Kingfish Lodge Resort North Island

Departed HiHi Campsite at around 9:45 AM; heading for Cape Reinga. Experienced our first rain of the holiday – the weather here is very fickle, rains for half a mile then stops, then it's sunny again! Travelled up State Highway 1 and the scenery was outstanding, combination of immense forests with huge sand dunes in the background!! Saw dozens of wild turkeys in the fields, so if we do move out here we know where to come for our Turkey ...

Spent another week in Kaitaia with Mike. Much of the time was spent chainsawing and stacking firewood for their winter. Did a bit of landscaping in the area where the barn that Mike bought would be reasembled so that he would have a place to put all of his junk out of the way. At the moment there are containers, trackers, a boat and random rubbish all of the "front yard." A few days were spent chopping up the wood that rescently got knocked down by ...

... to dam up the stream a bit to alow for the function of a small hydro electric power source. Wed morning we got up early to try to go for a drive to the beach and try to harvest some shell fish. But since the surf was a little bit too high in the opinion of the locals, all we ended up taking home was a huge heap of seaweed that had washed up on the shore from that nights high tide. The seaweed would be used in the compost pile, which really starts to ...

... as quaint and far more commercial. We booked to go out fishing and for only 63 pounds per person, you could get a 4 hour charter boat complete with with our captain, Phil (who was a typical looking fisherman, all weathered with tatoos and had no problem gutting fish), beginners rods and all the bait necessary. We headed out to a depth of 50m, the standard depth you can catch snapper and trevally. Just the day before, we saw some people ...

At 8.15am we woke up because of people outside the parking. We looked outside and thought, what are this people doing here? Well, 5 minutes later a man knocked on our window telling us, if we could move because they have a market every saturday on this parking. Great!!! So we had to hurry up and left 10 minutes later. We drove to the Kauri Museum (big trees) and had outside first breakfast. At 9.15am we went inside the museum, was really nice and big. We ...

... distance error in the name - 90 miles rather than 55 miles - is due to a man, in the 1800s, overestimating the walking speed of his herd of cows, thinking that they walked 30 miles each day over the three day journey that took them the full length of the Beach. As it turns out they were only walking 18.3 miles per day. Idiot!! The bus we were on was purpose-built for driving on flat, hard, beach sand and we maintained a speed somewhere close to 100k/h most of the way. The route ...

... had some spectacular views and some very nice-looking houses looking out over the water. We made for the end though and Matai Bay where we rejected a campsite in favour of a free stay looking over the beach on the other side. Chicken curry went equally smoothly as the night before (getting confident now!) and we soon fell asleep; Frankie rocked to sleep by a brief wind and rainstorm which passed to leave a beautiful cloudless and very starry sky.

... gefahren und es mir dort auf einem Campingplatz direkt am Ninety Mile Beach gemuetlich gemacht. Der Campingplatz war sehr gut und der Strand natuerlich auch :-) Und natuerlich war ich wieder fast die ganze Zeit komplett alleine mit den Voegeln und dem Strand. Delfine habe ich leider nicht gesehen, egal wie lange ich das Wasser angestarrt habe ;-)

So that night we were to stay with ... wait for it ... Fiona's sister's roomate's fiancée's friend in a beach area near Kaitaia. Yes I think that's right. Got some shopping together to cook them a hearty meal and some beers too (obviously) and set off on the road. Again ... more beautiful scenery. Like all the hills etc look soooo fake. It's just like Lord of the Rings! Got to dudes house and realised the driveway was the ...

... lunch on the sandy beach with the waves washing our feet. They supplied us with scones; raisin or cheese, cookies, granola bars, cheese and crackers, rice crackers and hot or cold drinks. After lunch we passed some kauri tree stumps and stoped ata little convenient store were we got really cheap ice cream "The biggest ice cream cones in the world". Tip top ice cream is famous for being very good and I have to ...