KEY POINTS:
Deep in Tuhoe country, two utes parked high on the banks of the Whakatane river mark one of the few signs of human life.
This is the domain of wild horses and rare blue ducks. You can hear the grunts of wild pigs. All the huts are empty, and the bivouacs, such as those of the alleged paramilitary terrorist camps, are long deserted.
And don't be fooled by the utes either - they are deserted too, trapped here in this gorge until summer when the river-level drops enough to get them out.
The Herald met just one person up here after jet-boating in yesterday - he had not seen anyone for weeks and was unaware police had foiled a terror plot, let alone that the suspects were said to have been on Tame Iti-led training camps in the Ureweras and setting off napalm bombs.
This is 45km up-river beyond the Tuhoe strongholds of Taneatua and Ruatoki where on Monday police were stationed symbolically on the "confiscation line", the point up to where land was confiscated from the tribe in the 1860s.
If Pakeha law isn't recognised there it certainly isn't up here, where buildings go up without consent, dogs routinely roam without licences and dope is grown with abandon.
Just as the valley turns into a gorge with 200m-high sides, the chance of public access narrows at the river's every bend.
Yet now the police are in here somewhere, with the training camps now the alleged crime scene that could result in the first charges brought under the Terrorism Act.
Police have so far refused to let media see the camps, so the Herald yesterday travelled 40km up the river, one of the major routes into the 40,000ha of bush in the Ureweras, then trekked from there into some of the hundreds of huts and temporary camps.
You can get some of the way by 4WD, you could walk if you had days, but the preferred way through here is on horseback.
Until Monday, this route was thought to be used mainly by the 15 or so year-round residents - although that grows to hundreds in the summer. Possum trappers and some deer hunters will come up too, if local Maori let them.
Now it could have carried an eclectic bunch of activists to a paramilitary camp with their camouflage gear and firearms, or the elite police Special Tactics Group that went in after them.
It is so remote, anything could happen here. At the same time, it seems impossible that anything out of the ordinary could go on too.
This is the home of the "Ruatoki Dundee", who was once seen riding horseback, then drawing an old military Enfield rife without sights and shooting a deer crossing the river, in the head. Hunters talk of coming across beautiful young Maori women bathing naked without a care in the world. Possum-fur prices of $100 a kilo bring trappers in here for three months at a time. They spend nothing, clear thousands.
Three or four men are said to run this part of the Ureweras, reporting back to a tribal elder with the final say. Do something they don't like, and they will send some boys to find your vehicle and smash it up, the Herald was told. The windows of a ute were recently smashed - and it was left tipped upside down in the river.
The camps and huts seen by the Herald were all deserted. There were "bivvys" made of a patchwork of tarpaulins. There were no local Maori in the half-a-dozen huts, where the mattresses were hung up to keep dry until the residents returned, and little more than leftover salt and pepper from the last visit.
There was no sign of the Maori family who live on a now-defunct farm, nor of the one-legged former gang president who has made the valley his home.
The only man the Herald found was a worker at the Wairaka Kokiri Trust, a camp for troubled youths in Child, Youth and Family Services care which hit the news earlier in the year after two escaped and went on a crime rampage, leading to allegations it had a culture of drugs, drinking and handling firearms.
He would not be identified, but said he had not seen any helicopters. He had not heard the news of the plot; nor did he know the All Blacks had been kicked out of the World Cup.
The visitor's book at the DoC hut at Waikare Junction showed no sign of any drama either, the last message from a hunter 10 days ago proudly stating that he had killed a 100kg pig.
And the Whakatane river is just one vein into the Ureweras. In Maori tradition, it was up here that Taneatua, the high-priest of one of the canoes from Hawaiki in 1350, named two of the streams that split off into even denser country after his two daughters, Ohora and Kanihi.
Today the DoC hut on the Ohora stream clearly showed the tensions that pervade Tuhoe country. The Mongrel Mob "Sieg Heil" slogan was emblazoned across its door.
Inside, the words "Give it back" make the intentions of local Maori clear - this is their land, and everybody else is here on their say-so.
