As told to Elisabeth Easther
When I was young, in Whangarei, dad built a 32ft sloop, in the backyard and we would cruise the Northland coast. The first time I saw my father cry was when he sold the boat to four Catholic priests. The day he handed it over to them in the Town Basin, they came aboard with a case of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes. But they were forced to sell it a year or two later because there was too much hanky panky going on — it was quite the scandal in the Catholic Church in the 1960s. We left Northland when I was 6, but sailing was in my blood.
Dad was a schoolteacher and took an exchange position on Vancouver Island when I was about 7. We lived in a little logging town and I have memories of harsh winters and not fitting in particularly well. Those years had a strong influence on me by making me fairly gregarious and comfortable with new experiences. You get a resilience from that sort of thing.
From there we went to Eugene, Oregon where dad went to university. We saw Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on a very grainy black-and-white TV. Dad worked evenings at the university gymnasium and one night, walking home past an anti-Vietnam demonstration, we were tear-gassed. It's like all your senses close down and there's just intense pain. I was about 9.
I went to a different school every year till I was 14. When I became head boy of my high school, I had a strong sense of other people's expectations for me. Supposedly I was the sort of person who went to law school, but I pulled out at the last minute and worked in a boat yard in Whangarei. I joined the boatyard's owner as a crew member in the Whangarei to Noumea yacht race. There were six of us on a little 32ft boat, and we ended up getting lost because the sextant got damaged — this was before GPS — and we ended up in the New Hebrides. As we approached the coast in the middle of the night, we could smell reefs and we realised it wasn't New Caledonia, partly because we couldn't see the lighthouse. We anchored till daylight, and the skipper decided we should all have some rum. I was sent to get coke from the bilges but the cans had rusted through so we had to drink the rum straight. Then we turned around with our tails between our legs and sailed to New Caledonia where everyone else was celebrating. We were one of the last boats in and I've never had rum since.
After university, I went on my OE. I was in London one winter when I saw an ad for sailing holiday staff in the NZ News UK. I'd never skippered a boat in my life, other than P Class, and I ended up running a flotilla of 12 boats, leading them round The Med like a mother duck. It was probably the best year of my life.
My wife Melanie and I worked in Turkey for two years. We ran a bare boat charter fleet, then become caretakers on a privately owned 52-footer. When the owners got pregnant — the boat was fully kitted out with enough wine and food to go round the world — they said we could help ourselves as they wouldn't be back on the boat for five years. So we were able to sail wherever we wanted and get paid for it.
I'm just back from two months guiding cycle tours in Kyrgyzstan and Tibetan China. Kyrgyzstan is just the most amazing destination. Eighty per cent of the country is mountains and people call it the Switzerland of Central Asia. There's very little tourism infrastructure, no hotels aside from in the main city, so we stay in yurts and with nomads up in the mountains. We eat a variety of wholesome local food, a lot of carbs and meat, a lot of horse.
I'm really keen biker and a few years ago, I was approached by three King Country locals who wanted to set up an accommodation facility on The Timber Trail. The Timber Trail runs through Pureora Forest Park, 88,000 hectares of conservation land where you'll find the most significant tracts of North Island podocarp forest. Thanks to the logging protests of the '70s and '80s, when people chained themselves to trees, that action brought about significant change to our forestry industry.
The trail is now recognised as one of the best two-day wilderness bike rides and with e-bikes now so popular, it's accessible to a wide range of riders. The lodge is at the halfway point and is fully off-grid. We're solar powered with our own biodynamic waste system. The food is amazing, the managers have taken the place to a whole new level and we're fully licensed too. I'm really passionate about helping people have great experiences whether in tourism or hospitality, and that's what's driven me throughout my working life.
Bruce Maunsell operates Timber Trail Lodge - timbertraillodge.co.nz, escapeadventuresnz.com