is a certain mystic quality, its air of tapu over all. The stories and histories I heard from this old man, and that—men who were born on the Island and would die and be buried there—show that Mokoia is in very truth a place saturated with the mystery that comes of centuries of human life on one small spot, and with the genius loci of primitive man. Long ago it was named Te Motutapu-a-Tinirau, after a South Sea sacred island famed in tradition. It is still the very home and citadel of tapu.

“… where the raptured eye hurries from joy to joy.”—Thomson.
The West End of Lake Rotoiti, North Island New Zealand.

So lovely a place should not be so deserted, but I hope it will never pass out of Maori hands.

Paepaerau village could be made a home of the ancient race typically and distinctively Maori, preserving all the ancient forms of architecture and art-craftmanship and cultivation, with canoes on the beach as when I first saw it. So preserved, it would be the most attractive thing in Lakeland, a retreat to which all the pakeha's sordid and blatant modernity would not be admitted. It is a natural sanctuary. The stone images of the old gods are preserved there still—one is on view to the pakeha, the others are buried. That ancient atua Matua-tonga, the mauri or talisman of the kumara gardens, symbolises the aura of sanctity which permeates the sland. The Motu-tapu-a-Tinirau with its Maori twilight story should be as classic a place to us as ever Mount Olympus was in the golden age of Greece.

New Zealand Railways Road Motor Services
(Rly. Publicity photos.)
Portion of the Department's fleet of buses in the Wellington-Hutt suburban service. This service carried 2,671,511 passengers during the year ended 31st March, 1931.