Rain rain go away

Helen: Just had breakfast – always an interesting meal in a hostel – C and I play a game trying to guess where people are from – the Brits are easy to spot with their jars of Marmite and the Germans are a dead give away as they always have salami and cheese and bread – C is worried about what they then have for lunch... We haven't seen a Tongan at breakfast yet, but we spotted one at our last hostel – he was in bed, fully clothed, at 4 in the afternoon – typical!

Since I last wrote we have been up to Ohope on the north east coast of the North Island, near Whakatane – C got his right arm finished – it took the guy about 6 hours to draw and then tattoo, and then another half an hour to tell us what it all meant – lots of stuff about the sea and mountains, which are important for Maori people to be able to 'place' themselves – a Maori will introduce himself to other Maori, not using his name, but by saying where his mountain is. If you can see mountains you can recognise in the distance you can use them as reference points – geographically and emotionally.

Rangi (the moko artist) drew many vertical 'hake' (ribs) which are a connection between the living and their ancestors. Ancestral Maori houses are designed to represent a body with the central beam along the roof as the backbone, a face at the apex at the front, the sloping beams as the body, with hands at the end at the front. The ribs (also called hake) that the roof rests on represent the living, connecting the earth with the ancestors. Each shape is filled with loads of horizontal lines or layers which represent 'whakapapa' (genealogy) also represented in the ancestral house by the sloping roof beams and the horizontal slats that go between the sloping beams. Hope all that makes sense!

It was hard listening to him as some of the Maori ideas are very different from Western ideas – it helped having been in Polynesia for a year, but still Maori culture is based on very different cultural assumptions. For example, Rangi explained that when Maori talk about going forward into the future they do it facing backwards, so they can see the past, rather than facing forwards with your back on the past, which is how I always imagined it. He also told us how Maori tribes used to be divided up into 'upper jaw' and 'lower jaw' people – the 'upper jaw' lot learnt all the knowledge to do with ritual and the sacred and the 'lower jaw' people learnt all about fishing and farming etc...

When I called this 'practical' knowledge Rangi said he didn't see it that way as all the ritual/sacred stuff was practical too and he didn't want to make a value judgement about it. Fair enough. It was hard talking to him sometimes though as we both got the feeling that he was very defensive – for example, C said he thought it was amazing how the early Maori explorers set off into the big blue ocean not knowing where they were going. Rangi immediately said that was a very Eurocentric view that assumed their vessels were less seaworthy than ours are now. That's not at all what C meant though – all he meant was that, after months of experience of being at sea and knowing how scary it can be not to see land for a long time, he could imagine how brave the early explorers had been. But sometimes it's impossible to explain yourself properly when someone doens't want to see it your way!

But anyway...we're now back in National Park (what an awful name for a village) and are still waiting for the weather to change so that we can go walking. I think everyone in the hostel is waiting for the same thing! But there really is no point in going for a 9 hour hike to see the stunning scenery when the scenery is hidden underneath thick cloud and you are more than likely to get drenched and cold and blown off the top of a mountain by gale force winds. There really isn't.

So to pass the time I'm sewing (nearly finished C's advent calendar – yes, I know it's almost too late – it would have been finished by now if it didn't need so many small pockets – I guess I should just be grateful that Advent doesn't start when the commercial countdown to Xmas starts or I'd have to have pockets all the way from Oct 1st!) and C is playing the 'iPod downloading blues' on his harmonica – it's taking forever and a day to backup all our music and he's (predictably) grumpy about it. Maybe he'll perk up in a bit and we'll go (indoor) climbing.

Hx