Blazing paddles on Whanganui

PADDLING the upper reaches of New Zealand's longest navigable river, Michael Gebicki soaks up its rich Maori culture during a two-day journey in a canoe.

Still waters ...the Whanganui River is a lifeline running through the history of its people. Picture: Michael Gebicki

FOR a paddling trip, it's an odd beginning. Before anything else can happen, Angela must karanga me into the marae, the meeting house and centrepiece of the local Ngati Haua community.

A karanga is a Maori song of introduction.

It tells where I am coming from, and why. Only women can karanga and so Angela sings on my behalf. She stands beside me on the lawn in front of the marae and sings with the drawn-out vowels of the Maori language. Diana, standing opposite and representing the marae, karangas in answer, and I'm free to cross and enter the marae.

Angela and Diana are operations manager and chief guide respectively for New Zealand's Whanganui River Guides. While there are several adventure operators offering guided canoe trips along the river, Whanganui River Guides is the only one that is Maori owned and operated. If you are paddling the Whanganui and you want culture as well as scenery, these are the people to travel with.

The North Island's Whanganui is the longest navigable river in New Zealand, born on the slopes of the volcanoes that lie just south of Lake Taupo and flowing first northwest and then turning almost due south to enter the sea at the city of Wanganui.

It's a river with a long Maori history. Crops grow well on the alluvial soil along its banks, and for several hundred years the river was lined with Maori communities. I'll be paddling the upper reaches of the river, a two-day journey from Taumarunui to Tawata, and over dinner that evening with Angela and Diana, we plot our course for the following day. We'll be travelling in a six-person waka (canoe), and they are both thrilled since this opens all manner of convivial possibilities.

Numbers are strength, and happiness. Misery for them would be paddling alone.

Diana will be guide and navigator, plus Libby, who's married to Diana's brother. There's also Jackie, Angela's mother, and cousin Natasha, just returned from a 17-year stint in Australia, and Charlie, who's got the day off. Charlie is a woman, which sets off a faint twinge of alarm.

"I don't hear any men's names,'' I venture cautiously. Angela and Diana are looking at one another and grinning, saying nothing. "So where are all the men?'' I blurt. They convulse with laughter.

"They are in jail,'' they say. "Or drugs, or just gone.'' Such candour is positively terrifying. I feel as if I am going to be filleted by these women.

The place where we begin our journey is on the outskirts of town, at the confluence of the Whanganui and Ongarue rivers. The Ongarue is quiet and slow, mirroring the poplars on the far side, while the Whanganui is boisterous and mettlesome. Immediately below the boat ramp, the Whanganui is raked into white scars by a rapid. In Maori, this place is Ngahuinga, The Meeting of All. In English it is Cherry Grove.

Diana sticks a silver fern leaf from a ponga into the bow and we dig our paddles into the Ongarue. Just before we enter the Whanganui, we pause at a large rock in the middle of the river where
Diana sings a karanga and we each anoint the rock with water as we glide alongside. Spirituality runs deep in Maori culture. According to its animist creed, certain rocks, trees and the river itself all have a spiritual dimension.

For most of the day, we paddle through sheep pastures that are broken by patches of forest. If you paddle with eyes closed, you can recognise the forest by the sound of birds. The river wafts us along at a steady 5km/h. All we do is paddle through the rapids to maintain steerage.

There are more than 40 rapids in the 27km of river we cover that day. Most are grade one, a few are grade two, yet only once does Diana read it wrong when a fallen tree in the middle of the river catches her attention for too long and we turn sideways to the current and angle close to the bank.

In no time at all, the river has us pinned against a boulder and we are tipping. I turn around and already Diana is out of the waka and in the water, swinging our bow around to face into the current, then keeping us straight by kicking against the rocks as we slide backwards down the rapid.

The river is a constant topic of conversation. Its vigour and colour are mulled and dissected, but most of all it's about what it has become. In its upper reaches, the Whanganui has been dammed and the reduced flow worries these women as would a sick child. To them this is not the Whanganui. This is Awa, the river, and it's alive.

Jackie, paddling in front of me, turns to tell me several times about the river as a healer, as a finder of lost souls. "It's a special place,'' she tells me, "and when they leave the river they lose the thread from their lives. Listen to the river and it shows you how to live.''

In the afternoon we turn into a tiny stream and walk to a waterfall with a deep, dark pool at its feet. Jackie sings a waiata, a Maori song, although she tells me it's tinged with sadness since the stream has been fouled by dairy farms higher up the valley.

Jackie prods us all into song as we paddle, warming us up using the vowels as scales. I tell her I'm flat and she says, "That's no excuse, all Maori men are flat'', but I am needed to balance the women, so we sing long and loud.
 
It's only mid-afternoon when we finish our day's paddling at Ohinepane, at the site of a former Pa, a stockade to which the Maori people would once have retreated in times of trouble. Angela has driven there and set up the barbecue and made a comfy campsite on the grassy terraces overlooking the river.

There is a two-person tent for me with a foam mattress and pillow, which I drag out into the afternoon sunshine to lie on and read, but I barely turn a page before heat and the sound of the river send me to sleep.

Dinner that night is a boil-up - a local favourite, Angela tells me - of pork, potatoes and carrots, all tossed into a pot and boiled together. Simple but satisfying, and there's chocolate pud for dessert.

At the end of the day there's a whanaungatanga, a sharing of our thoughts. Each of us holds the floor in turn. Diana says there was too much talking, and it distracted her from the peace of the river. Whanaungatanga is one of the traditions of Maoridom. It can also be a gripe session.

Teenagers can voice their complaints to parents, wives scold husbands, sons-in-law accuse mothers-in-law ... all free from recrimination.

The next day is quieter. There are long reaches of still water between the rapids. We are down to five paddlers. Instead of Libby, Natasha and Charlie, there's Muki, another guide, and Anne, for whom this is a new experience. The landscape is quieter too, more forested, the sharper hills permitting no farmlands along the bank.

Late in the afternoon we land the waka at a beach of ankle-turning rocks. For all of these women, this is a special place. Tawata is their ancestral home, the place where they once had their kaingas, their houses, among fields that were terraced with sweet potato and yams. Today it's given way to forest, but it's still theirs.

We heave the waka out of the water and trek up the hill along a rough track. Close to the top is a cemetery where Jackie makes me stop at a gate while she calls to the Old Ones to ask permission for me to pass.

It's a neat graveyard, well mown and exuberantly decorated with floral tributes. "That's my mother there,'' she says, pointing to one of the most florid graves of all. She was Angela as well, same as Jackie's daughter.

After some food and drink we sit in a circle and Jackie asks us to whanaungatanga, to share our day. When it comes to her turn she talks about how Angela was lost and found again, that it was the river that brought her home, and how she has now found her place here, among her people.

And Jackie says she is so proud of what Angela has become it makes her heart burst. And she breaks down in sobs, unable to speak another word.

I look over at Angela and she's quietly sobbing, too, and Jackie does nothing to hide her emotion, voice breaking, drenching the earth with tears that will one day flow back to the river and down to the sea.