Page 33 - Demo

Top left: Robert Kingi is well pleased with the Western Star – a replacement for his previous logger, a 530hp Isuzu
Top & lower right: Closer to Napier, torrential rain sets in...and by the Esk Valley the Western Star’s in the midst of ooding and slips
Lower left: We’re lucky to get through the ooded sections of the Napier-Taupo highway before it’s closed to all tra c. Robert gets to unload and prepare for the trip back to Taupo....but will soon be joining heaps of other truckies, waiting for the road to re-open
a truck driver was never my priority.”
He didn’t start driving loggers until after he returned home from
more than two decades in Australia: “When I was there I did a bit of inter-state driving, and worked in power stations and mining, driving heavy equipment underground. I’d stayed 23 years in Australia, and it was just time to come home.”
Robert returned to NZ in 1997, and landed a job with the government, working for Work and Income – and “then I got involved with these people and one of them had a son who owned a logging truck and was looking for a driver.
“They said: ‘Can you drive a logging truck?’ I said, ‘you tell me a Maori that can’t drive anything!’
“So I had a play around in the truck and went driving. I’ve always been a driver, but I never took it up as my first job.”
He’s now been driving loggers for 18 years: “I go everywhere....I haul logs to Napier, to the Mount and the Port of Tauranga. We cart to all the local mills – Rotorua, Te Kuiti, Katikati, Kaingaroa.”
He likes driving trucks because, he says, it allows him to be an independent spirit: “It gives you your own space, I suppose – when you’re driving. It’s your time at the end of the day.
“On this sort of job – carting logs – it’s a very high-intensity job.
There are only so many hours in the day. To make a good day, I can do two trips across to (Napier) easy.”
And driving loggers is what he really likes: “It’s a very challenging job...you’re driving in the bush as opposed to linehaul.”
It takes you to “places in the bush where you have to have your wits about you...you have to be switched-on...”
And he’s more than happy with the way the Western Star performs in the forest: “It’s manoeuvrable in the bush – very much so.”
The closer we get to Napier, the worse the weather gets: “This is not a very nice day,” Robert says with some understatement. “Look at that – the rain’s getting heavier and heavier.”
The Western Star’s RT breaks into warnings from other drivers that water is flowing over the road in the Esk Valley near the end of the Taupo-Napier highway. We drive past slips where Higgins crews are working to clear the debris.
“They must have had SOME downpour here,” observes Robert as lightning flashes and a swollen stream flows just centimetres below the roadway as we cross a bridge.
As we enter the Esk Valley, water covers the road, and torrents are pouring down from the hills and the roadside cuttings.
The railway line that runs parallel to the road is completely
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