Whananaki

A homestay sort of in the middle of nowhere. I'd ear-marked this ages ago as a place to pause for a few days and I'm very glad I did. I have done virtually nothing since arriving except stroll about the garden, strum the harp occasionally, read a bit and eat my host's excellent cooking!
We did go fishing for a couple of hours down on the rocks by the sea yesterday evening but, sadly, didn't catch anything!

Paihia - Bay of Islands

Small seaside town, bit touristy I suppose... Lots of Dutch here for some reason... Took a boat trip out into the Bay of Islands for the morning. This was fascinating solong as the islands offered protection BUT once we hit open sea - with a big, long swell - I did rather regret it! Still, we followed a pod of quite big dolphins, which was quite fun. The water is very clear everywhere, so one sees them underwater as well as bobbing out. The trip out to Piercy Rock (and the dash thru the hole in the middle) did NOT do my stomach any good. I am definitely glad I did not assay whale watching! But I had a lovely lunch (after an extended walkabout to calm things) in Russell, just across the bay, sitting in the shade of some tree or other right down by the strand, watching the ferries come in and out...

Birthday? What birthday? lol !!

Well, sadly my birthday was spent getting from A to B - one big day's driving and a rather pokey motel room at the end of it! But I DID get to see the biggest Kauri tree in the world (I think). Certainly it is the biggest in NZ and pretty ancient too - at nearly 2000 yrs. Very impressive with a tremendous energy field round it. Pictures will follow one of these days...

The next day too the bus up '90 Mile Beach' (actually only 64 miles long). The bus actually drives along the sand, just above the water line, passing the odd remains of vehicles that didnt quite make it... The drive takes one all the way up to Cape Reinga - the top of NZ - where one can see the Pacific Ocean meeting the Tasman Sea: quite turbulent even on the clear calm day that this was!

Cheese

New Zealand does not have quite the same variety of cheesy substance we have in the UK. There are, of course, many variants on the cheddar theme, but things get interesting when you hunt for, say, feta: I have seen three different types of 'feta' and none of them have borne much relation to the crumbly, white, greek product that I'm used to! One was a semi-soft, yellow cheese, one was a very salty 'crumbly' cheese (that was so hard one nearly needed a hammer to break it up and so salty one had to soak it in water first!) and the third one just wasn't anything in particular... Camemberts are also interesting, usually bright 'cheddar' yellow inside and not always soft-centred... Still, I'm not complaining - this is what travel is all about... But perhaps there's an opening for someone who knows about, say, goat-farming...

Auckland

Arrived in Auckland on Friday. Staying in the very pleasant, respectable, leafy suburb of Grey Lynn in a house that is delightfully bohemian and cluttered... books everywhere; rugs on the walls; a large wooden dolls house taking up half the hall; and a rapturous welcome from a slightly over-weight fox terrier...

The city itself is a bit soulless tho - pretty much like modern cities everywhere, the combination of old and new architecture not always sitting harmoniously side by side... It's all VERY hilly (San Francisco springs to mind), with houses being built on slopes that would make a UK buildings inspector blanch! But of course here most of the houses are wooden, so are just on stilts. If they want an extra floor on the house, they simply jack up the old (generally single-storey) structure and slot a few more rooms underneath - and sometimes the people carry on living in the house while this is going on! There's a lot to be said for timber-framed buildings!!!

Today (Monday) I'm headed off north again...

Coromandel

Drove up to Coromandel after Rotorua. I have to say the drive did not grab me terribly- the novelty of hairpin bends wore off some time ago and every town/village was sea-side/surfing oriented.
Coromandel itself, however, was fine and I found myself a very pleasant motel up the coast a bit overlooking the bay. Spent a morning following a little road to nowhere, with a beach and some houses at the end. A wonderful old tree had semi-collapsed-grown down onto the beach and formed a sort of cave - magical. Then in the afternoon I did the touristy thing and went for a ride on the Driving Creek Pottery railway. NZ potter Barry Brickell originally built this crazy, small guage railway to collect clay from the hillside, but it seems to have been extended over the years and now winds and zigzags its way up the hillside, through native forest up to the 'Eyeful Tower' (NZ seems to be full of such puns...). An hour's round trip and actually very enjoyable. Looking down into the crown of a tree fern is amazing, with all the leaves radiating out...

Inside a volcano...