Chatham Island times

By PETER CALDER

The two 4WDs, stopped driver-to-driver, were so close they seemed locked in an embrace on the wet dirt road. Frank slowed up, pulled up, waited up.

"What's going on?" I wondered aloud with a mainlander's impatience. "They're having a yarn," said Frank, as if that explained everything. The motor idled and so did Frank, staring across the hills to the endless expanse of silver seas beyond.

"If you can't drive around them," he said, as they, then we, started moving again, "you just have to wait until they finish yarning. No point in being in a hurry. Nowhere to go anyway."

An Aucklander might find the sentiment a trifle exotic but there's no disputing the last point. Here on Chatham Island, the larger and more populated of the two main islands that make up the Chathams, you may drive as far as you like, but you'll only end up where you started.

It seems flip to say it's another country out there, but that's how they see it (no wonder they don't feel part of us; they're in the Christchurch phone book and the Wellington Central electorate). They say we interlopers come from "New Zealand," not "the mainland." They set their clocks a contrary 45 minutes ahead of ours, not a full hour which would be easier to reckon and more apt to the actual difference.

They marvel that we think the weather's bad or that we laugh at a "partly sunny" forecast. And they're amused at our urban hunger for the abundant crayfish. Three weeks after the season has opened, Frank, a crayfisherman, hasn't been to sea once. No point in being in too much of a hurry, he says, as he tucks into the shrink-wrapped corned beef we brought with us from Foodtown. And anyway (this bit he adds to taunt me, I suspect), they hardly ever eat it.

"At Christmas, maybe, but it's not much of a delicacy down here." Maybe that's why, in the two days I'm there, Frank and his wife Jan both mention that near the end of the driveway paua beds are exposed at low tide. You can get all you want to eat without getting your feet wet.

"It's low tide now," I suggest. "Let's go."

"Nah," says Frank. "It looks like it's going to rain."

Out on the edge of time, the last sprinkle of land between New Zealand and Chile, the Chatham Islands impress as a land apart. It's an impression that begins when you get on the 20-seat Convair at Wellington Airport's most remote gate. "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," says the cabin attendant as the plane taxis shudderingly out for takeoff. "For those of you who don't know me, my name's Jenny."

Turns out almost everyone knows Jenny. They pay appreciative attention as she demonstrates the safety procedures and they chorus, "Good on ya, Jenny" when she finishes.

The aircraft flies low as it makes the approach, hugging the land which has appeared so improbably out of the cloud.

Laurens van der Post wrote that you only ever learn to love one landscape, and the virtually treeless expanse of New Zealand's farthest outpost is an alien world to one from the subtropical north. Speckled with lakes and peaty ponds, Chatham Island is home to streams which run tea-brown, leaping from rock to rock under skies so grey you might be in Scotland. When the ribbon of clay road passes through open country, it's studded with tussock like the land either side of the Desert Road, although the soil is a rich volcanic loam and not that pebbly scree.

You can tell you're in New Zealand by the brands on the store shelves and petrol bowsers or in the fridges behind the hotel bar in Waitangi, the main settlement. But they do it island-style here; you can drink beer from the local Black Robin brewery (named for the once-endangered and now rapidly recovering bird) and pay for it with a $3 note - minted for the millennium and legal tender only on the islands.

The attention the islanders got over the millennium was not always welcome. Locals still grumble about what they see as slightly sneering coverage and there are dark grumbles about broadcasters who left unpaid bills. One local told me folks avoided Waitangi for a week because it was full of "too many odd people."

Frank and his wife Jan met one of the "odd people," an English journalist furious because his rental car had broken down.

"We stopped to help him," recalls Jan, "and he wanted another car straight away. We explained it was Sunday and he said, 'I don't care what bloody day it is.' "We took him around where he wanted to go, " she says, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. "But he still wasn't happy."

But if they're glad the millennium stuff is over on Chatham, glad the odd people have left, that doesn't mean they won't make you welcome.

They'll be happy to see you, keen to know how things are "over in New Zealand."

But whatever you do, don't expect them to get excited.

Casenotes:

GETTING THERE: Air Chathams flies several times a week to the Chathams from Wellington and Christchurch. The basic fare for the 90-minute flight is a whopping $1234 return from Auckland, but discounts of up to 40 per cent are available with certain conditions. See your travel agent.

The Cook Islands National Shipping Line, ph (09) 309 6703, also serves the islands. One-way fares for the 48-hour voyage are $250 from Auckland and $150 from Napier, including food and berth.

ACCOMMODATION: A wide variety of accommodation is available, ranging from lodge ($100 double) to backpackers ($25) and homestays.

ATTRACTIONS: Ecotours, fishing, birdwatching and tramping. Try the local Black Robin bitter at the Waitangi pub and pay for it with a Chatham Islands $3 note. All you need to know is online at www.chathams.com