About 5 hours in, New Zealand delivers rain.  Endless, unstinting rain.  24hrs later the news is full of flash floods, landslips and evacuations in the places I’ve driven through.  Yikes ! 

My quest for fresh fish & chips (‘fush & chups’ as they say here) in Tauranga starts with a few spots on the windscreen.  Knife and fork in hand finds me soaked to the skin, dripping on the carpet in the local watersports club.  Odd place.  As it turns out, an inspired choice.  Superb value, great service, great atmosphere, great food, great view.  Oh, scrub that last one, you can’t see the end of the jetty outside the window.  A racing yacht looms out of the deluge, tacks and heads off again into the murk.  To where, who knows.  A red channel marker blinks in the greyness.

Day 2 starts as day 1 ends with lashing rain and wind.  The bathroom is awash and I have to bail out my wash bag.  Grrr.  I hit the road early.  All ideas of a brisk morning walk up Mount Maunganui* to admire the views are futile.  East it is.  Past 20ft high hedges sheltering crops of kiwi fruit and avocados, fields of corn and, amusingly, a flock of black sheep.  I assume they are the ‘All Blacks’.  I drive through Te Puke.  I resist the urge to take a photo of the Te Puke Diner.  I am a grown up, after all.

The Pacific Coast Highway must be great on a sunny day.  To my right a lush, green hillside of trees and pampas.  To my left a single railway track, sand dunes and a pale sea, lacking a horizon.  It’s all rain and spray.  I press on, oddly not tempted to stop and wander along yet another beach.  (I will never tire of good beaches.  Ever.)  Whakatane looms closer, my stop for the night.  Incidentally I’m glad a Kiwi acquaintance has forewarned me about pronouncing the Maori ‘wh’ as ‘f’’.  (Schoolboy humour is well catered for) I check in at 11am and head out to see what I can do in ‘the sunniest place in New Zealand’.  The monsoon rages on.

At the i-site (information centre) in town a patient lady gives out rainy day information for the nth time.  No point heading out to White Island**, the active volcano, no point walking for 3 hours in the rain to take in the spectacular, and invisible, scenery, no point hiring a paddleboard or kayak for the day (it’s 13° right now).  But there is a Maori ‘marae’ (meeting house) around the corner which may be worth a look, although by protocol, you have to be invited in.  Oh well, it’s only rain.

I reach the marae to find the visitor centre is shut, but a tour is just starting outside.  I wait politely in the rain and am rewarded by an invite to join the tour (pay later!).  We are now a group of 5.  The conch is blown and the formalities begin. 

We are ushered inside and take our seats.  Formal Maori address over, our host reverts to English and we take time to examine the inside of the building, rescued after 136 years of being moved around the world.  In London back in 1924, now it’s been carefully reconstructed and restored here.

An evocative light show tells the story of the Polynesian settlers who came to this place and established Whakatane as a Maori settlement back in the 1300s.  The carvings of significant ancestors are all original.  We lay hands on them all to get to know them.

After the education we are taken to a table in the adjacent swanky new dining hall where we have ‘afternoon tea’.  I kid you not.  Herbal tea, chocolate and sweet potato brownies and warm, fluffy dough balls with butter and jam.  Baked fresh for us.  My companions are Dutch and American.  We tuck in and share stories.  So glad I walked this way.

Back in the car I drive to see the key sacred Maori sites in town.  At the river entrance a beautiful statue of a brave Maori woman who saved her fellows at sea stands strong, poised on tiptoe atop a rock, head held proudly high.  Today is International Women’s Day.  This could not be more appropriate.  Despite the rain, I feel uplifted.

*http://www.bayofplentynz.com/discover/mt-maunganui

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whakaari_/_White_Island