My father-in-law was born in Manchester. After the second world war he came to New Zealand and swore he would never go home. "Not bloody going back there," he always said. From working class northern England to the North Island, and then — after he'd enticed my mother-in-law out from Manchester — they bought a car and drove north of Auckland, to what we call the Far North.
They drove into unknown territory, she with her vague impractical fear of going anywhere, of all logistics, and he seemingly fearless, ready for any new experience. She held the map, unable to understand what it meant. On a whim, he turned off State Highway 10, on to the wild stretch of the Karikari peninsula. The peninsula road was only a dirt track back then. Here the land is dry and sandy, the sky a great blue bowl over the low hills, the scrub petering out into white sand beaches fringed with pohutukawa and shining flax. They ended up in a tiny settlement called Whatuwhiwhi.
Arriving late, they came to the end of a spit of land. The little old car, in the twilight. The sun setting over the enormous bay, currents moving across the surface, the gannets diving into the water like bombs. I can hear the exchange. She: "George, there's no more road." He: "Well, I'm not bloody going back." A Maori couple emerged from a house. George asked if they could camp on the land. The Maori couple were the Rupaperas, Roma and Pawhau. Years later, Roma told me, "George, he was so handsome. That blond hair . . ."
"Camp as long as you like," the Rupaperas said, and a lifelong connection was formed.
The Rupapera family still lives at Whatuwhiwhi, in a series of tiny wooden houses on this piece of beautiful coastline, at the edge of the vast, moving stretch of Doubtless Bay. They and my in-laws are still close friends, and this is where I go every year with my family, to stay in the bach (holiday house) my father-in-law built, on a hillside overlooking the bay. Across the water, in the far distance, you can see the curve of the opposite coast, and at night the line of lights at Mangonui. During the day, the sky changes and changes, every shade of blue, silver, grey. Stingrays glide along the shoreline, and sometimes dolphins cruise near the beaches. The children swim out to hear their strange whistles and watch them frolic (this despite a warning from a local researcher: be careful, far from curing your ills and all that new age stuff, dolphins play rough; they might just as easily pin you to the bottom and whistle jeeringly while you drown).
Decades after his first trip to the place, when George died in Auckland, the Rupaperas came down in convoy and announced they were "taking George home". They gave him a tangi (Maori funeral) at the Whatuwhiwhi marae. He lay in state, wearing flax blankets. They buried him in their hilltop graveyard, in the Rupapera line. This was a great honour. As a rule, pãkehã (white New Zealanders) are not given a place on that hill.
The Karikari peninsula, on the western side of Doubtless Bay, reaches out into the Pacific Ocean. In 1769 James Cook sailed past the entrance to the area and noted briskly, "doubtless a bay". At the same time, the French ship of Jean François Marie de Surville was anchored in the bay, and each ship was unaware of the other. The peninsula has about 70km of coastline, and lots of beaches, all beautiful and usually pretty empty. The road in has been tar sealed now, making it much more accessible, but it's still a wild, remote area, full of hidden bays and vast stretches of empty countryside, a place where barrenness turns suddenly into beauty. There is that particular literally ozone-less clarity of the New Zealand light. At night the stars are extraordinary; the children lie on the grass and count satellites moving busily through the points of light. There is strong colour, a sense of being close to and sometimes lashed by the elements: powerful sun, sudden brief rain, striking changes of the light. One day, crossing from one beach to another, I passed from burning sunshine into a premature afternoon, in which the sky was a deep, weird purple. The air became hot and seemed to pack oppressively down; there was rain, thunder, lightning, the full hysterics of a storm — and 20 minutes later, bright sunshine again.
About 10 years ago an American (referred to hereabouts as "The American") arrived in the area and set about turning 3,000 acres of land around Whatuwhiwhi into vineyards. He built Carrington Farms, which includes the Karikari Estate vineyard, a golf course and a luxury lodge. This development hasn't diminished the wild feeling of the place, nor has it much affected the life of the inhabitants, beyond turning some of the local Maori into apprentice vintners. The Karikari Winery is built on a hill, with a view out to the white sands of Puheke. It serves lunch, and holds wine-tasting sessions. The locals can't afford any of this luxury, and most stick to Whatuwhiwhi itself, which has a petrol station and shop, and a backpackers' hostel called The Rusty Anchor, which offers horse riding, kayak and scuba hire, and so on. There is a cafe and a takeaway bar. The settlement has no motels, but there's a camping ground, Whatuwhiwhi Holiday Park, which has a few apartments for rent. And you can rent "bach" beach shacks.
It's possible to hole up for weeks in George's old bach in January, only emerging off the peninsula to drive to Kaitaia, about half an hour away, for supplies. There are the local swimming beaches, Patea and Perehipe, and the rocks below the bach for fishing. Sometimes a Rupapera comes calling, bringing shellfish as a present; sometimes the man from next door gets off his boat with a big snapper for us, which his son delivers in a plastic bag. There is always the smell of cypress and gum trees. The scrubland gets tinder dry. One year the headland caught fire and had to be doused by helicopters with monsoon buckets; we watched, worrying, making plans to run down to the sea if the fire got too close.
Some days we take trips, driving around the enormous rim of Doubtless Bay. On the opposite side from Whatuwhiwhi are Cable Bay (with a shop with a large plastic ice cream impaled in its roof like a crashed rocket), Coopers Beach, and then Mangonui, which was once a whaling and trading port, and is now a twee little town with a wharf, restaurants and shops, and the Mangonui Fish Shop, where you can sit looking over the harbour, listen to terrible country and western songs and eat fish and chips.
At Patea beach, next to Whatuwhiwhi, I first encountered Roma and Pawhau's son, Bradley Rupapera. He emerged from the bush, where he'd been kipping under a tree. As boys, my husband and Bradley fished, hunted crabs and rode wild horses round the peninsula. Bradley spent a lot of time sleeping outdoors (large family, minimal dwellings). One summer we arrived at the beach to find a crowd. There were relatives staying, and Bradley had been allocated a mattress under a tree above the beach. He'd woken at dawn to see a beached marlin struggling in the shallows. He'd leapt out of bed, fought to catch it, and dragged it on to the sand. It was 6ft long. They were cutting it up. The old people were sitting in chairs; Roma, the matriarch, magnificent in her leopard-skin hat, was directing operations. The cousins had run off to get soy sauce. "For sushi," they said. The sea provides a lot of local food. On the outgoing tide the kids climb down the bush track to the rocks below the bach to catch snapper. The locals use scuba gear to dive for scallops.
Sometimes we drive along the road past Carrington Farms to Matai Bay. Matai Bay is actually two symmetrical, crescent-shaped bays side by side, divided by a thin spit of land. It takes a good half hour to walk to the end of one bay. One year we followed a school of dolphins around the crescent, another year we found an octopus in a rock pool. Here there are giant, smooth grey stones as big as cars, strewn about on the sand. The land belongs to local Maori. There are just a few houses, small and flimsy and mounted on makeshift blocks that look like wheels, as if the owners could let off their brakes and trundle them to a different spot. There is a camping ground at Matai Bay, but no other facilities beyond lavatories and bins. In the summer the pohutukawa trees are full of red flowers and the light shines hurtingly bright on the flax. The sea changes; sometimes there are waves enough for body surfing, at other times it's calm and still. In wet weather it's all silence and salty air, space and distance, the rain like metal curtains over the sea.
Possibly the favourite trip is to Puheke Reserve. The unsealed road can be rough in summer before it's been graded, a juddering, sliding ride. It winds through scrubland and swamps, leading to Mt Puheke, and the long, white Puheke beach. After a serious scrub fire, a few years ago, Mt Puheke was black (it burned for a day and a night, blazing on the horizon, the flames like mad hair); now it is green again.
Puheke is a surf beach, stretching about three miles along the coast. If you walk away from the swimmers, there's nothing ahead of you but the great sweep of the coast, the white sand, and the dunes. At the far end of Puheke, the bend of the coast and the distance hide all evidence of other humans. There is a hillside covered in flax and cabbage trees, and the sea is dark blue, washing against the rocks. In summer, on a hot, clear day, there's a kind of animal satisfaction in walking the length of Puheke beach. There is the wind and sun, the roar of the surf, the effort of walking in the heat and finally, at the end, calm in the shelter of the rocks. Everything registering in ear and eye and body; no need for anything else — no other meaning outside this.
• Charlotte Grimshaw's short story collection, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International short story prize. Her new book, Singularity, will be published by Cape next June.
Way to go
Getting there
Air New Zealand (0800 028 4149, airnewzealand.co.uk) flies Heathrow-Auckland from £750 rtn inc taxes if booked before October 31.
Where to stay
The Rusty Anchor (rustyanchor.co.nz) double NZ$95 pn, camping NZ$15pp pn. Whatuwhiwhi Holiday Park (whatuwhiwhitop10.co.nz), 2-berth units from NZ$60 pn. Rent a bach from HolidayHouses.co.nz, bookabach.co.nz or bluecastle.co.nz.
Further information
Tourism New Zealand (0906 601 3601, newzealand.com).
Country code: 0064.
Flight time: London-Auckland: 26hrs.
Time difference: +13hrs.
£1 = 2.71 New Zealand dollars.
