KEY POINTS:
Except for getting robbed and her husband becoming seriously ill, Susan te Heuheu says she had a lovely time in Ecuador.
It's a wry line from the woman married to one of the most respected and influential men in Maoridom, Ngati Tuwharetoa paramount chief Tumu te Heuheu.
While he has an eminent status within Maoridom, he has also made his mark globally with Unesco's World Heritage Committee which he has chaired for the past four years. It is this role which took him to Ecuador.
His chairmanship term ends after the committee's annual meeting which starts today in Christchurch and it has left a distinctly Maori imprint on the organisation's aims.
His impact is almost certainly undervalued in New Zealand partly because he does not adopt a high public profile. In tribal matters it is usually his brother, Timi te Heuheu, National MP Georgina te Heuheu's husband, who is in the front line with the media.
But Tumu is a key player behind the headlines. Last year, he led tribal discussions at Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu's tangi about who should succeed the Maori leader.
In November, it was Tuwharetoa again, with Tumu te Heuheu at the helm, who drew Maori together at Pukawa on the western shores of Lake Taupo, to discuss the future of the Kingitanga movement and ways iwi could speak with a cohesive voice.
When he does talk, te Heuheu is a good man to listen to. The 64-year-old is articulate, has an old world gentleman's charm and his remarks are considered, even diplomatic. But he's not cagey and conversation flows easily.
He and his wife live in Taupo, in heartland Ngati Tuwharetoa country, on a rise overlooking the water. But in April they were in Ecuador's capital Quito - the city built on Inca ruins in the 16th century and a site recognised on the World Heritage list.
It was there, says Susan, after a visit to another heritage site, the Galapagos Islands - where they took in the amazing biodiversity Charles Darwin discovered - that her husband collapsed. "It was a wonderful trip, except Tumu got sick and someone tried to mug me."
At the beginning of May he was in Waikato Hospital undergoing open heart surgery.
Two months later he's looking pretty good, Susan te Heuheu says. "We're looking after him. Considering, we're not far post-op, we're happy."
The snatch and grab was unsuccessful and after the dramas, they were happy to be home, she says.
Tumu te Heuheu says he's feeling better but points the discussion in a different direction.
"The health is going very well. It's certainly good for me to take a rest."
He has chaired the WHC for four years but has been involved since 1993 when the Tongariro National Park was the first in the world to be designated as a cultural landscape.
To have sites included on the list means countries have to be signed up to the World Heritage Convention. The site must have outstanding universal value. States must also regularly report on their conservation efforts.
Before 1993 sites were either noted as natural or cultural and at the time the cultural label did not recognise the spiritual connections people had to landscapes.
Instead, it focused on physical heritage sites like Stonehenge, the Acropolis, the Taj Mahal, the Egyptian Pyramids - in short the architectural wonders of the world.
Widening the meaning of what constitutes cultural heritage has been a focus of te Heuheu's and to that end he's championed a WHC initiative - the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage.
While it's a bit wordy, the essence of what it's about is simple, te Heuheu says. "It's the wairua side. The Great Wall of China, you can see it from the stars. People died for it, so there is a real wairua attached to it.
"Sometimes it appears the physical is more important even though there might be an intangible."
To explain, he returns to Tongariro National Park. It is part of who Ngati Tuwharetoa are as a people, part of their whakapapa, their stories, their history, part of their ancestor's legacy.
It's Tuwharetoa's heritage, he says.
"In the old days when the people used to pass the mountain [Ruapehu] they'd shield their eyes - that was out of respect.
"We know that times have changed and I always remember my dad [Sir Hepi te Heuheu] saying the mountain was for all people to enjoy."
But the spiritual connection remains.
Now the committee has embraced the wider meaning of culture with 42 more sites classified since Tongariro's addition, he says. Today there are 830 sites, 644 cultural, 162 natural and 24 mixed sites listed.
The change gave Pacific culture - which places an emphasis on land, rivers, the sea as part of a heritage - a chance to be recognised as being as valid as older civilisations. The previous definition excluded any recognition of cultural heritage in the way Polynesians view it, he says.
"The Pacific was always considered somewhere at the bottom of the world. We were not necessarily recognised, particularly in regard to our values. The criteria was Eurocentric.
"We wanted to give clarity to the rest of the world about who we are and what was important to us."
The Department of Conservation's general manager of world heritage Tata Lawton has travelled extensively with te Heuheu and he cites an incident which shows the difference between how indigenous and Western cultures view heritage.
The committee was looking at what's considered the birth place of Buddha at Lumbini in Nepal. After generations of people taking keepsakes, the temple had become unstable and the committee was considering striking it off the list because of its dilapidated condition.
"It's a technical person's delight [to be on the committee] because the people who have a say in whether it should be there, are architects, archaeologists, all the technical people.
"But they forget the kaupapa [issue] - what are we protecting here? The building or the birthplace of Buddha?"
Many states couldn't articulate how important the intangible was to them, Lawton says.
"If there's been one impact on World Heritage Tumu's had - it's how his Maoriness has been able to communicate who he is and where he comes from."
Another candidate to be struck off the list a few years ago was the African city of Timbuktu. The city in Mali is regarded as the centre for the spread of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries, and with three great mosques, its architectural heritage is a merging of the continent's Islamic traditions.
However, encroaching desert sands and time were endangering the sites.
The fact that the committee considered taking Timbuktu off the list omitted one of the most important values in world heritage - people and their connection to place, te Heuheu says. "Where's the humanity in that? What makes it [Timbuktu] of outstanding universal value is that people have lived there for hundreds of years in this special place."
Lawton is harsher.
"It was a slap in the face - those people might be doing everything in their power to protect their sites but they are so poor. What they needed was help."
Closer to home, protecting all New Zealand's World Heritage sites - the Subantarctic Islands and Te Wahipounamu, which includes Fiordland, Mt Aspiring, Westland and Aoraki Mt Cook national parks - is continuing work. And in te Heuheu's backyard development looms as a threat.
Ngati Tuwharetoa gave 79,500ha of Ruapehu to the Crown in 1887, creating the country's first national park.
Whakapapa and Turoa ski fields operator Ruapehu Alpine Lifts plans to build a six-seater chairlift, the Valley Express, higher up the mountain on the Whakapapa side.
Building is to start this summer but the resource consent process won't be easy because Tuwharetoa are uneasy the plans encroach on the "gift area" - which starts at the 2300m mark and rises to the peak at 2797m. Under the 1887 agreement this part of the mountain was to be left undeveloped.
"It's being interfered with for economic reasons. It goes to the essence of what we as a people are trying to protect.
"The very strong view of Tuwharetoa is that there should be no sort of development in that area - the gift area was to be left sacrosanct. It's a decision our old people made."
Further development risks the park's world heritage status and without the proposed lift people would still be able to ski, he says. But that is a battle for another day.
World Heritage is something all people can take pride in, he says.
Elections for the chair begin in October, and he is unsure if he will still be this country's representative but he hopes that New Zealand will actively push for more sites and help smaller Pacific nations do the same.
"Our continued involvement is crucial. It's for you and I, and it's for our identity that we keep involved."
