Wellington Journal

North Island Trip: Days 11-13, Coromandel

Having gotten to the top of the island (some of us, at least), it was time to head back down.  The problem with any kind of journey north of Auckland is that you really can’t come up with a looping itinerary: there’s really only one way up and one way down.  You might look at the map on the right and say, “Wait, you could go down the west coast using 12 and take 14 after Dargaville!”  But then I would say, “Thanks, Princess Mapquest, but that route would be less fun than a street full of sheep poop.”  And I can pretty much guarantee it would be, because 1 is the main national highway and it is one lane from Auckland on.  It’s got stop lights and go-slow zones in almost every town it passes, and if you’re really lucky then driving from the top of New Zealand down to the Coromandel peninsula (where we were heading) won’t take too much longer than a full day of driving.  Which it did.

This is not to say it wasn’t gorgeous, because it was.  But it was also what we’d seen already, so I didn’t take any pictures.

Waiau Waterworks

The next day we lazed around for a bit in the morning, and then headed out for the Waiau Waterworks which Fodor’s calls a “quirky playground.”  This, I’m guessing, was edited down from “the playground you’d get if Rube Goldberg collaborated with the guy in your office who emails everyone stupid Internet jokes.”  There are quite a few moving sculptures, mostly operated by water, and a lot of odd playground equipment, much of it we’d never seen elsewhere, interspersed along a long woodsy trail. As you follow this trail, from sculpture garden to playground, you find random bulletin boards and posted signs with information that could only have come from stupidjokesandamazingfacts.com.

The bicycling guy powered by water reminded us of Ben

As did this sign:

Alison LOVED this spinning wheel (though she didn’t really spin)

Katie reads a bulletin board with Internet jokes

Ride ‘em, Cowgirls

To get a real sense of these things, though, you’ve gotta see the videos…

The bedpan water sculpture:

The water-powered clock

If only we’d gotten the video of Sara falling on her butt trying to do this…

Katie on the super-long zip line

And my personal favorite: the ET-like bike ride

Driving Creek Railways & Pottery

On our next day in Coromandel we found another (slightly less odd) hybrid attraction: Driving Creek, the railway / pottery store.  As it turns out, the fellow who bought up the land, and then set up a pottery collective, needed some way to get the mud from one part of his land to the other.  So he built himself a railway.  Now, when the railway isn’t hauling mud (which it still does), it’s giving rides to tourists.

The train’s destination is the “Eyefull [sic] Tower.”  (Anyone who makes puns that bad probably hangs out with the Waterworks Internet Joke guy.)  But it’s an unsurprisingly beautiful vista at the top, and the engineer / artist / owner who bought all the land is making a concerted effort to restore the forest to its original state by replanting kauri trees, so I can’t complain too much.  I think we were all a bit tired at this point, but we enjoyed the train ride.  And then we really enjoyed going back to our room and watching  movies rented from the front desk.

Riding that train…

When your train is built by artists, you’ve got to expect a little sculpture along the trip

Our destination, up above the trees

The View

Heading home to watch Shrek**

These are just a few of the photos from our Coromandel days, go to the Picasa website to see more.

 

** I would be remiss not to mention that this is where Alison first saw the Shrek movies, starting with Shrek III, and fell in love.  She now regularly wants to play “Shek,” and always chooses the character of Shrek for herself.  Katie is allowed to be Fiona, and Megan is usually cast as the donkey.  If I’m lucky, I get to be “baby cookie” (i.e. the gingerbread man).  All of this is set up so that Megan can start singing “On the Road Again,” and Alison can yell, “Stop singing, Donkey!”  This, she believes, is the single most hilarious part of all three Shrek movies.

Labels: North Island trip

posted by Dug @ 4:18 PM