Road Trip

Some forty years ago, when I was a university student studying for my BA degree, a group of us - me, my brother and his girlfriend, and several of our friends - had decided to go up to the North Island during the summer holidays to stay at a beach house at Ahipara that belonged the parents of one of them. Ahipara is a tiny beach settlement in Northland, at the lower end of the erroneously named Ninety Mile Beach (I think it's around 65 miles, but it's definitely less than 90), so it promised to be a relaxing and fun holiday. Or so I thought.

I arranged to hitchhike to Auckland with a friend of my brother's. This was, of course, back in the days when it was still safe to hitchhike - sadly, those days are long gone. Roger was a very pleasant young man, tall and thin with floppy blond hair, but definitely a little on the strange side. He was a mathematics wizard who whiled away his time on the road by performing complicated mathematics with the numbers on car registration plates. It was he who told me that if you punch the button at a pedestrian crossing five times, the light will change more quickly in your favour. I have no idea whether this is true, but to this day, I find myself doing it. Another of Roger's gifts, I discovered, was the ability to walk for hours on a single Crunchy bar. My idea of hitchhiking is encapsulated in the advice given to me many years ago by a hairdresser who had hitchhiked through France: you can't walk all the way, so why bother walking any of it. Just sit tight and only get up and walk when you see a car approaching. This makes perfect sense to me, but Roger was clearly made of sterner stuff, and it was all could do to keep up with him.

We took a bus to the Main North Road just beyond the motorway, and, although there was little traffic, it didn't take long before we got out first ride. A man in a Land Rover drove past us, then turned back to pick us up. I suppose we should have taken the warning when he informed us God had told him to return for us, but when you're hitchhiking, any ride is a good ride, so we hopped up beside him, and off we went.

I don't recall that he made any attempt to convert us, but his faith clearly wouldn't allow him to drive very fast, and our hopes of catching the afternoon ferry to Wellington began to recede. When he stopped to take his part in a 24-hour prayer vigil (I imagined a sort of religious relay), leaving us to entertain ourselves with a bag of peppermints and some religious tracts, Roger and I seriously considered absconding to try our luck elsewhere. But the traffic was not exactly heavy, so we decided that a religious zealot in the hand was probably worth two other drivers possibly somewhere in the distance.

We finally rolled into Picton in the early evening, too late, as we'd feared, for the ferry. Being students, neither of was exactly flush with spare cash, so we decided the Youth Hostel would be our best bet. Only there wasn't one. This we discovered when we enquired at the local police station. But, we were told, the new cell block had recently been completed, so we were welcome to spend the night in the old one. Well, beggars can't be choosers, so there we were, an hour or so later, partaking of fish and chips and brandy in a police cell, and reading the graffiti scrawled on the walls - none of which was particularly edifying, much less memorable.

Early next morning, we made our way to the ferry terminal and caught the early ferry to Wellington. Three rather uncomfortable hours later, we were in the capital city. But we didn't hang around to see the sights. We caught a train to Paekakariki (which someone once told me is Maori for: 'Two parrots sitting on a log'), north of the city, and stationed ourselves to attract the attention of any passing traffic. The weather was warm and golden; the sky was the colour of cornflowers - perfect for life on the road. Before long, we had our first ride.

We were set down again just outside the evocatively named town of Bulls, and began to walk along the side of the road beside long grass and white-flowered yarrow. As we walked, the sky began to cloud over, and we wondered if it might be a good idea to get our waterproof jackets out of our backpacks. But in the time it took to have these thoughts, and before we could do anything about them, a sudden cloudburst dumped a swimming pool of water on top of us and soaked us to the skin. A word of warning here: generally speaking, people don't like giving rides to drowned rats.

The rain didn't last long, but the damage had been done. No one stopped to give us a ride. So on we trudged, despite our soaking clothes and sandals (you may detect a smidgeon of Roger's influence here). I could feel blisters beginning to form on my sodden feet. Finally, a man wearing khaki shorts and gumboots - and apparently nothing else - gave us a ride to Taranaki, a small farming town where we were able to change into dry clothes (though not, sadly, dry footwear, at least for me; I hadn't thought to bring a change of shoes) in the toilets at the back of a fish-and-chip shop. Having refuelled on fish and chips and a welcome cup of tea, we set off again. Not even the sight of the near-perfect cone of Mt Taranaki piercing the late-afternoon sky could induce us to linger in the home of the annual gumboot-throwing contest. But the approach of nightfall found us in the middle of nowhere, with visions of having to sleep in a paddock somewhere. I kept thinking of my brother's girlfriend's tale of going to sleep in a wheat field and waking to find a harvester bearing down on her. And, just to round off our day, it was raining again. Eventually, however, someone stopped for us. He was going to Rotorua, which is a bit off the beaten track for Auckland, but we accepted the ride anyway. At least in Rotorua we stood a chance of having a roof over our heads for the night.

Said roof belonged to a small travellers' lodge, where we were able to find a cheap room with two single beds. There, as we breathed in the trademark sulphurous air that pervades Rotorua from its volcanic hot pools and geysers, Roger pulled out a small black box and opened it. It contained a couple of syringes. Not the plastic sort you get today, but the real deal, in glass and metal. Thank God he didn't do anything with them beyond gazing at them lovingly for a while. I heard some months later that he'd been fined for possession of a restricted drug, and, later still, that he'd become a pharmacist. So I suppose one could say he'd already started on his career path.

By the following morning, I had developed massive blisters on the soles of my feet, and my legs had seized up so that I could barely walk. So, while Roger continued on foot, I bowed to the inevitable and took a bus to Auckland and a ferry across Auckland Harbour to the North Shore where I was to meet up with my brother and his friends. As it happened, they were waiting for the ferry too, so we all chugged across the harbour together. We gathered at the rather palatial home of the father of a fellow student who was generally known as Aardvark, possibly because he had been born in South Africa. Or possibly not.

His father, a lawyer, was away hiking around Australia. The son seemed to have inherited his father's eccentricity. He once stood for president of the student council on the platform of declaring himself Emperor for life if elected. He wasn't joking. And his response to the forming of a local branch of the Procrastination Society - dedicated to doing nothing, preferably late - was to found the Anti-Procrastination Society, which was, naturally, dedicated to doing anything and everything, as soon as possible. Under its auspices, wild oats (for the sowing of) were distributed amongst the student population, along with supposed birth-control pills (a new and wondrous invention at the time, and not too readily available). Inspired by these splendidly gratuitous acts, and by the sight on television of Chinese mass-gymnastic displays, I organised a Mass Poetry Reading. We gathered in the upstairs common room of the Student Union building and read The Charge of the Light Brigade (chosen mainly for its galloping rhythm) over and over again until we attained catharsis. Well, actually, until we got sick of it, at which point we read it backwards. When we got sick of that, we took all the spare copies and handed them out to unsuspecting passers by ("Here you are, sir, have a bit of culture.' 'Oh, ah, thanks.'), finishing up at the local student watering hole shortly before closing time.

By the time we arrived at Ahipara, I literally had blisters on my blisters, and was reduced to a sort of crouched hobble reminiscent of a Neanderthal. Ahipara, however, was beautiful. There were ginger flowers growing along the beach, and the beach itself, stretching away to apparent infinity, provided me with my first glimpse of white sand. And there were local Maori riding horses on the beach, bareback with just a piece of rope as combination bit and bridle. The house we were staying in was a rundown, blue weatherboard affair with faded wood panelling, old-fashioned pictures in wooden frames, and colonies of ants in the fridge. The room I slept in contained a massive, ornate kauri dressing table that resembled nothing so much as a shrine, and an elderly - though still functional - radiogram.

This was the marvellous Sixties, and we were all into magic and mysticism - for some of us, quite literally. My brother and his wife belonged to a kabbalistic society that claimed to be a successor to the Order of the Golden Dawn, a late 19th - early 20th century group that practiced kabbalistic magic and contained such luminaries as the Irish poet W B Yeats and the self-styled 'Great Beast' Aleister Crowley, dubbed by newspapers of the time as 'the wickedest man in the world', a sobriquet he did his utmost to live up to. Whether it was this influence I don't know, but I recall lying in bed one night and suddenly feeling as though I were leaving my body. I was so terrified I had to get up and turn on the radio. Thank goodness it was actually working!

Our holiday over, we all made our way back to Aardvark's father's house in Auckland for a proper shower and some decent food before starting on the trek home. I still didn't feel up to hitchhiking, so I decided to take the night train down to Wellington, where I could catch the inter-island ferry.

Which is how I came to be in a train carriage filled with a drunken rugby team returning from a match somewhere and an entire class of Jewish children on their way to a school-holiday camp. To make matters worse, I was seated next to a middle-aged man who kept putting his arm round me every time I tried to compose myself for sleep. (These days, he would have been given very short shrift indeed, but I was in my twenties then, and shy. Mind you, these days I don't suppose he would have dared to try it on.) And, as if all that weren't enough, my period had started, so I was in pain, and desperately in need of 'freshening up'. Eventually, to my enormous relief, a conductor came and moved my would-be amorous companion. It seems he was sitting in the wrong seat. (I could have told him that!), and I finally managed to make my way past the sozzled footballers and rambunctious Jewish kids to the 'rest room'. After that, I was more or less able to settle down for the rest of the journey, though I don't recall getting a great deal of sleep.

A day later, after an uneventful ferry trip, I arrived in Picton and boarded the bus to Christchurch. I was feeling a bit peckish, so I took a packet of biscuits from my bag and opened them. A plaintive voice next to me said, in a strong English-midlands accent: 'Can I have one of those, please? I haven't eaten for three days.' It belonged to a skinny, slightly scruffy young man who, I found out, came from Birmingham. Naturally, I was happy to share my biscuits, and we spent a companionable journey chatting and munching. It turned out he worked on the rubbish trucks in Christchurch; I saw him several times, and he always gave me a wave and a cheerful grin.

Looking back on that trip, I'm amazed at how adventurous I was - how adventurous we all were - to hitchhike the best part of the length of New Zealand with very little money and even less preparation. I didn't even have the price of the train fare from Auckland to Wellington, and had to sign an IOU for the conductor (imagine trying that on today!). No sensible person these days would embark on such a trip - for one thing, it wouldn't be safe. There's no doubt most of us are better off in so many ways than we were then, but I can't help thinking we've lost something very precious along the way. All of us, back then in the sixties, had a kind of innocence that doesn't seem to linger beyond puberty nowadays. Perhaps it's just that I'm just getting old, but, thinking back on that trip, for all its discomfort and awkwardness I can't help but sigh: 'Aah... those were the days!'