Her speech was interrupted by a neighbour who dropped in for a cup of green tea. ‘This is Ben,’ Annie said. ‘He built the loo.’ I shook hands with a merry Dutchman. Ben Beemsterboer asked if I would like to look at his loo. We walked around the back of the section. He’d built it with bricks. I was carrying a glass of Annie’s delicious organic apple and grapefruit juice. I took a long drink and looked at Ben. He said, ‘Do you get it? It’s a brick shithouse.’
It was time to leave. The closest village was Kaiaua, which had a fish and chip shop and a pub. In the early 1990s a nutcase shot and killed the publican. A man at the door said, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ He was shot and killed too. The nutcase was murdered a year later in Pāremoremo Prison.
This story was told by Jack Hema in his motorhome called ON THE MOOVE. ‘Come on in,’ he said. ON THE MOOVE was parked alongside 27 other motorhomes on a reserve known as Ray’s Rest. The collection looked like a travelling circus. Keith Woodley once counted 93 motorhomes during a Queen’s Birthday Weekend, a record. The parking fee: nothing.
Who were these migrant waders? With their fold-up dining tables, their awnings, their solar panels, their Freeview TV boxes, pot plants and terrible novels, they represented middle New Zealand on the fringes, fantastically social, fanatically house-proud, wading in leisure.
They were also public enemies. The line-up of motorhomes was my first encounter with the species who would become known as freedom campers. Their fame and notoriety increased during my travels. They cropped up everywhere, attracting headlines and statistics. Motorhome users doubled in the past decade to 110,000 international visitors and 40,000 New Zealanders, but they said they weren’t the same as freedom campers. The issue was shit, and how it was stored. Motorhome users shat in their own nest. Freedom campers drove vans and shat on the side of the road. Motorhome owners, said the president of the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association, were responsible Kiwis. Freedom campers ‘should be shot’. Being burnt alive was another option: in Nelson a man tried to set a campervan on fire while a couple slept inside it.
Motorhome owners didn’t want to be lumped in with freedom campers. They just wanted to be lumped in with each other, as closely as possible, going by the way they parked up at Ray’s Rest. I stepped inside ON THE MOOVE and talked to Jack Hema. He said he’d been on the road for two years. ‘Was in Little Waihī recently. You been there? Pipis there. Flounders there. Good place.’ His opinion of Kaiaua: ‘Good. Heaps of snapper.’ His plans for the following year? ‘I’ve done the whole of the South Island but I didn’t see everything so I’m going again. Westport. It’s good, that Westport.’ I expected him to mention fish. He said, ‘There’re wekas there. You seen ’em? Awesome bird.’
Manu Taitoko and Bev Ross said, ‘Come on in.’ They were in their motorhome, Dolph Inn. Also, they were in love. They had met at Paeroa police station – Bev worked in the watch-house, Manu served as an officer for 24 years. They quit, sold up, and had been on the road for four years.
Manu recalled the day Dolph Inn came into their lives. ‘It was at a motorhome sale. We just went to have a nosy – nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon. By the time we came home we knew exactly what we were going to be doing.’
‘It was weird,’ Bev said. The moment I hopped on I thought: This feels like home. It wasn’t the fanciest bus, but… yeah. Strange, eh.’
Manu went outside to check on his kitset gazebo. He had lashed it down with big hulking ropes; it looked as if it would survive a tsunami. He looked along the line of other motorhomes and said, ‘We’ll take a chair and walk along a bit later. You always find someone to have a drink with. Friendly people everywhere.’
Percy and Dale Edwards were in Rusty Snail. ‘Come on in,’ they said. They were from Whanganui and had worked in the catering business. They quit, sold up, and had been on the road for twelve months. ‘Best decision we ever made,’ Dale said. She writes updates of their travels on a group email called The Rusty Report. The report is relentlessly enthusiastic.
Sitting in the front of Rusty Snail, Percy and Dale laughed and talked about the jobs they’d had in the past year – planting grapes, staffing fairground stalls at the A & P show in Gisborne, working the night shift at the freezing works in Paeroa, where Dale was on the slaughter floor. ‘I do the offal, the guts. Nothing goes to waste.’ Percy said, ‘My job is to cut out the diseases – pleurisy, things like that.’ Where to next? ‘Whichever way the bus is pointed,’ Percy said. ‘Sometimes we flip a coin: north or south?’
Dale said, ‘So many people, other motorhome owners, have said their only regret is not doing this before.’ Percy said, ‘Yeah, it’s a skins holiday.’ What? ‘Spend the Kids’ Inheritance Now.’
Outside, five white-faced herons poked for food in the mudflats. You could hear skylarks and oystercatchers, and inevitably there was a pair of spur-winged plovers. They were fighting off an Australasian harrier in the air – it was probably circling over a nest. ‘The closest interest I’d had in birds was KFC and muttonbirds,’ Dale said, ‘but since coming to Miranda and seeing the godwits – oh, man. I’m absolutely intrigued. Do you know how far those birds come? It’s amazing.’
A fine sea-spray mist smudged the view of the Coromandel. It felt as though the bright light in the sky and
