Kerikeri and Waitangi Treaty Grounds

Kawakawa

Just one week after messing around at the All Blacks Experience, we were off again – this time up north towards Kerikeri.

On the way to Kerikeri, just off Highway One (think more A33 than M1), the lovely town of Kawakawa offers a scenic break and the chance to explore more of Hundertwasser’s architecture. The Hundertwasser Museum is in the centre of Whangarei, which is well worth a visit, but Kawakawa has created a more practical implementation of Hundertwasser’s architectural principles: toilets.

Hundertwasser’s design ideas revolve around avoiding straight lines, integrating nature with architecture (he was way ahead of his time), and freedom of expression. Whoever built the town’s toilets followed his guidance like a disciple. The floors are rolling, the columns curved, and there’s creative use of bottles as window lights so that even the most clear-sighted of voyeurs would have no chance of grabbing a peek,

Further into town is the Bay of Islands vintage railway – the oldest passenger railway in New Zealand. Most weekends, you can buy a ticket to ride the train for a 90-minute round trip to breathe in the steam and take in the scenery. Unfortunately, we arrived on Wednesday. But at least the cafe was open.

Kerikeri

We stayed at a lovely Airbnb in Kerikeri. It was small but, as the cliche demands, perfectly formed. We didn’t see much of Kerikeri apart from a restaurant in the evening and a waterfall and river during the day, but it was lovely.

Waitangi Treaty Grounds

We didn’t spend more time in Kerikeri because we wanted to return to the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, which we briefly visited the day before. This is a must-visit place for anyone visiting New Zealand and should be compulsory for all Brits for a day or two of cultural appreciation and self-flagellation for our ancestors’ actions. Being lost in translation is the flimsiest of excuses for any misunderstanding during negotiations.

Once that treaty was signed, the boilerplate colonial administrative process was rolled out, and that was that. It is fascinating and cringeworthy at the same time.

The people working at Waitangi are wonderful. There is no animosity; they are lovely people who appear to regard the events as a genuine misunderstanding that is improving as time passes. Well, I certainly hope so.

Towards the end of the tour, a performance by the Maori people attempts to give a feel of what it was like when the treaty was signed. It did give the impression that the Maori language was being extinguished during the colonial period. But when I asked one of the performers later, that wasn’t the case—there wasn’t any prohibition on the native language, and nothing was lost.

So, on that cheery note, we will leave it there. It was time to get back to Whangarei to sort things out before our next trip to the sulphurous town of Rotorua.