Papakura ⇨ Takanini ⇨ Te Mahia
Tuesday, 19 September 2017
Papakura
Papakura train station smelled of fish and chips and was quietly busy with school kids and early commuters. This is the quiet that attaches to stations everywhere and can even be felt when there is lots going on around. Perhaps it is the sound of waiting.
To get to the platform you go through the old station house that has redundant, but still interesting looking, switching gear on display and a security guard in a high vis vest, no doubt to keep the kids off the museum piece. Looking out from the platform, the station and its surrounds is a web of thin steel, not yet weathered by age, gauche and uncomfortable, like a new shirt with the original creases still showing.
Having stood on the platform as my starting point I head out following the tracks as closely as I can. This takes me past a strip mall that is as ugly on the front as the bare concrete and steel at the back. As I get closer to the Clevedon Rail Bridge I realise that the smell is not fish and chips but the KFC up the road. A signature dish for Papakura. The newness of the train infrastructure, from the steel to the patterned concrete on the overbridges, contrasts strongly with the generally tired feel of the Papakura Streets. Like most things designed and built in the 1970s, I suspect that Papakura has never looked new.
I like Papakura. My liking must be genuine and not superficial as, on the surface, it is not an attractive place. Instead it has a certain gravity. Papakura is like one of those core samples geologists take - as you walk along the streets you can see the decades unfolding as they come to form present day Auckland.
Approaching Takanini I begin to feel like I am in a different country, on holiday and exploring it for the first time. This is not because I haven't been here before. I recently spent 2 months driving all around this area every day and walking many of its streets. It must be because I am not going anywhere. I am following the tracks so I don't need to know where I am headed. The tracks will take me there.
As I walk up the line the ugliness of low-key Papakura transforms to the ugliness of Great South Road and the Mega stores and strip malls that line it. The pavement runs out from time to time, letting me know that I don't belong here on foot. Cars rule and a pedestrian is prey. I cross the tracks to the East and walk around the back of a strip mall and I am suddenly in 2017 Auckland. A block of new shops, cafés, sushi and brand new houses on tidy streets and tiny sections. There are also acres of land fully laid out with streetlights and pavements where the outlines of houses to be have been dug in the brown earth.
Then around another corner and I am back to the established weariness and planning confusion that better reflects this part of the city. "Hello Boss" says one of the boys (although he is about half my size again) I pass as I walk along the path leading to Takanini station. A train arrives and the passengers head off to their cars or to walk home, many, if not most, with the heads bowed to their phones. I notice the train station quiet again and wonder if it is simply the absence of cars.
So far I have not had to double back in my attempts to follow the tracks as closely as I can and this still holds as I walk through long grass past the car park and onto the road. At the next crossing a car has broken down and a group of men are trying to push it while communicating with the driver to get the car to budge. It doesn't and the men give up. I start waving traffic around the breakdown, halting the oncoming cars to allow the backlog to clear. I suddenly realise that there will be no end to this and so, as soon as I can, I simply stop, smile and walk away to let them sort it out.
This brings me out onto Great South Road again which is thick with crawling traffic and has had its ugliness deepened by many layers of construction all around. New overpass; new subdivisions; new roads. Suddenly on my right I see an alleyway and I head up it, hoping it will keep me close to the rails. In fact to my surprise it takes me right onto Te Mahia station and I decide to wait for the next train back to Papakura. As I pass the breakdown crossing the stalled car is gone.
Onehunga ⇨ Te Papapa ⇨ Penrose
Saturday, 23 September 2017
I knew the trains weren't running in South Auckland but decided that catching the replacement bus might be just as interesting so I headed to Papakura Station. An attendant directed me to the right bus stop, "It leaves in a one minute", and I jogged over. Twenty five minutes later and no bus it was time for Plan B and so I headed back to my car and back on the road. Although this was a fine Saturday afternoon, the traffic was crawling and I felt both cheated and like I was the one cheating. This plan to walk the line was not meant to be just another thing to drive to.
Onehunga
I have come to like Onehunga a lot and if there was ever reason or opportunity I would jump at the chance to live there. Although Onehunga was an early pakeha settlement, with access to the port on the Manukau Harbour, through most of my lifetime it has been quite a run down, poor part of town. The town centre is still unattractive with old buildings yet to be rejuvenated, graffiti and steel shutters over the shops outside of trading hours. All around there is industry with workshops and factories. It is a Saturday and the place has an abandoned feel except for the paint and panel shops and other car related businesses from where loud music blares as the young guys work on their own cars and bikes.
In some ways Onehunga is saved by its geography. It has the harbour on one side, then a fringe of flat land surrounded by hills thus avoiding the monotony of more, relatively, recent subdivisions. And, unlike those subdivisions, Onehunga is a place unto itself and would remain complete and useful even if the surrounding metropolis was swallowed up or, going by the walls of volcanic rock that are so common here, covered in lava from nearby Mangere or Maungakiekie. Onehunga always feels far away from Auckland to me but from its hills I can see how close the remainder of the city really is. No wonder it is perfect for me; on the fringe and out on its own but easily connected to the rest if that is what I choose.
In a street of villas I come across a red and tan building with a sign declaring it the Railway Enthusiasts Society Inc. and the home of the Glenbrook Vintage Railway. This is strange for me as I pass the Glenbrook railway every time I venture to the city and it is incongruous to see it identified with this place. But it makes perfect sense really. Such societies need cheap, practical accommodation and, until now, that is what Onehunga has been. The new paint and gardens of the surrounding houses, and the cars in their drives, tells me that practical may remain but cheap has long gone. I just hope the railway buffs bought their building when they had the chance.
The start of the walk is adjacent to the line but then I have to begin making crossings and choices which again turn out to be the right ones. I climb a hill or two where there are corner dairies and shops at the top and just when I am beginning to wonder if I will need to go back and find the tracks the line is suddenly in front of me and it is a few hundred metres to Te Papapa station.
The rest of the walk is almost completely light and heavy industry with the wide roads, lunch shops and the like that form part of this landscape. I am sure there is innovation and ingenuity taking place in these complexes but with the scoria walls, the Cyprus pines planted on the berms and the combination of raw sun and pavement I feel like I am walking through the 1960s.
I arrive at Penrose station sooner than I expect, fooled again, no doubt, by the false sense of distance and isolation that I associate with Onehunga. Now there is no charm. Penrose is simply ugly. Old overcrowded roads, power pylons and a mass of new steel overhead and all around that shows the recent re-discovery of Auckland's rail network. Auckland is slowly and very begrudgingly beginning to come to terms with not being the Los Angeles of the south. I should have seen it coming when the dress shop in my town of Waiuku, "LA on Bowen", closed to be replaced by a real estate agent.
The Penrose platform fills with people heading into the city, with one large group being a family of three generations. I wait for the train going the other way, back to my car at Onehunga Station and as I wait I can see across to the other Penrose station that is on the main southern line. It is tempting to head across, but at this point I am still wanting to do that line in its own order.
Te Mahia ⇨ Manurewa⇨ Homai ⇨ Puhinui
Monday, 25 September 2017
Manurewa
Every journey should involve a trek across a desert, and this was my route today. It started with a walk along the suburban streets from Te Mahia station until I had to return to Great South Road to get to Manurewa. This is still old Auckland and the sections are large and some of them contain houses that look more like a bach by the beach than a city dwelling.
There is a very sad looking motel which declares it has no vacancies. Tourists? Business visitors? More likely the local homeless being put up by the government who have sold off that state houses that are all around and that are now in private hands and their large sections subdivided for profit.
Manurewa itself is not run down or shabby, just cluttered and ugly and another challenge for a pedestrian. All these places are designed (if at all) for the car and those of us on foot have clearly been forgotten.
I head down to the Manurewa station platform and remember that I forgot to tag off after I arrived at Te Mahia and do so here, the fare being the same. I get a call on the platform telling me I have an interview for a job in a few days. I then get another call and chat for a while as I head off. Perhaps it is these distractions that causes me to hit a dead end at Homai station.
I cross the tracks and turn right down a road that looks like it goes somewhere but as I reach the end I see that it doesn't. It is the Foundation for the blind, a literal blind alley. There are guide dos being taken for a walk and a lady passes me heading to the station. I cross the small footbridge she must have used and end up alongside a security fence which I follow as far as I can. It is a dead end and climbing onto the railway embankment to find a path through only results in thorns in my skin and the need to retrace my steps.
There are religious symbols all around with pink and red Jhandis, Sikh and Hindu Temples, a Mosque, Christian halls and churches and even a buddha. There are veiled women, men with turbans, crosses and ॐ signs. It would seem that here religion is something you declare.
I am now on the fringe of the desert as the houses peter out and the factories and warehouses begin. Not the small local and light industry of Papakura but enormous and cavernous warehouses, with large truck and trailer units grinding through their gears on wide streets. There are no alleyways or side streets to keep me near the tracks. Just big functional roads that I must follow and that join at right angles.
I get hopeful when I see an overbridge and a platform, only to find that I have reached the marshalling yards and there is no access for me or any way through. Like in a real desert, clouds of dust blow off tracts of land under development and I have no option but to take the long, and only, way around. The pavement simply runs out and I wonder what the passing drivers think of this person wandering in this industrial wilderness.
Feeling very separated from the railway I finally get a chance to circle back towards it and soon I am up a small path and back in a suburban street. I am thirsty and my feet are sore and Puhinui station is my last stop for today. It's good to be out of the desert.
