A first for everything....
Trip Start
Feb 11, 2008
1
42
58
Trip End
Jun 30, 2008
Wellington,
North Island,
New Zealand
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
It's hard to believe we have been in NZ for just over a month now, and we've seen so much!! The week after we were WWOOFing we house/dog sat for a well known Kiwi novelist called Kelly Anna Moran, who was off running around the Northland reading to kids in schools (rather her than me) and we had the use of her little home, which was decked out in retro 1950's style furniture - she's rather eccentric!! She even let us have the use of her 1960's MG!! I loved driving that, it was a lot like driving a little go-cart around the winding country lanes of New Zealand.
Since then, we have bought ourselves a van (called Tilly, a 1985 Toyota TownAce van, named after my late grandmother who was also bloody stubborn, but reliable) in which we can see so much more of the islands. It's the only way to travel here, it means you can get off the beaten track and explore some of the remotest beaches, forests, mountains and delightful countryside this country has to offer. Once we'd kitted Tilly out with the necessaries, we hit the road and headed north where we got away from the busy highway and found a delightful sandy beach running for 4 miles along the northeast coast. After an hour long walk we drove on towards Whangarei where we stayed at the best campsite we have been to on this leg of the trip.
Tilly, Our lovely Van
It had a FREE Spa (hot tub) which we used for the evening. Every campsite here has a fully fitted kitchen for campers use and usually a TV lounge, where you can make sure you don't miss your weekly fix of "Bones"!!!The town of Whangarei had a pretty good waterfall and a nice hour long walk to a Kaori tree forest. Some of these trees are huge, and are hundreds of years old. We left Whangarei and headed west toward Dargaville as we had heard on the TV that the weather was going to turn for the worst, so we bolted westwards to avoid the heavy rain. Sadly, we failed and for 3 days it rained almost constantly, which was interesting enough as we were driving through the deep bush on the west coast, along steep, winding roads through hail and high water!!
The idea had been to make our way back eastwards toward the Bay of Islands, where we'd been told was some of the most delightful countryside in the Norhlands. Unfortunatley, we saw none of it as the weather refused to break, but that didn't stop us going kayaking along a rather swollen river for an hour! That night though, if at all possible, the weather worsened - we were told it was some of the worst weather they'd had for months and I was going to punch the next Kiwi in the face who said to us " uh, you shoulda been here in the summer, mate, we had the best weather for as long as I can remember up until a week ago, 'ey!" (Kiwis end EVERY sentence with "'ey!", drives me bloody mad, and they're so bloody fit too, they never walk anywhere, they run, and if they are walking, they always have to walk so fast!!)
So, after getting Tilly stuck in the mud at the last campsite we were at and flooding the engine with petrol as I was revving her too much in order to get out of the miasma the campsite had become, we headed south again toward Auckland as the weather forecast ahd predicted better weather to the south.
Lou Lou, Warkworth
Off we plodded along Highway 1 and we stopped at a little town called Waiwera, where we sat in a natural spa pool resort for the afternoon while it continued to rain. The next day though, the sun came out and we ran southwards with all haste into warmth and sunlight! We stayed that night at another spa resort area called Miranda, where the campsite had a large pool heated by the hot water springs leaking from underground! Pretty cool! The plan from there was to follow the coastline to Coromandel and drive along the west coast all the way around to the hot water beaches near Whitianga, but it was so cold that we decided to keep our clothes on and wait until the next day to dig our hole in the sand and let the hot water from under the ground fill it!! The day after, the sun made a comeback and for days we actually went for a walk without our fleeces. We took a stroll along the coast through some native bush to Cathedral Cove, a white sandy beach with a natural cave arch in the cliff through which you can access another lovely, white sanded beach. It was delightful and very relaxing just to sit in the sun and enjoy the sound of the waves breaking on the shoreline! This is what it was all about!!
We followed the line of the coast around to the beach resort town of Tuaranga, but before we got there, we spent our first night in one of the DOC (Department of Conservation) campsites, a rudimentary camground with long drop toilets, running water taken from the spring and a fabulous walk along the fast flowing river to the head of the watrefall.
Some sort of jellyfish?
This walk took us 3 hours, there and back, but the waterfall was amazing and it was in full flood due to the amount of rain we'd had. Tuaranga was meant to be my chance to get into the waves and try my hand at surfing in New Zealand, but unfortunatley, it proved impossible for me to find anybody who would hire a board or give me any lessons, so dissapointed, we drove on to the incredibly stinky town of Roturua. Just north of the town is a buried village, www.buriedvillage.co.nz, which was practically destroyed by the eruption of a nearby volcano in 1886. Today, you can walk around the excavated and rebuilt remains of the colonial town, but for us, the most interesting part of the experience was enjoying the 1/2 hour guided tour of the museum by a local Maori guide, who was the grandchild of the Maori chief who had taken refuge in the Whare (meeting house) during the eruption which killed 123 people.
The musueum exhibits were great, as well as the talk given by the guide (and his song) but for me the wierdest moment was when he told us about what happened to the remains of the whare his grandfather sheltered in. The beautifully carved remains were transported to none other that Guildford in Surrey, where today they stand in the grounds of Clandon Park, West Clandon, near Guildford, and I remember seeing the same building as a kid in the grounds of the park! http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-clandonpark/w-clandonpark-photo_gallery.htm The fact that this building saved the lives of so many of the villagers, as well as the grandfather of the guy who was telling us the story, was not lost on us, but the guide had never seen the same whare as it is now in a park on the other side of the world, but I had! A wierd circle, to have come half way around the world and be stood in the ruined village where a house once stood which I'd seen at home!
The day after, we drove through the sulphurous smelling town of Roturua (stinks of rotten eggs) and headed southwards towards the Tongariro National Park.
Tony on a beach full of shells
The rain followed us, but once we'd parked up next to the information centre in Whakapapa (pronounced fuckapapa - I kid you not - "wh" is pronounced as "f" in Maori, so nearly every town has a wh in it's name, which means a lot of swear words!!!) the watery sun made a show and finally broke through the clouds enabling a walk along the torrnetial Whakapapanui river running from the mountain ranges into the bogs lower down. We were here in order to walk the Tongariro Crossing, an eight hour hike over the Tongariro volcano ranges, so we were hoping for good wether. The next day the weather was not so good, so we opted to wait until the day after, but we took a ski lift to the peak of mount Ruapehu, the highest of the three volcanoes in the park. This was my first time on a ski lift and as I hate heights, i was bricking it half way up the mountainside, to find that i was actually enjoying having 50 foot of air beneath my dangling boots to the jagged volcanic rocks below me!!
The 1 1/2 hour hike to the ridgline was knackering, but the view from the top across either side of the mountain and toward the conical shape of the volcano next to us was breath taking - we were at 2100 ft above sea level! So, as we were the only people on the mountain that day, and in true Goring-Norman style, we stripped down to our matching stripey thermals and posed for the camera on top of a live volcano - as you do!! (photos to come shortly!!)
The following day the weather changed, so at 7am we were stood waiting for the coach to take 18 of us to the foot fo the crossing to be picked up 8 hours later on the other side! The day was beautiful, and although it was cold due to the altitude we were at only 1800 ft, at the top, the sun was beating down on us, making rivers of sweat run down our faces as we plodded our way up the stepp paths towards the first stop, the Red Crater.
Whangarei Falls
It was here that we bumped into a couple from Switzerland we had met back at the campsite in Whangaei who had shared the hot tub with us and another traveller! (What a small world, in fact I was to find out that it is even smaller as the van parked next to us at the campsite we stayed at that night was being rented and driven by a girl who works behind the bar in the pub called The Farmers, which is in the village of Skaynes Hill, where my brother lives and where I'd stayed last summer while I was teaching in Brighton. When she stepped out of her van during a conversation I was having with her boyfriend, we were amazed to recognise each other, as I'd chatted to her when I had been in the pub back in England!!)We may have been struggling up the steep sides of the volcano, but there were families with kids as young as 5 or six, dressed in shorts and t-shirtts, practically running up the side of the volcano! Bloody Kiwis, always have to go one better!! The Red Crater and the view was out of this world, well worth the ten minute tea brak we had at the top. Although the walk along the ridge and eventually down the other side of the volcano took us three hours, we finally made it back to the car park on the other side six and a half hours later; sore, bruised, knackered and swearing never to do it again! It was awesome!!!
That night, as we were washing the dishes from dinner, Jo and I jumped six feet in the air with a scream as a bloody mouse leapt from it's hiding place in the kitchen, straight for our throats, before it landed in the soapy water amongst our dirty dishes, where it proceeded to do fifty laps of the sink trying to get out.
Tony with a praymantus on our bag
Being a masculine chap I decided to let Jo tackle the mouse as thoughts of viels disease and disease infested rabid Kiwi field mice went through my head. With a look of disdain and several rude derogatory words thrown in my direction, Jo grabbed a saucepan and lid and scooped the offending rodent up, clamped on the lid and headed outside to let "Jerry" go free!! Aching in every part of our bodies (i still ache now), we drove south westward to the town of Wanganui in order to stay at a campsite where we knew they had a hot tub! Wanganui was just like a mid American town, the kind of place you see on TV, wooden houses and buildings built on a grid system, very un European, but impossible to get lost in!! After our soak and a breather for the night, we decided to book our crossing to the South Island on Wednesday 30th April,which cost $200 (about 80 quid) for us and Tilly. With that in mind, we trotted off southwards towards Wellington where we could relax before we sail on Wednesday. We hope to be astounded with the "Lord of the Rings" scenery in the South Island we have been promised, so we'll be updating soon along with photos of the trip over the last week or so!
TTFN
