After my third year working, I must have been 25 or 26, me and six of my mates got a campervan to chase the 2007 Rugby World Cup in Britain. So we flew in, watched a game in Scotland, then drove down to Dover, through France to Germany to do Oktoberfest, then back through Amsterdam and back to the rugby where we ended up in Wales when the All Blacks played France. That was a pretty sad ending to that trip. It was heavy, that's the only way I can describe it. The French and the Aussies they were all jubilant, but us, we just went silent, no one talked. It was like hearing that someone had died, everyone was dealing with it themselves.
After we lost, we spent a week in Thailand. That was a bit of a bucket-list trip and we had to do all the iconic things. But what really hit me - the front street would be booming, people looked happy but walk a couple of blocks back and very quickly it starts looking very impoverished, people are playing soccer with rolled-up rags and leaves, you realised there was poverty. And here we are on holiday with all these gears and go pros, walking into these neighbourhoods and they had bugger all. It made me realise how grateful we should be.
In 2009, my fiance fell pregnant with our first daughter, but we didn't want to raise her in Auckland so we moved back to Whakatane. Our business is about providing opportunities for visitors to immerse themselves in the Maori world, to make connections with our land and our people. Our bread and butter is the hangi experience where we welcome visitors to our tribal area. We bring you in, put the hangi down and cook a real meal in the Earth.
Lots of our competitors use stainless steel vats, but we say if hangi isn't cooked in the heart of Papatuanuku, you can't call it a hangi.
We host our hangi at the family home. We're not big on performance but we'll teach you about the song, why we sing it, then teach you the song, so you can sing it. We don't want people to just watch or hear the culture, we want them to live it.
More information: see nativ.co.nz
