The great circle route from Rarotonga to Taitokerau, depicted on the AlfaWolfram map above, was the second half in the exploration of Aotearoa by voyagers from Tahiti and possibly also the Marquesas, plotted on the map (oriented to the northeast) below.

The road to Aotearoa

Even with Rarotonga as a home base, the journey to Aotearoa is an epic one. The Kermadec Islands, used as a staging post, were 2,000 kilometres southwest, and the mainland of Aotearoa another 1,000 kilometres further on. At least Aotearoa was a reasonably large target, although in the distance to be travelled only a small error in the angle of approach (let alone problems with wind and currents) would make it easy to miss; the Kermadecs are mere specks in a vast area of open sea.

We can mimic the three thousand kilometres from Rarotonga as we walk the hundred metres or so back to our starting point. The korimako bushes are less than 10 metres from the Pohutukawa, to your left as you head away from that site.

Carry on straight ahead; the path veers to the right past a corrall,

straightens out again past several olive trees,

and then shifts slightly to the left with a side path going off to the right.

Take the left fork; a few metres on the path comes out at what is, right now, anyway, an open, park-like area,

and as you follow it on a leftward curve,

you'll see in the distance the tï that maked stage two of the journey.

Instead of heading in that direction, head diagonally across to the right, about 25 metres ...

... through the trees and bamboo, towards the mound with the variegated harakeke, just visible in the centre of the photograph above.

A little to the left (north) of that, you'll come across a group of three very young karaka trees (two of which are just visible (see the white tags!) in the picture, that symbolize the two-way traffic from Aotearoa to the Kermadecs.

The furthest one is close to a wide pathway that will take you the last 25 metres to the polygonal garden with the assortment of whara, where you began the journey.

A very interesting variant of this naming process is tied into the bestowing of an old name on a new tree, and overlooking the species that originally had that name for long enough to need to invent a new one for it. This is what happened to the karaka, in many ways a look-alike of its namesake, the karaka of the Tuamotus and Rarotonga and the qalaka of Fiji. Some Mäori traditions name the karaka as a plant brought along with the kumara, uhi and hue from Hawaiiki. In this case, however, it is the name that came from Hawaiiki, and the tree (known to botanists as Corynocarpus laevigatus) was probably dispersed from around the Bay of Islands.

This tree, the new karaka, became a very important Maori food source (after the poisonous glycoside karakin was removed from the kernel by heat treatment) and was carried throughout Aotearoa and also to the Chatham Islands. It was probably also carried to the Kermadec Islands, where stands of it are found. Likewise, it is dispersed around Te Mära Reo, and there is a cluster of three young karaka planted specially to the east of the pathway on which you are walking now (there's a photo of one of them on the linked page, and you can see two of them vaguely in the second to last photograph in the "directions" series to the left).

The original Oceanic / Polynesian "karaka", the tree Planchonella (a.k.a. Pouteria) costata (not yet in the garden), was also growing in more or less the same habitats, but seems to have been overlooked initially and later given the new name tawapou. However, another tree which had smaller but equally conspicuous fruits, and and abundance of milky sap like the Pouterias (although free of the unpalatable latex in the latter), was apparently noticed early in the piece, and given the name karakariki, "little kalaka". You may remember that you passed a young karakariki on your journey from the eastern edge of Near Oceania (Stage 4) to the western edge of Remote Oceania (Stage 5).

You can read more about the *kalaka and its namesakes on these linked pages:

*Kalaka (Proto Polynesian form)

Karaka (Modern Mäori)

Karakariki (Modern Mäori)

As you walk further along the route illustrated in the left-hand column, you'll also encounter a fourteenth stage in the development of the Mäori language -- the incorporation of new words from other languages after the rest of the world finally caught up with the southernmost Polynesians and stayed long enough to swap ideas and plants in the late eighteenth century. The olive tree can represent this stage; you will have walked past many of these already, and there are few along the path you are taking now. These were and are called öriwa, one of many additions to the Mäori lexicon as the plants themselves were added to Mäori gardens, or made known through the translation of religious and secular texts.

Leaves and branches of the Öriwa (European olive).

And that is the end of the formal journey, but of course it has focused on only a small selection of the plants in the garden. Apart from the trees, there are ferns, like Blechnum procerum (piupiu - a Proto Central Pacific name),

a variety of shrubs, like the hebes (koromiko, a "stage 13" name, but among them providing a welcome splash of colour the whole year round),

and climbers, like the pua wänanga, Clematis paniculata, whose Mäori name dates back to Proto Oceanic times.

As well as the plants, a growing number of birds are making Te Mära Reo their seasonal or permanent home. One of the most welcome of these is the tui. For some years several pairs have come here when the kowhai, harakeke and Australian warratah are in flower, and at least one pair has nested here.