Beer and Jandals in the Coromandel
Striking a heroic pose on the bow, Mr Knight is ready for anything, as long as that anything is beer and seafood.
We were just off Gannet Rock when the party pills began to kick in. By then we had already bought and drank all the stocks of Baroona on the ferry and ahead of us the Beer Desert of Coromandel loomed.
"I guarantee we won’t find anything there we want to drink." said Alan and went back to amusing himself with gannets and interesting rock strata. He and I hung over the rails armed with cameras staring at passing wildlife.
The sea was like glass. I wanted to see one of the enormous great white sharks that are inclined to hang out in the vicinity of the Rock. However instead of sharks we were followed by a family of small dolphins who were not really trying.
The Captain said we could stand on the bow if we wanted, though mainly it was only me that wanted. I saw three penguins swimming under water and a petrel who was nearly run over by the boat. Finally, just out of Coromandel, I saw my shark, a small insignificant one that nevertheless had the basic decency to swim along in the proper manner with its fin sticking out in a way guaranteed to worry swimmers. Nobody else saw it, alas for the shark’s sense of dramatic timing.
It was too shallow for the boat to go to Coromandel town, so we landed at a small pier on Hannaford’s Point, miles from the town. Ugly tin flat-bottomed mussel barges floated on the tide and we all got into buses in a reasonably well behaved manner. Our party got all separated from each other but fortunately not from the reserve stocks of beer.
This was the great and terrible Beer Desert, where people drink Waikato and are unashamed, and no doubt many of them have six fingers and play the banjo, whereas up in the mountains they grow Forbidden Herbs in huge secret plantations, carry sharp sticks and don’t share nicely. I saw a yellow biplane with a black chequered nose sitting in a shed among bamboo quite a way from the airfield. There were black swans with their bottoms in the air dredging for muck in the bay. The mountains were huge and foresty to our east. Otherwise, mainly cows.
The buses came into Coromandel and now we were tourists. The first thing we passed was a green shop full of smoked fish. Alan, who had been ensconced in the back seat no doubt feeling like a rebel, appeared over my shoulder.
"Did you see that fish shop?" he said.
The buses stopped. We got off and found the other buses with the rest of our party.
"Did you see that fish shop?" said Jen.
"Mmm. A fish smoking establishment," said someone dreamily.
Fish smoking. Now we know what the locals do for fun. I had a brief and pleasing vision of a dark and secret shop, its windows boarded up and its interior full of strange and enchanting fumes, full of glassy eyed figures slumped on mattresses with pipefish in their mouths, while behind the counter someone sold really huge Zig Zags and in the back room was a small hard core of abandoned souls snorting dried cuttlefish powder and sucking on squid ink bubble pipes.
Ben's hat is laughed at in a beer-fuelled sesssion of risibility
Alan and I bought irresponsible amounts of fish. Then we all headed for the main street that, apart from the cars, looked exactly like a 1940s film set. We instantly found the Star and Garter, a large beautiful pub made almost entirely of corrugated iron NOT Zyncalume, and our fears of the great and terrible Coromandel Beer Desert proved to be groundless though of course they had no Baroona. They served us beer in our own steins which we had been carrying, loudly, since Waiheke.
Once installed it was hard to remove the party though Alan and I kept referring with increasing urgency to the bag full of various smoked fish that needed eating. Eventually we left them to it and went shopping for bread and knives and chili products. The entire town, once it had stopped being a mining town, seemed to have become a Shrine to the Fish which suited me just fine. There were bait shops, fish shops, diving shops, and gift shops with many fish-related products in them.
We eventually managed to extract the rest of our party from the pub and walked to a green riverbank where we spread out our stuff and made a large pile of seafood which we then attempted to eat in 20 minutes. We did not succeed but nevertheless Alan and I were compelled to return to the fish shop to buy still more fish.
A friendly passing member of the Waiheke gentry said, "Last time I was here I spent $150 on a hat and my husband was so cross!"
"Umm" we said, unable to compete in the shopping stakes, "we’re just going to buy more fish."
"Oh, what kind?" she said.
"Every kind. Lots," we answered and made good our escape, afraid that someone else may have bought all the broadbill.
Our party sat up the back of the bus behaving very badly indeed and drinking the reserve stocks of beer while waiting for the rest of the ferry group. I thought the driver might object.
"If anyone tries to take my beer I will fight them with knives," said Alan, but it was hard to take anyone wearing a straw hat quite seriously and in any case I thought he was only saying that in order to get quoted in the paper.
For some reason many of the other people on the bus quietly got off and went to the other bus. Then the driver came back and was very understanding.
"Has anyone seen Leith?" was all he had to say when faced with the terrible scene of debauchery.
"Yes, he’s on the other bus." I said. And we set off back to Hannaford’s Point.
"This was good," I said. "We will have to come back in an aeroplane." Ben said he’d fly us here. I told him to watch for the yellow and black biplane.
Jen said: "It’s behind some bamboo."
Meanwhile certain members of our party behaved disgracefully and spilled beer. We couldn’t find the yellow biplane again.
"You scared it off with all the noise," we told them.
At last we were back on the boat. I asked to be given irresponsible and copious quantities of beer. There were two flagons of coriander and orange beer just for me and Woody-from-Norfolk, and as Woody-from-Norfolk was currently imaginary I had to drink his share.
The captain said I could go on the bow and I stood there for most of the trip home. Nobody else seemed to want to watch gannets. Then the boat stopped just off Cowes Bay and Alan came out and then a horde. Apparently the captain had announced: "See that house? It’s worth 24 million." This caused a rush forward that threatened to have the boat go down bow first.
For a while I was surrounded by people pointing at various expensive houses on the hills and saying, "[Insert name here] lives there."
A series of women took turns to stand at the bow and say, "Oooh, I’m Kate Winslet."
Finally we came back into Matiatia. I could at last take off my shoes again. We headed to the Legless Arms to drink more beer and eat more fish. I said, "I don’t think the editor is going to be able to publish this story." •
