My immediate goal upon arriving in Auckland was to find the beach in The Piano, which, as the crow flies, is only about 30 miles west of the city, on the shore of the Tasman Sea. But as I drove myself and my wife west out of the country’s largest city in a heavy early-morning storm—summer rain in our part of the world is never like this, so hard and so constant—crossing bridges and viaducts to pass over the water that makes up so much of Auckland’s domain, the weather proved too difficult and our map too vague, so we decided to turn north toward our destination for the night and save the beach for later in our stay.
By midmorning the skies had begun to clear, and we had clean views of the landscape: sheep-speckled squares of farmland, with the blue of the Tasman hinting to us from the west and the South Pacific beckoning to us from the east. In New Zealand, despite all the acreage of field and hill and forest that makes up the North Island, and all the mountains and great lakes and pastureland and vineyards of the South Island, water is never far away, falling from the sky, gushing from the rock face, gathering in lakes, and always, always surrounding you no matter where you are, at home or out on the road. Stand anywhere in this buoyant country, and it is like standing on the deck of a nation-size oceangoing vessel moving through time and great seas.
That’s what New Zealand’s earliest inhabitants discovered. The first Maori explorers paddled their giant oceangoing canoes—seven of them, as the story would have it, each carrying members of a different tribe or subtribe—across the Pacific to shelter here in what is now called the Bay of Islands, on the northeast coast of the North Island. They originally touched land at the bluff now known as Cape Brett, or Rakaumangamanga mai Hawaiiki (“Branch of Many Tribes”). The morning after our own arrival, my wife and I set out on a small motor-driven catamaran from the dock at the village of Russell (originally Kororareka, the first settlement in New Zealand), jaunty Kiwi skipper Pete Stuart at the helm, slapping along on the slight chop to that same spot, Cape Brett, the easternmost point of the Bay of Islands.
The Maori explorers, like Captain James Cook and his crew, and like the hundreds of English and American whalers who eventually made landfall at the Bay of Islands, had crossed thousands of miles of ocean to reach this haven. My wife and I, after our flight from L.A. and our four-hour drive north, felt we’d also accomplished a feat—one that merited celebrating. Dolphins cavorted around our small boat. A warm wind off the South Pacific toyed with our hats and hair. Our guide, a chunky Maori man—and Vietnam vet—named Richard “Blandy” Witehira, chanted a prayer to his ancestors as we started out on our hike along the ridge of one of the seven small peaks the Maoris view as representing the tribes who arrived in those original canoes.
Blandy led us in a climb of several hundred feet to the lighthouse at the top of the point, and along a series of goat paths, naming plants and trees while we walked as though he were cramming for an examination in the flora of Eden—here is the ponga, or silver fern; there is the flax plant, and notice the manuka, or tea tree; and also the ti kouka, the so-called white-flowering cabbage tree that lends a tropical look to the shorelines and hillsides and whose shoots Captain Cook’s crew nibbled on and deemed cabbagelike in taste.
Maoris. Captain Cook. Flowering hillsides. Movies may have brought us here, but we were now the actors in our own little cinema of travel, following a trail that led from one more beautiful sea-and-landscape to another.
Cut next to Karekare Beach, our original destination, where the Waitakere Hills meet the ocean, a vertiginous drive down winding roads to the place where the imported piano of the movie of the same name sat unattended on a vast strand of black volcanic sand, washed by the incoming tide and guarded at either end by two monstrous chunks of three-story-high rock. Oh, movies, oh, illusion! Where were Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel, she the mute Scotswoman, he the exotic native loner, the ill-fated lovers in that marvelous Down Under romance? Where we walked in the sea-wracked remains of a recent high tide, marveling at the outsize nature of this fantastically beautiful location, young parents pushed baby carriages across the sand, and weekenders from Auckland, many shirtless despite the constant wind off the ocean, chugged beer and played American rock and roll on their boom boxes while Japanese tourists shot at each other with fancy cameras against the rough spray and bass notes of the surf.
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