One winter’s day a couple of years ago I came across a survey posted on the internet. According to an Auckland research company, the Real Kiwi Bloke was dying out. The traditional macho New Zealand man was hanging up his sheep shears and turning soft.
I was sitting at home in London as I read the piece and, to me, this seemed odd. After all there were plenty of perfectly macho New Zealanders striding around Earls Court. Maybe they were just experiencing some kind of weird geographical shift. But whatever was occurring, it looked as though somebody needed to go to New Zealand to investigate.
In order to reach these creatures, though, I was going to need a set of wheels. The big question was: which type? The year before I’d written a book about cycling round Spain and frankly the pedalling had been hard work. Then I struck on an idea that, from the warmth and safety of my London flat, seemed quite brilliant: I would ride a motorbike.
Fast forward some months — glossing over details of my motorbike training — and I was standing in Auckland outside a company called Adventure New Zealand Motorcycle Tours and Rentals, from which I’d arranged to hire a 650cc Suzuki Freewind, a gleaming blue-and-silver machine. It was the first day I’d ridden a bike without L-plates or without an instructor in tow.
Scared rigid by the hulking machine, I instantly forgot the very few things I did know about motorcycling — such as the fact that you should pull in the clutch when you stop. At the first red light, in a township just outside Auckland, my bike bunny-hopped and crashed to the ground.
I didn’t stand a chance of picking it up again, of course. It was far too heavy. Frustrated fellow drivers angrily beeped their horns; a kindly woman with shopping bags tried to help but even the two of us couldn’t shift the thing.
Then, as we heaved and shoved, the hitherto inert beast rose miraculously from the ground. I turned round and there behind me stood an enormous Maori man whose tattooed biceps bulged from his singlet. He appeared to have lifted the machine with a single, muscle-bound finger.
“Nice bike,” he said, and grinned.
Had I been a real anthropologist, of course, I would have stayed around and investigated this creature further. He seemed a promising specimen. But humiliated as I was, I rode off as fast as my wheels would carry me.
Fortunately, my motorbiking quickly improved — and as I travelled, other bikers told me their stories.
Just outside Tauranga I stayed with a Maori carver and motorbike enthusiast named Morris. One morning over coffee he produced from his kitchen cupboard a small vial filled with white shards.
“See this,” said Morris. “This is my elbow.” A few years back he had come off his bike on one of the gravel corners outside his house. “I was hoping, when they took the bone out, I’d be able to make a carving.”
I wondered if Morris qualified as a real Kiwi bloke. He certainly reacted with an understated nonchalance to the loss of his body parts and he seemed to spend a more than healthy amount of time in his shed. He was building a hovercraft in there, he told me. Smiling enigmatically, I climbed back on my bike and continued my quest.
