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Dargaville & Matakohe, NZ
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We managed to be up, breakfasted, packed away and on the road before 10am, a real achievement for us! A few km's down the road yay! I got a signal. We rung Sam and was able to wish her a good one whilst it was still her birthday.
Onto Dargaville. This is a fairly large town and we went to a museum just on the outskirts. It was big and had the sail masts from the Rainbow Warrior in their garden. This museum had a really good section on the Gum Digging Years and a large marine section as well as other collectables. We were there for ages, it was well worth a visit.
We stopped in Dargaville for lunch, we splashed out and had Chinese. It was ok, but we still haven't found anywhere that does a really good Chinese meal.
We stuck to SH.12 and headed for Matakohe. Here there was two things, the Kauri & Pioneer Museum and our Top 10 site. We did the museum first. It was $15 each in (I later found out that we would have got in for $12 if we'd shown our Top 10 membership!) This was a huge place. We walked to the back and worked our way to the front. The first displays were of pioneers and the engines that they brought over and used to make tasks easier. The models were of actual people who helped maintain the equipment for the museum and are descendants of the first settlers, cool.
The next section was a working display of the machine they used to cut and mill the Kauri trees. The section after held examples of the goods that were made out of Kauri and they had rooms set up that depicted the lives of various trades at the time. Near the end there was a display of the Kauri gum. There was loads of it in various stages, just as it came out of the ground right through to carved and polished trinkets and jewellery. It was all very interesting and took us about two hours to go round.
We then got to the site, which again was very pretty. This one had WI-FI, woo hoo! We got an hour just so that we could check e-mails and let everyone know our address at the farm. We're hoping to get a few Crimbo cards to remind us that we have friends who miss us and think of us back home.
We got chatting to Neil, Kate and Rachael who were all from Yorkshire and Amy, who's and artist and is travelling alone she's also from Yorkshire. We're taking over!!
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