Kerikeri, following the path of the first missionnaries in New Zealand

Well, after some boring posts about our regular life, a little bit of tourism and pictures of NZ.

Once we got the car, Ryan and I decided to visit some places nearby. After consulting our guidebook, we decided to go to Kerikeri to visit the oldest Kiwi stone building (still standing)  and a wooden house which housed the missionaries and their families. That town was also the first place to have a vineyard in the country. Its rich volcanic soil also welcomes  many orchards with fruit such as avocados, feijoas, oranges, kiwis... The town itself is quite cute with its little shops (a great butcher), restaurants and cinemas (Ah, the return to modern life!)...

The stone house (directly extracted from the nearby river) served as a store. This visit allowed us to see what types of materials were sold and where they came from (nails, tools, fabrics, dinette ...). There was also an exhibition on the first floor that helped us understand a little bit of the region's history and its main characters. It was like a little time travel.

Then we visited the missionaries house. The garden around the house was beautiful and well preserved. A speaker told us a little about the situation of families that successively lived in this walls. They had to believe in the Lord to come into such wild territories. Indeed, their survival depended upon the goodwill of the Chief, his longevity or the outcome of wars in which he participated. Hongi Hika, chief of the tribe around the shack went to England for two years. There he participated in the development of a bilingual English Maori dictionary. It was the first of its kind in the Pacific region. In the meantime life was a little rough for the missionaries who had "taken away" the tribe's head! However, they introduced the indigenous people to agriculture, carpentry, reading and religion ...
They did not have much luck with the conversions, but survived the death of the tribes leader, the power transfer to his brother and were not killed by neighboring tribes jealous of the colony's gifts to their protectors. These gifts could be new knowledge, raw materials undiscovered or not existing on-site and unfortunately European weapons.

New Zealand had a special settlement, unlike Australia, it was not an area of deportation. The first settlements of Europeans or Paheka in Maori were adventurers: whalers, sealers, and sailors. According to my book, the English had become aware of errors made in earlier colonisations and wished not to repeat the indigeneous massacres. Unfortunately Maori quickly learned to use European weapons and made ​​war among themselves, blinded by their new power... The settlers bought their land but we can wonder what it meant to the Maori who moved with the season or food, won or lost territories through the war, if the notion of selling land was even possible to grasp. 


It was nice to get out and play tourist again, on to some boat projects again, but hopefully more tourist posts will be coming.