Claire and Eleanor and Daddy spent the morning at the beach while Laura worked.
After reaching the end of the North Island, we stayed another day near Kaitaia as I had meetings with the local iwi, Te Rarawa, and with one of New Zealand’s leading social enterprises, Community Business and Environment Center (CBEC) http://www.cbec.co.nz/. CBEC is an amazing organization that, over the last 20 years, has become one of the biggest employers in an economically depressed area, with waste reduction and other great environmental projects. One of its leaders, Cliff Colquhoun, is one of the most energetic and dynamic people I’ve met, and he’s become a strong ally in my work.
CBEC has a number of joint ventures with Māori. Cliff introduced me to the leadership of Te Rarawa http://terarawa.co.nz/. Kevin Robinson, Chief Executive of its Runanga (the tribe’s organizational structure) and I talked about how social lending could dovetail nicely with a recent iwi initiative: they’ve created a beekeeping/honey program at the local community college. Kevin saw the potential for graduates to become microloan borrowers in order to get their new honey businesses up and running. At the other end of the spectrum, we spoke about a multi-iwi initiative to increase internet access in the rural North which needs millions of dollars of investment. I also met with their staff person, Rongo Bentson, who’s helping develop a variation on a co-housing community in this remote part of New Zealand.
The next day we started our return south. We spent the night at a very nice beachfront holiday park in Pakiri near New Zealand’s original marine reserve, Goat Island. It would be a great place to spend a few days hanging out by the beautiful sandy beach. If, however, your goal is Goat Island, staying at Pakiri makes for a longer, quite harrowing drive from Pakiri to Leigh, where the marine reserve is located. Goat Island has a holiday park itself which would have been ideal had they had space, but alas they didn’t.
What makes Goat Island so special, is that the fish and sponges have had 30 or so years to feel unafraid of human threats and so they are abundant and completely unfazed by human interaction, plus, it’s very shallow, so snorkeling shows it all. A local conservation group http://www.seafriends.org.nz/index.htm rents wetsuits and snorkeling equipment, serves delicious breakfasts, and has an interesting little visitor center about the reserve and its contents. One can also kayak and take a boat ride around the reserve – and both the kayaks and the boat have glass bottoms.
Later that day we dropped John off at the airport in Auckland as he had to return to work. Claire, Eleanor and I carried on with our holiday and I learned that Claire is a superb map-reader and navigator. With Claire beside me and Eleanor living it up in the luxury of the entire back half of the car, we motored on to Rotorua, in the heart of New Zealand’s volcano zone. We stayed at Cozy Cottage International Holiday Park (www.cosycottage.co.nz/). The accommodations were clean and comfortable, although not particularly flash (as they’d say in New Zealand), but we loved it as it’s well situated in Rotorua, is right on the main lake and atop some great geothermal activity: natural hot baths at varying temperatures and a thermal river running right into the lake beach.
We spent a full day doing touristy things. We loved the Rotorua Museum which is in a Victorian era hot baths resort and has two excellent films: one on the geothermal nature of the area which the girls insisted we see twice (the tiny theater shakes when the volcano erupts) and then a very good film about Māori soldiers who fought in the WWII, plus very good exhibits.
We drove about 40 minutes to Wai-0-Tapu, where there’s a geyser and some beautiful multicolored pools and bubbling mud puddles.
We also visited the Buried Village, sort of a Kiwi Pompeii on a smaller scale. The Māori tour guide was very good and it was interesting to see how the Māori houses with the slanted roofs and smaller sizes fared much better than the flat-roofed Pakeha buildings under the weight of the falling volcanic ash from a major eruption in the 19th century.
We next moved onto the coast, where we stayed near Whakatane on the Bay of Plenty. I had another inspiring visit, this time with Enid Ratahi-Pryor, who leads Ngati Awa Social and Human Services Trust (NASH). Enid took me on a several hour tour of their facilities, explaining their methods, philosophy and outcomes for their iwi members, but also for the local community overall. While it is Māori-led and steeped in Māori values, it serves and employs a significant number of Pakeha. She’s a brilliant social entrepreneur, having collaborated with a retired NZ general to put together an awesome looking ropes course for youth development, but also for income generation (renting it out to other organizations) to help subsidize their operations.
Enid also told how she saved to buy land for the organization then convinced the railroad company to sell her some unused station buildings cheaply with lots of sweat equity has leveraged her $180,000 land investment into a $2+ million complex.
Enid shared how she evaluates the strength of a non-profit organization on the basis of their assets – my kind of gal, on many levels.
As the boat was returning to Whakatane, we saw a small group of people playing with a dolphin. Turns out this dolphin, named “Moko” has been hanging around NZ’s east coast for several years and been in Whakatane for much of that. He likes to play with people, is reputed to have led an almost beached whale back out to sea and brings fish treats to some of his favorite humans – quite amazing. A couple of months after seeing him, he was found dead on a beach. It seemed to have been from disease, not foul play or an accident. It was in the national papers for some time including his Tangi (Māori funeral).
The next day we drove up to Tauranga, stopping for lunch in Te Puke (pronounced Poo-kay) , the kiwi fruit capital of the world. I visited Bay Trust Foundation which is expanding its social lending. I sat in on a couple of meetings with prospective borrowers. It was a treat to take off my policy hat and put back on my loan underwriter hat.
With navigatrix Claire beside me, we drove back to Wellington the next day. We stopped in Taupo, which is at the other end of the volcanic zone that begins at White Island, to break up the drive. In Taupo, we visited a very hokey shrimp farm (to be missed), watched some bungy jumpers and enjoyed a swim in Taupo’s aquatic center – kiwis have excellent swimming pools with great features like slides and tarzan swings. We left Taupo re-energized for the rest of the ride home.
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