Lisa Scott is on a journey of self-discovery.
"It’s a long way to the shop, if you want a sausage roll," sang AC/DC, and I can currently find no finer words to live by.
It is a long way. Especially if that shop is at Cape Reinga. Like a reverse Blondini, I’m taking this car up the country, even if it’s not a Mini, but a 1998 Mazda Capella with a paddleboard inexpertly strapped to the roof and making weird humming noises.
Today, being December 13, I have arrived in Golden Bay on the anniversary of the very day Abel Tasman first clapped eyes on the place. Who knew New Zealand was so pretty? The whole country smells like lupins, sweet and nose-tickling.
Unlike mine, which has so far involved sports cars, hot tubs, wine and kayaking in the national park named after him, Abel’s great New Zealand roady went pear-shaped before he could even engage the handbrake, due to a misunderstanding over the friendliness or otherwise of firing cannons at people (ye olde maritime convention had it discharging your guns meant you were signalling harmlessness, because it took forever to reload them. Local Maori thought otherwise, bad things happened, and Abel skedaddled).
As I write this, I am also trying to put a tent up; never has an erection been so joyless. I would ask someone to help me, but I’m on a journey of self-discovery, and there’s an unwritten rule somewhere that you have to do stuff by yourself. Let’s just hope I’m not suffocated in the night when the tent collapses.
An hour later, the tent is up, but it turns out I’ve forgotten to bring a pillow, and the pump I borrowed doesn’t fit the airbed. It’s going to be a long night.
While we’re talking about me killing being single, by the time this goes to print, I will have managed to drive the Green Hornet on to the Bluebridge ferry (finding Picton in the process, I know it’s around here somewhere) to Wellington all by myself, for the first time, ever. ALL BY MYSELF.
Me, yes me, the kind of woman who can make backing down a driveway a 56-point turn. Someone who has failed her full driver’s licence test twice because roundabouts confuse her and speed limits feel more like suggestions than out-and-out rules.
However, to be fair, there is an equally good chance I will not manage, and we’ve all seen enough movies to know what that would look like: a metallic green station wagon sinking in Cook Strait, the furious rush of bubbles and then nothing but embarrassed silence and the laughter of gulls as the air freshener floats to the surface.
All the things that could go wrong would normally have me in a paroxysm of terror. However, my self-confidence is pumping right now because I paused on my journey at the home of perfect strangers, Lucy Hodgson and Darryl Wilson, who live on the estuary of the Riwaka River, outside Motueka.
Darryl runs Wilsons Abel Tasman and is a seventh-generation member of founding family, the Hadfields. The briny blue-green of Tasman Bay has flowed through their veins ever since Adele Snow married William Hadfield and, with his brother, pioneered farming at Meadowbank homestead in Awaroa in the eye of what is New Zealand’s smallest national park (225sq km).
It was pretty hard going as, unlike Motueka’s fertile soil, the Abel Tasman is 135 million year-old granite and experiences a tidal range of up to 5m, meaning inlets change from wide lagoons to sandy basins twice every day. Adele, no doubt sick of farming rocks and rowing everywhere, managed to convince her husband to move to Nelson where he established a boat-building yard and built her a boarding house to run. Unfortunately, Adele fell for one of the lodgers and moved with him to Palmerston North where he would later shoot her dead in the street in a fit of jealous rage.
Today, Meadowbank hosts visitors to the park for kayaking, walking and overnight stays, something the family has done since 1841. On the other side of the family tree, Darryl’s father "Captain John" Wilson, a house and boat-builder and salty sea dog, was awarded a QSM in 2008 for his role in developing Abel Tasman as an international destination.
Sick when I arrived, Lucy gave me medicine. Hungry, she made me dinner. Tired, she packed me off to bed without expecting conversation, witty or otherwise.
Such hospitality might seem a thing of a bygone era, but I’m starting to think people are amazing, that love and friendship only breeds more of the same. If there can be any morals to be found in a year when my life burnt to the ground they are: be kind to strangers and hold your powder as we journey through this life together.
