Where the land speaks

Both an inspiration to walk - or dream of walking - and a memento if you have walked them already, Classic Walks of New Zealand, by Craig Potton, has been revised and updated.

This extract is from the new edition illustrated with Potton's magnificent photographs and bird's-eye maps by Geographx.

Despite the dusty road that splits the huge Te Urewera wilderness, there remains a sense of other-worldliness about Te Urewera National Park.

In this largest of all the fragments of North Island forest, the author Katherine Mansfield also sensed a mood when she wrote "it is all so gigantic and tragic - and even in the bright sunlight it is so passionately secret".

The Tuhoe and neighbouring iwi, who lived in these ranges for hundreds of years before Pakeha came, discovered its hallowed places and secrets, and named its rivers, lakes, forests and mountain ranges.

So powerfully does the land speak, that Tuhoe trace their ancestry to the coupling of the mist maiden Hinepukoho-rangi, and the mountain Te Maunga, a myth from which comes the name "Children of the Mist", as Tuhoe are also known.

Tuhoe alone can recount these mysteries should you wish to discover more about them, though glimpses of their relationship with the land are revealed in Elsdon Best's monographs on the Tuhoe and Judith Binney's works on Tuhoe prophets Rua Kenana and Te Kooti.

But better still, if chance or grace allows it, speak directly to and learn from the Tuhoe, who still live near the sacred centres of their land.

No matter from where our myths and unconscious calls emanate, Lake Waikaremoana and Te Urewera's forests have a deep resonance for all who go to them.

Many now make the journey around Lake Waikaremoana, which from on high appears gangly and long-fingered, an aquamarine starfish held by an enveloping clasp of forest.

The popular myth describing the lake's creation tells the tragic story of Haumapuhia, a woman whose defiance towards her father so angered him that he decided to drown her.

Struggling desperately against her father, she called for mercy from the Gods.

They transformed her into a taniwha, and she desperately thrashed through the land, gouging the enclosing hillsides in her attempts to find an escape to the ocean.

Water filled the places where she clawed at the hillsides and the lake was created, and although Haumapuhia lost her struggle when daylight came and turned her to stone, the lake's many bays and indentations are reminders of her tragic struggle.

Certainly the land offers no easy ways to get one's bearings because no single mountain peak rises above the forest and no central river dominates; it's just a series of sharp ridges and deep valleys, one upon another, spiralling out from the lake.