Get out of town! But make sure we don't spoil the countryside for our kids

Saturday, 27 January 2018

Rain and a king-tide combined to flood the coastal town of Kaiaua this month.

OPINION: Driving home from the Coromandel this month, we paused in the small community of Kaiaua, outside the low-lying Bay View Hotel where they'll sell you snapper and chips for 12 bucks. Across the road by the estuary, a few small fishing boats were moored in the lee of the river bank, their gaping windows and peeling paint reminiscent of the sort of cutesy framed print one finds hanging on the wall of a two-star motel.

Down the road, locals moved slowly in the humidity, shifting mattresses and furniture off their verandas where they had been drying after the battering the town had taken from the storm a few days earlier.

Kaiaua took the brunt of a king tide which ripped through their township – but that didn't deter holiday-makers.

Outside the town, a dozen camper vans and converted people-movers were parking up for the night, in a somewhat desolate layby overlooking the Firth of Thames. Some were self-contained; who knows what the rest of them were doing with their waste, the strain they were placing on an already struggling community.

When New Zealand goes on holiday, not everyone gets a break.

Jack Swanney, 2, enjoys an ice cream at Pohangina near Palmerston North this weekend.

Rachel Hunter and a Trumpet, the nostalgic face and flavour of Kiwi summer.

* Alison Mau: A survival guide to staying sane in the heat

* Smashed by storm, Kaiaua puts up 'for sale' signs

Bayly's Beach is a small town whose population is boosted by summer holiday-makers.

* Tourist mecca of Punakaiki is bursting at the seams

* Manapouri poo debate causes a stink**

The Queenstown-Lakes council has banned freedom campers who were despoiling beautiful Lake Hayes.

This is the season we get out of town. This is the anniversary weekend of our biggest city. The queues on the motorways out of Auckland on Saturday were like ants on a hot day, spilling out of their over-heated colony in search of new digs.

It will be the same in all New Zealand's cities next weekend, as our nation's workers award themselves a four-day weekend to commemorate (or not) the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Locals stopped going to Lake Hayes reserve as freedom campers overcrowded it and dumped their excrement.

Summer is when we Kiwis, urbanised over generations, rediscover our small town heritage. When we wear jandals, buy our sausages and tomato sauce at Four Square, hang out with Rachel Hunter eating Trumpet ice creams on limpid, languid lagoons, then ride Phar Lap down the beach at dusk. At least, that's how we like to see ourselves.

HITTING THE BEACH

With 450,000 tourists a year, there just aren't enough coach parks, toilets and workers to service them at Punakaiki.

My family will be staying in a holiday park at Baylys Beach in Northland next weekend. (No word yet as to whether Our Rach will be joining us for a barbecue, bringing ice creams for the kids).

There are strong feelings in Manapouri about plans to pipe in Te Anau sewage and spread it over land by the airfield.

There are five of us, plus Rusty, the terrier. Campground owners Trish and Mark and the 360 or so people who live year-round at Baylys will no doubt welcome as with the friendly hospitality for which they have become well-known.

But for all of us holidaying in New Zealand's smaller communities, it's worth remembering the added strain tourism places on their infrastructure. The water supplies, the roads, the sewerage.

Ah yes, the sewerage. If there has been one recurring theme in the news this summer, it has been poos.

In Queenstown, the council has banned freedom campers who were soiling beautiful Lake Hayes and Shotover Delta with their excrement. So too in Taranaki, where the reserve at Waiwhakaiho river mouth has been inundated with up to 80 campervans, converted vans, cars and tents a night.

Through summer Stuff has been telling the stories of the small towns with big hearts whose communities have been pulling together to meet their challenges.

In Punakaiki on the West Coast, there isn't enough coach parking, enough accommodation, enough water - enough toilets - to meet the needs of nearly half a million tourists.

Indeed, in many tourist destinations there just aren't enough locals to do the low-income hospitality jobs and pay the rates to sustain the tourist infrastructure.

Pancake Rocks Cafe manager Patrick Volk asks: 'Who wants to do those dishes, clean toilets, sell sausages, be on the coffee machine all day, who wants to be on the till?'

In tiny Manapouri, the 230 residents are up in arms over plans to spray sewage from the neighbouring tourist mecca, Te Anau, over pastures near their airfield.

We all want to celebrate our small communities, to enjoy them. But we are in danger of destroying them. Some locals have had enough.

Ruth Shaw, a Manapouri resident of 35 years, says : 'They are trying to turn it into a small Te Anau, and the reason we are here is we don't want to live in Te Anau.'

Our greatest wealth is in the hospitality of our people and in our nation's beautiful isolation – last, loneliest, loveliest.

If we are to preserve that for our children, we need to share the cost of spending a penny. As tourists in our own country, we need to take responsibility by working alongside locals to manage our impact on the infrastructure and environment.