Karamea, New Zealand

90 minutes from Nowhere

I remember watching a younger version of Michael Palin shlepping down the Nile on a shabby looking riverboat for the BBC a decade or so ago. He said with an authority he had unquestionably earnt that this place he was travelling through had something inexplicable, something special for which words escaped even his most expressive of minds. Karamea might be the first of these such places I’ve had the pleasure of visiting.

As if added to the map of New Zealand as an unfortunate afterthought, a stray blob of ink falling from a quickly withdrawing fountain pen, Karamea is - certainly in geographic terms - the end of the road. And from the small and wholly uninspiring town of Westport, one-hundred kilometres south of Karamea on the northern half of the western shoulder of the south island of New Zealand, one finds oneself asking if this probably tedious drive can really offer as a destination anything of note at all. Through Granity, Little Whanganui and the Bluff, the wild west coast presents itself in all of its raw and still untamed excellence. Brown rivers spill out onto a perpetually fearsome Tasman Sea, and the coastal road lays thick with mud and falling debris from the latest in a millennia of violent storms. Dairy cattle and Tamarillo orchards sit sandwiched between hillside and ocean. Somehow there always remains just enough room for the road to twist past the next homestead and on towards the end of the road, to Karamea.

There is a natural poetry about this part of New Zealand, a vocabulary which lends itself to that image of travel which brings so many people to this country in the first place. A glimpse of Mount Stormy, a hike through the old gold mine plots of the Fenian Trail, an afternoon among the Nikau Palms at Scott’s Beach on the Heaphy track via Kohaihai. All this for a town of just 650 people, whose school this year has a graduating class of just one student, whose epicentre is a single grocery store and the nation’s most expensive and glumly-staffed petrol station. Karamea has an embarrassment of riches which for the most part, it has inexplicably sought to, and succeeded in, keeping under wraps.

I spent my time in this special little place as a WWOOFer, a Willing Worker on an Organic Farm, though it ought to be said that my willingness varied, and I spent very little time farming. I lived and worked in a backpackers hostel called Rongo, the focal point of a larger project seeking to create an artistic retreat of some sort, in addition to a more tangible aim of becoming self-sufficient with the help of the very latest in agricultural theory. Rongo (‘peace’ in Maori) is not the sort of place a cynical, capitalism-loving twenty-something Englishman ever envisages ending up. The exterior walls are painted in the colours of the rainbow, a steady stream of hippies and layabouts pass through or stay for a while. But it has to be said that once I overcame my initial reservations regarding my new home, it became far less difficult than I had imagined. People, it turns out - regardless of their disdain for the global economy, or affordable air travel, or governmental policies on the legal status of various intoxicants - are all pretty much the same. Rongo is staffed entirely by volunteers like me, some of whom stay for a fortnight, some who stay for longer. Victoria & I stayed for almost three months. Our time at Rongo was spent making sure the hostel (an old maternity hospital) was kept clean, warm and comfortable for paying guests and seeking to improve the place in any way we saw fit. I embarked on creating a website for the community radio station which is operated from the shed in the garden, Victoria turned her artistic eye to various projects including but not limited to spice racks, signage and murals.

With the coming and going of guests and WWOOFers, there were never two weeks alike at Rongo. We’d have stern groups of very serious trampers, followed by troupes of epicurean Europeans keen to find some form of spiritual retreat. It was difficult maintaining a level of involvement and attention towards these strikingly different groups. We would have periods of camaraderie and community followed immediately with disquiet and a strained peace, with occasional spells of mutual apathy and non-remarkableness. When you paint a rainbow around a building you are going to attract a certain type of person, and I found it difficult to find commonality with people who spoke sincerely about ‘energy fault-lines’ and moon-phases and government-led conspiracies. In the same way, those people who came to Rongo and refused steadfastly to let down their guard and involve themselves in the community of the moment were equally impenetrable. It was the moderate middlers with whom I shared my most enjoyable moments at Rongo, people who may or may not have dabbled with drugs or drink, who might or might not have been ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’, but who over-ridingly were just nice, ordinary folk; the people who took themselves seriously enough to still resemble inhabitants of the real-world despite their being anywhere but.

In this place, watching a never-ending trickle of people from all countries pass through, I found myself repeatedly commenting on how accurate those oft-dismissed national stereotypes turn out to be. Our Brazilian guests were effusive and generous and extroverted. Our German visitors were for the most part dry and demanding. The French were reluctant participants in manual labour, and the English passed barely an hour without conversing on the weather, drinking tea, or both. We are encouraged to dismiss our ill-concieved misconceptions regarding the foreign masses, but I can report that in a large majority of cases, the ill-concieved and well-concieved are often the same.

Rongo has come to represent in Karamea an era of change which is finding significant opposition among the conservative old-Karameans who see its bright walls, radio antenna and radical ideals as a threat to this frontier community of dairy farmers. As such, an uneasy impasse seems to have developed between the old guard and these young upstarts from out of town. Preposterous given that both sides are pulling in the same direction, albeit with varying levels of commitment. Were Karamea an hour from Auckland or Wellington, it would be the weekend hangout of the rich, a regular stop on all of the tour coach trips. It would have a McDonald’s, a Domino’s Pizza, a supermarket, two supermarkets, a better library and easier road access. But all of that would come in sacrifice of what Karamea is all about: It’s a destination, a place you GO to, not pass through. And when you go, you see the arches, and walk the Heaphy, and spend a night sitting on the beach watching the unimpeded sun fall over the Tasman pulling down with it a curtain decorated with the most incredible night-sky. A night sky so incredible as to relegate all previous night skies to mere footnotes in the wake of this most spectacular of sights. For every star that shines in the skies of Queenstown and Christchuch, a hundred shine down upon the lucky 650 people who get to call Karamea home, and the few souls who braved the winding coastal road from Westport to stay at Rongo Backpackers.