Note: We have a pretty crappy internet connection right now. I will add pictures when we have a better connection.
Spence
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Next stop, Coopers Beach, a small town on Doubtless Bay in the north end of the North Island. We stayed at one of the nicest accommodations we’ve found yet, a small apartment below the home of an older retired couple. The house was right on the beach, with beautiful gardens surrounding the house and a nice deck from which to enjoy breakfast overlooking the bay. Our first day there we drove a couple hours further north to the end of Cape Reinga, the farthest northern point open to the public and the sight of a lovely old lighthouse. It is also where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean and we were led to believe that there would be a significant churning of water at this point, much like on Cape Hatteras, but the water was calm with little evidence of big currents crashing into one another. We did a short hike down to the beach on the western edge of the point before heading back to Coopers Beach for an excellent Thai dinner overlooking the water.
On day two we drove out to the Karikari Peninsula, an L-shaped peninsula that creates the Doubtless Bay, sheltering it from the Pacific Ocean. We did a very short, very steep walk up to the top of another old hill/volcano, Puheke Hill, with a beautiful 360 degree view, then drove further down the peninsula for another long walk down a deserted Karikari Beach. Then back to enjoy a lovely sunset from the deck.
Then next day, before driving to Hokianga Harbour, we stopped at Ancient Kauri Kingdom. Here they drag out 30,000+ year old Kauri stumps from the swamps near by and fashion them into furniture and other wood products for sale to tourists. Kauri trees are conifers like our sequoias – they grow very old and very large but are close to extinction. It is basically illegal to cut down living kauris, so in the Cape Reinga area, they’ve found lots of old intact stumps. At this store, they had placed a trunk between the first and second floors and then carved a staircase inside the stump. It was quite beautiful, as was much of the furniture, if you don’t mind paying $4500 for a coffee table.
From there, we headed south and inland, to stop at the Ngawha Springs. Now this is a hot springs like no other I’ve seen. As our guidebook says, Sanford & Sons meets thermal resort. There were a number of wood plank lined hot pools, and again, I quote, “ with oddly named and oddlier-colored soaking pools.” It cost $4 to get in and had no showers and no toilet paper in the bathroom, and the walkways were lined with embedded bottle caps. Think Maori meets hippie. I enjoyed it but I think it may have been a bit more “rustic” than Spencer preferred – I think the film on the top of the water made him a bit uncomfortable. Or it could have been that sign in the changing room telling you not to put your head in the water due to the danger of amoebic meningitis. Can’t imagine what he was worrying about! Smelling very strongly of sulphur, we piled back in the car and headed back to the western cost to Omapere on the Hokianga Harbour.
This time we had rented a somewhat tired holiday home that had a most incredible view of the harbor out to the Tasman Sea, and with a perfect view of the sunset. The next morning we drove down to see the Waipoua Forest Kauris. This reserve is home to the big ones – huge, big kauris. The big ones have names, with the largest about a ten minute walk from the road – Tane Mahuta. It is between 1200 and 2500 years old and is 45 feet in girth and 168 feet tall. Unlike a sequoia, the trunks of these trees don’t taper much and they are shorter, with lots of big, fat branches shooting out, in this case at 58 feet up. They are really impressive. But there are very few left and they are plagued with a fungal problem and lack of habitat, as so much of the North Island is pasture. The North Island’s native habitat is like a tropical rainforest, and it’s very hard to imagine that the sheep paddocks everywhere were once that kind of forest. It’s a real shame but we humans just seem to do that. We spent much of the day doing the various tourist walks to see the big kauris and it was really time well spent. The next day we did a short walk on the Waiotemarama Bush Walk (yes, most of their place names are impossible to pronounce!), but due to rain and falling leaves and inadequate footwear, it was too slippery and so we headed back to the car after seeing the lovely waterfall.
We drove through Dargaville, the “NZ Kumara Capital” (you know it’s not too interesting when its main claim to fame is the sweet potato), and on to Matakohe, where we stayed at a lovely bed and breakfast way, way out in the middle of farm country, with nothing but rolling green hills, cows and sheep. This B & B was owned by a Kiwi lady and her French husband. They had lived for thirty years in France before “retiring” here 10 years earlier. He had taken up ironmaking/sculpture and his specialty was very modern and astoundingly comfortable metal chairs – looked like Picasso had a hand in these. He used swamp kauri for seats. They were lovely but too modern for our style. We had a lovely talk into the evening with the owners and a young couple on their honeymoon. She was from California and he was from Germany and he was doing stem cell research on Alzheimer and Parkinsons, and they lived in Germany. We got a long tour of the iron studio, where the husband had his forge, etc. The next day, we headed to the Kauri museum in town. The hostess had warned us about this museum, and her warnings proved to be correct. It was actually a wonderful museum, big with lots of gorgeous old kauri furniture, kauri gum (amber) carvings, lots of history of the logging and gum digging operations, etc. But nowhere did they mention or acknowledge that all of this industriousness had effectively wiped out the kauri trees. It was as if there were no consequences to all of this history. It was a bit odd and a bit disturbing to me. After some meat pies (a New Zealand obsession), we headed off back to Auckland.