Part #1- Destination Golden Bay

 TAKAKA

Thursday 18 January 2024

I enjoyed a nice, uneventful flight to Nelson, with the good luck of being seated next to a photographer and children’s author from Chicago, who showed me the proof copy of her fabulous new book. If you sit next to anyone on a plane, an actual writer of some description is usually the best – but not a pretentious one or self-aggrandising one.

Saffy was at the airport to meet me – right on time - so much so, that I had not even collected my luggage. It was straight into the car as we took off to Golden Bay, not stopping anywhere until we got to Takaka.

It was drizzling, cloudy and warm from the moment we left the airport as we began our long drive down memory lane, especially once we were on State Highway 60. Saffy took a wrong turn at a roundabout that, “wasn’t there last time we were in Nelson.” In fact there were a whole lot of new roads and traffic lanes, plus many roundabouts in Nelson also infinitely more houses, factories, malls etc.

Everywhere had grown, which made me wonder how well this would bode for Takaka. Would we find shiny, rumbling Euro cars outside of glittering restaurants full of spangly, jewellery dangling rich immigrants from Auckland and nearby cities who had turned Takaka into their own little Ponsonby, albeit, a very remote Ponsonby. Fortunately, my fears were groundless.

We drove along what I remembered to be the Coastal highway to Takaka, via Motueka, which snaked through Tasman and skirted the Tasman/ Mariri Inlet. Once upon a time this highway had looped through Mapua and Ruby Bay but now it completely bypassed the village and beach of my former home from the 1980’s. It saddened me that I would miss seeing my beloved village and the road that I had lived on when we had barely been in the region for an  hour. I had to remind myself that a lot can change over 35 years, as I was already discovering. And none more so than me and Saffy.

The highway was now wider and interspersed with more roundabouts and large road signs, though it was no less windier. We slid into the main street of Motueka which is called High Street, passing the clock tower which was once the Rothman’s clock tower. I chuckled and remarked that it would now be, in the 21^st Century, politically incorrect to have such an auspicious landmark being sponsored by a tobacco company. However, now it was plastered with ITM slogans so technically it is partly sponsored by the sale of nasty pine trees which perhaps are seen as a lesser evil than tobacco. Ironically, Motueka is still the largest tobacco growing area in New Zealand, an evil that seems to be difficult to root out from the land in more ways than one.

Traversing over the famous Takaka Hill or Marble Mountain where I had also resided and worked as a housekeeper, not once but twice during the ‘80s, I was dismayed to see that my former residence had burnt to the ground with barely any trace of the home that had nestled amongst the pine trees on this sharp bend in the road. Only a small portion of an ancient brick chimney remained and a stand of red hot pokers, blooming defiantly in the corner of what was once the garden. I gazed mournfully out of my misty window, trying hard to see any landmark that showed that I had once lived here.

We reached the township of  Takaka and found the hostel that we would be staying in which was to be a new experience for me, especially with it being called, “Annie’s Nirvana”.  However it was quaint and cosy, and Saffy chose the narrow top bunk to help ease my shock of staying in a Hostel for only the second time in my life. The gardens were beautiful, the other guests friendly and the owner one of those colourful characters who had come here around 40 years ago (just like me, Saffy and Pikelet). Then fell in love with the place and some pretty young girl and never left.  We went out for dinner and found a pop-up restaurant in the Telegraph Hotel - "it's still here", we had jointly chortled. Dinner was mussels, local sourdough bread, hummus and pasta. We returned to the hostel, and unpacked, showered and retired to our cabin due to the over-sized mosquitos lurking in the garden, baying for our fresh, out of town blood. I slept better that night than I thought I would.

 I woke first in the morning as daylight started sneaking under our bedroom curtains. I very quietly left our shared abode, and clutching my container of coffee headed for the kitchen to find a coffee plunger. I found one almost straight away and decided that I now loved Annie’s quirky Nirvana hostel and almost wanted to stay longer. I made a plunger of coffee and sitting outside on a lovely cushioned bench beneath a magnificent blossoming wisteria I decided that I would film the rising sun and capture the songs of early morning birds in the surrounding trees. However, Takaka had other plans for me. As I took my phone out of my pocket and set it to video the skies opened above me and released the heaviest rain that I had forgotten existed and drowned out the birdsong and sent me running for shelter with my hot cup of coffee.

I videoed the rain and laughed to myself at the intensity of the Golden Bay weather with it’s almost emotional intensity which now seemed to be gifting me a heavenly heralding of welcome. I pondered the glowering, heavy dark skies, searching for a crack in the clouds that I knew was not coming and it was in that moment I realised after all these years, I had finally returned to the Bay.