Mere Shows Us Her Playground, the Mount

In the busiest day of our seven-day trip here to the North Island, we met Mere Mollard-Wharepapa, who guided us up her favorite playground, the legendary Mount Maunganui. This bulb-shaped mountain is located at the end of the sweeping Bay of Plenty, and is green all the way 'round. Sheep graze on gentle terraces, keeping the grass short and there are runners and hikers going up and down a network of many trails, called tracks.

Mere is a Maori...she certainly looks the part, with a ceremonial tattoo on her beefy forearm, short hair, wrap-around shades and a bit of gold in her front tooth. Her high cheekbones, dark complexion and manner of speech befits her tribal roots. She is proud of her traditions, and spoke to us in her native tongue, introducing herself as she would to another Maori by naming the mountain where she resides. She had already been up the mountain twice today, and as we huffed and puffed and had to stop, she was barely winded.

She told us about how the Maori are still fighting battles over land, especially outraged that sometimes the government sells off their land to foreigners. She showed us where a landslide had uncovered a massive pile of shells, and how she was one of the people called in to check for ancestral burial grounds. It is important that they perform ceremonies if ancient relatives are disturbed.

We circled higher and higher and finally reached the summit, and Mere, having made this trip thousands of times, shook our hands and smiled broadly. "When I was a kid, this was my playground," she said. "We plucked oysters out of these waters, and we used to live right over there." She pointed toward two high-rise apartments, obviously added more recently.

We clambored over to the other side of the Mount and gazed down upon boats making their way over to Tauranga harbor. An uninhabited island called Matakana stretched as far as we could see, this is where her two sons often surf, either swimming across the channel or hitching a ride with a pleasure boat. It was breaktaking and clear, and as we looked out a hangglider slowly drifted down and around and almost skimmed the waves. He managed to catch another updrift that carried him gracefully right down to the grass beside the beach.

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