Wellington Journal

North Island Trip: Days 9-10, Kaitaia & Cape Reinga

After a wonderful full day touring the Bay of Islands out of Russell we drove north to Kaitaia.  The trip was fine for all of us except Megan, who got sick half-way through.  She persevered, though, and after a lunch stop along the northwest coast of the “northland” (as the Kiwi call it), we made it to our bed and breakfast just south of Kaitaia.

On both of our trips (South, then North Island), we’ve stayed at plenty of very nice places, with very nice people.  Probably our favorite hosts, though, were Jenna & Polly.  Mike & Rosemary, actually… Jenna & Polly are the golden retrievers who live with them.  Alison was, by turns, enraptured and horrified by these two lovable, but quite active, doggies.  “Do you remember Jenna and Polly?” was a common out-of-the-blue question from Ali for the rest of the trip (and well into the weeks following).

Sara had originally planned (through Mike) an all-day bus trip for all of us from Kaitaia up to the very tip-top northernmost point of the North Island, Cape Reinga.  With Megan feeling sick, though, we decided to limit that excursion to just Katie & Sara, and thus spared ourselves the horror of a day-long bus ride with a two-year-old.  Megan, Alison & I stayed home, which means I can’t give a very good description of what happened.  (Though I well remember the fact that with Megan reading in the back room, and Alison down for her nap, I was able to listen to my own music!  It was a momentous occasion.)

Therefore, after a few pictures of the trip to Kaitaia and our gracious hosts, I’ll leave it to Sara & Katie to fill in the details…

One things about NZ trips: when you have to pull to the side of the road because one of your children just barfed, at least the scenery is usually quite nice.

We got to watch some avian fighting while stopped for lunch

Our very wonderful hosts from the Plane Tree Lodge

Katie & Sara’s Excellent Adventure to the End of the Island

The bus trip starts by driving up the so-called Ninety Mile Beach (it’s actually only 60 miles long).  It’s massive—this wide stretch of beautiful beach that goes forever.  There are several tour buses that do the route, and some brave(read: stupid) travelers take their own cars.  Standard road rules apparently apply.  Our tour bus guy was a fairly typical tour bus guy—he thought he was funny, a lot of the older people on the bus thought he was funny, but from a purely factual point of view (ours), he was not.  We are going to do OUR blog post differently, interspersing our narrative with photos, so let the eye feast begin.

Our trip begins!

Looking out from where Katie is standing, there is this amazing rock formation.  I’m sure it has an official name, but we simply call it…

Holy rock

Looking the other direction from Katie, you get a sense of the terrain up here.  Sand, sand everywhere.  These absolutely gorgeous dunes with grass, trees, and other vegetation growing on them.  Scenery made for screensavers.

 

We love our family, we really do, but it was SO nice to have this day to ourselves.  This is us in front of our Sand Safaris bus.  We were troublemakers, always the last ones back on the bus because we were busy taking silly pictures, getting hot chocolate, buying ice cream.  Here we are…

Intrepid explorers

One of the highlights of the trip was the stop at the sand dunes, where anyone who wanted to could borrow a sled, haul their butts to the top of this massive dune, and go slip slidin’ away.  Katie got extra lucky and found a new/old boyfriend up top (if you look closely, you can see the delight on her face).  She made it to the bottom, and we managed to give the old guy the slip.  We both went down three times; the climb up was really rough, and we were seriously tired out afterwards. 

Sand sledding

 

This is my artsy-fartsy shot.  Pretty nice, eh?  We were really quite stunned by the beauty of the sand dunes.  It inspired me to get my family down to the Sand Dunes National Monument when we get back to Colorado.  Nothing like going half-way around the world to get your priorities straight.

We got back on the bus for another hour or so before winding our way down to this lovely bay where we had lunch.  It was a cold and fairly windy day, so we just huddled up and enjoyed the scenery.  The feet shot is yet another example of my budding photographic talent.  Four feet is a heck of a lot less (and more manageable) than the usual ten.

 

 

After lunch, we headed for the top!  The walk down to the lighthouse has apparently been really built up in the last ten years or so; there were lots of signs on the way down, and the path was lovely.  But it was really windy and cold and started raining.  If it weren’t the amazing view, we would have been miserable.  The lighthouse itself was fairly standard, but the fact that we were standing at the top of the country and looking out across the Tasman Sea to the west and the Pacific Ocean was pretty breathtaking.  I love the idea of being able to look out over the meeting of two massive bodies of water. 

Cape Reinga Lighthouse

Looking to the east, we could see the actual tip of New Zealand.  It’s obviously inaccessible, but it was nice to be able to look at it.

Then there’s The Tree.  This is so amazing.  From the New Zealand Encyclopedia:  “It is a pohutukawa tree and, according to ancient lore it was the final departure point for the spirit of the Maori.  It was said that the spirit, after travelling up the west coast to a spot a few miles south of Cape Maria van Diemen, continued overland to the western end of Spirits Bay and eventually reached the pohutukawa tree. There it descended the roots and entered the sea. (This tree is reputed to have been in position for about 800 years and is said never to have blossomed.) The spirit surfaced at Manawatawi (the Great King Island) and, after a farewell look at the land of the living, descended again to the depths and continued its journey to the other world.”  And it’s so photogenic to boot!  Yea for The Tree!  Go Pohutukawa!

And this is us.  We are not dead, so we will not go the route of the Pohutukawa.  Instead, we will go get ice cream (oooh, foreshadowing…)!

 

This is the most important photo of the entire North Island trip.  This ice cream symbolizes our love of ice cream.  It was The Epitome of Love and Ice Cream (flavors: Lime and Boysenberry).  Just typing it gives us shivers.  I was skeptical of the combination, but man oh man.  (Note:  we stopped in a tiny town at a tiny dairy and most of the people on the bus went in to get ice cream.  We were not going to get ice cream, but then it looked so good, so we snuck off the bus and got in line.  We were the naughty naughty people who made the rest of the bus wait, and we will NEVER regret it.)

 

The final stop of the day was at the Gumdigger Village/Kauri Forest.  One of the early industries in this part of the island was gumdigging—extracting gum from ancient Kauri trees.  Kauri trees are massive.  They’re just huge.  Dug at this point would go to the internet and find some factual information to share, maybe add a little “hyperlink”, but we prefer not to do that.  So, instead, we present…  Boots!  And a little hut!  Yay!

It’s a jungle out there…

Before we left the Gumdiggers village, we spotted these cute little ponies.  They were just irresistible, so we went over to have a look.  “Oh, look, mom, the cute little pony!  AAAA!”  It was an electric fence.  We decided the day just wasn’t complete until someone got electrocuted, and this is photographic evidence (I took the picture just as her butt decided to touch the fence).  Apparently it really hurt, but it was so dang funny I had a hard time conjuring up any sympathy. 

 

Fortunately, the Fence Incident of 2009 didn’t do any permanent damage, and the day ended with Katie just as beautiful as when it started.

 

Thank you for your time and patience.  We hope you have enjoyed the guest bloggership provided by Katie and Sara.  And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming (Dug).

 

And as always, if you’re interested, we put more pictures from these couple of days up on our Picasa website.

posted by Dug @ 8:28 PM