Tommy Wilson: Hikoi rides high on amour

The flag of choice on this hikoi has been the one that many Maori will fly long after the final choice has been made in next year's referendum.

They say that Paris is the city for lovers and as the song says you can love it in the springtime or the fall, and for 44 Te Puna people with French whakapapa it was love at first sight. Last Tuesday, day one, we touched down at Charles De Gaulle airport to begin a hikoi to the whenua of our ancestors, Louis Bidois, Emile Borell and Charles Poitier.

For me, it is a hikoi I had done a few times before.

The first, almost 30 years ago when my Paris-based brother Tipene and I went looking for where our ancestor Emile Joseph Borell came from and what the whenua and the whanau looked like that he left behind to come across to the other side of the world to Te Puna here in Tauranga Moana.

Today, all across the Bay from Ngati Whakaue to Ngati Ranginui and Ngaiterangi there are direct descendants of Borell, Bidois and Poitier and now for the first time the largest French-Maori community in the world has embarked on Le Hikoi, the journey back to the birthplace of their ancestors.

Le Hikoi has been three years in the planning and the challenge to put together saving plans for our 44-strong group - who range in age from 18 to 80-plus, instead of fundraising and taxing our own, made the landing in Paris tres, tres special.

Paris has opened up her arms and all 44 of us have embraced her. The wairua that many of us feel is almost overwhelming and although it cannot be explained in words, to me it is like a completion of a circle first started almost 200 years ago.

Tomorrow, as Te Puna sleeps, we will be greeted with an official mayoral welcome in Deauville and letters and gifts from Mayor Ross Patterson will be exchanged between towns connected by Borell and Bidois.

When the photos of our ancestors are presented by our kuia to the Mayoress of Deauville and the spirits of our ancestors are returned from whence they came, these will be moments that will be locked forever in the memories of those who took up the challenge and walked in the footsteps of their tupuna on Le Hikoi 2015.

This has been a journey that has already had more likes and shares on whanau Facebook than all four flags put together and, as the photo above shows, the flag of choice on this hikoi has been the one that many Maori will fly long after the final choice has been made in next year's referendum. It says who we are on Le Hikoi and what we stand for as indigenous peoples of the long white cloud.

For many on the trip who had never ventured further than a hop across the ditch or a weekend up in Raro it has and will be a trip of a lifetime.

Fifty dollars a week for three years for a trip of a lifetime and we are only on day 6 of a 22-day hikoi that started in Singapore, perambulated through Paris and now today has landed us in Deauville, the Mount Maunganui of the Normandy coastline of France.

And right up the road less than five clicks away is Touque, the birth place of Emile Joseph Borell who followed Bishop Pompallier and his Catholic faith out to Aotearoa and into the heartland of Ngati Apakura in the Waikato to marry his Maori wife Roha Tangike before settling in Te Puna with his best-man mate Louis Bidois.

And the rest, as they say, is history, one that is richly embroidered with a strong foundation in the Catholic faith, an almost insatiable appetite for fine wine and tres bon kai - and a passionate personality that until very recently many born into this Wiwi (French) whakapapa knew little or nothing about.

Language is a cornerstone of any culture and the French language, just like the Maori language, tells our stories and to watch the Wiwi (French) side of our ancestry spoken in the native tongue of our forefathers for the first time on this Le Hikoi pilgrimage, has been an experience like no other I have had in my colourful journey across this planet we call home.

Cost of kai in Singapore en route to Paris - cheap as.

Ticket to the top of the Eiffel Tower - 11 Euros.

A fine feed of frog legs this morning with our young rugby boys - un petite price.

Look on the faces of 44 excited whanau as they play in Paris - priceless.

broblack@xtra.co.nz

Tommy Wilson is a best-selling local author.