Originally, our plan for the North Island trip was going to take us out around the Bay of Plenty and the East Cape, but things were getting weary and everyone was ready to be home, and Sara suggested we give up the extra-scenic tour for a quicker journey home. (I quickly agreed. Thank you, sweetie.) This had the added advantage of allowing us to see Taupo again, but this time in the daylight. So we chose a few way-points, such as the straightforwardly-named hot water beach just south of Coromandel Town (B), and Taupo (C), where we stayed the night. We got there in time to see the lake, but only just barely: it was almost dark and after dinner we fell right asleep. The next morning we woke up early and headed home for Wellington (E), stopping on the way in Napier/Hastings (D), which is like Minneapolis/St. Paul, except much, much smaller and located in New Zealand.
Here’s how it looked on the journey home:
Hot Water Beach
I’m sorry to admit that I took a pass on Hot Water Beach and went for the nap-in-the-car option instead. In my defense, I drove for literally the entire trip, with the one exception being once during our stay in Coromandel Town when Sara drove to the nearest take-out place only to find it was three blocks away. So I had a little car-nap coming to me. But by all reports, Hot Water Beach lived up to its name: it’s a beach where you can dig a little in the sand and it’ll start filling with hot water. Meanwhile, a few meters away is the Pacific Ocean, which is decidedly not hot water. This particular geological oddity is a big tourist attraction though, so the beach itself was pretty crowded. Here, take a look:
Kiwis enjoying their Hot Water Beach as if it were beach weather…
… and what the weather was really like
We did have some breaks along the way to Taupo, and I got in a few shots. As did Sara, obviously.
I don’t look that bad in a beard in this shot
Pacific Coastline
Napier / Hastings
We only stayed for a couple of hours in Napier because we wanted to get home to Wellington before I was sleeping at the wheel. I even managed to convince Sara to forgo Hastings, which is so close to Napier that they almost have the same name. (Thank you again, sweetie.) But we did enjoy the park that we found in Napier, we had a good lunch, and as we drove further south we really started to see the fall colors. Which was a little odd for us, seeing as how this was the end of April.
Excited to be out of the car
Standing over the Port of Napier
You’ve got to stop and hear the flowers
Starting to see those Fall Colors
Yep, definitely fall
As usual, you can see more pictures of our last few days heading back on our Picasa website. But this marks the end of our North Island trip. I have plenty of other great pics from just the regular days in between trips (and a few smaller trips around the area) here in Wellington, but we’re moving out on Sunday, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get to them all. But I owe it to my mom, so I’ll try, dear reader, I’ll try.
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.
I’m pretty good with driving on the wrong side of the road now, but there are a few things that still throw me. One of those is: as you move north, the weather gets warmer. Thus, it’s in the northern parts of the North Island that you’ll find your Kiwi beach towns, my favorite of which – by far – was Russell.
We journeyed north from Auckland towards Russell using the same map that Google provided on the right here. But that, it turns out, was the wrong map. Luckily, Sara had learned from the guide books that the last bit of the drive, though the only over-land route, was long and boring and to be avoided at all costs. Instead, we took the ten-minute ferry from Opua to Okaito and had a lovely ride (see map below). I’m fairly certain that this is the first time Google has been wrong ever.
Russell is one of the main tourist towns in what’s known as the “Bay of Islands.” According to Wikipedia, it used to be a rough-and-tumble place whose reputation was so bad that they couldn’t put the colonial capital there, even though it was the obvious choice. There’s precious little sign of that now, though. More than anything, it reminded me of a small seaside town in Massachusetts, maybe, but with fewer Kennedys.
We stayed at a pleasant motel for two nights; Sara had booked us on a boat tour of the Bay of Islands during the intervening day. Originally, she’d planned to have us stay longer, but the nicer hotels or B&Bs were booked, which all turned out for the best because, as much as I liked the town of Russell, the B&B we stayed at next was certainly our favorite of the trip.
Our first evening in Russell provided a beautiful, if cloudy, sunset which we watched from one of the many restaurants along the beach. Katie read Harry Potter VII to Megan while Sara played with Ali by the water and I drank a pint of northland brew and marveled at the awesomeness of my life.
The next day was our full-day boat trip around the Bay of Islands called the “Cream Trip.” The name sounds odd until yo learn that the trip follows the same route that the milk run once did, and in fact still delivers packages to summer residents. One highlight of the Cream Trip is visiting “The Hole in the Rock,” which certainly lives up to its name. The water was too rough for us to be able to actually ride through the hole in the rock, but we did get to stop at a quiet beach for a picnic, a glass-bottomed boat fish-feeding tour (for Katie & I) and a tramp up along the ridges overlooking the ocean (for Megan & Sara). They brought us back before dark and then we headed across the small main street to enjoy probably the best homemade pasta meal I’ve had most anywhere (Gannets, by the way, if you’re planning a trip).
There is no doubt that if we lived year-round in New Zealand, we’d be planning a week-long family holiday in Russell. I can’t think of a better place in the northland to spend one.
Close-up of the Bay of Islands
Flowers outside of our motel, town hall in the background
Russell Pier Panorama
A building is Russell’s “downtown”
The sun goes down in Russell
Heading out for the Bay of Islands “Cream Trip”
Classic Bay of Islands Shoreline
The aptly named “Hole in the Rock”
Our picnic beach
Rare shot of Sara & Dug together… alone!
I can’t get enough of these Bay of Island shoreline shots
You can find plenty more Russell / Bay of Island shots up on our Picasa website.
We spent our third night of the trip in Hamilton, a small but pleasant college town just about in the middle of the North Island, north-to-south, though it feels more northern. One of Katie’s best Boulder friends had lived in Hamilton not too many years ago, so Katie was on a quest to get a picture of herself in front of her friend’s old house. So before we headed out to Auckland, we wandered the neighborhoods of Hamilton for a bit until our objective was achieved. Success!
Hamilton Gardens
Before we left we also visited the Hamilton Gardens. This would seem an excellent place to point out how fantastic it is to have someone who actually researches trips, reads guide books, plans itineraries, etc as part of your family vacation. I’m not completely deficient in this area (the trip to Sydney that Katie & I took wasn’t completely without planning), but Sara is certainly the master. Had it not been for Sara, I’m pretty sure there’s no way we’d have ended up going to the Hamilton Gardens. And as much as I’m pleased with our gardens here in Wellington, I must admit that the Hamilton Gardens are superior.
The part of the gardens we visited is called the “Paradise Garden Collection” and it reminded me most of the World Showcase at EPCOT Center. There are six separate and completely different gardens in the Paradise Collection, each representing a particular garden style in a particular place at a particular time. We first visited the Japanese Garden of Contemplation, then the Chinese Scholars Garden, followed by the Italian Renaissance Garden, the English Flower Garden, and finally the American Modernist Garden. (The Indian Char Garden was closed, unfortunately, due to vandalism.)
I was completely wowed by the first three gardens (I was on grumpy baby duty for the English Flower Garden, and all of us were underwhelmed by the American Modernist Garden—blech), and particularly interested in the different between the Japanese and Chinese gardens, something I’d never have been able to describe before visiting, but which became self-evident simply by walking through them and appreciating the flowers, the layout, the design. There were a few helpful signs with background information, etc, but it’s really best just to be in them, walk through them, experience them to understand, and that’s what the Hamilton Gardens provide. Kudos to Hamilton.
NOTE: My insistence that the only way to really understand these gardens is to actually experience them won’t keep me from showing you pictures of each. Sorry.
Japanese Garden of Contemplation
Contemplation Happening (mostly)
Chinese Scholars’ Garden
Italian Renaissance Garden
English Garden
We spent the next two days in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and on those two days we visited two major attractions: the Auckland Sky Tower and Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter & Underwater World. Both were interesting and fun, but only the Sky Tower will live in family legend forever. And that’s just because of…
The Sky Tower Man!!!
I’ve been in my share of iconic man-made viewing structures (the Empire State Building, Seattle’s Space Needle, etc), so I didn’t have high hopes of this being much different. Like the Space Needle, Auckland’s Sky Tower was built as a restaurant and an observation deck. Unlike the Space Needle, the Sky Tower is all about scaring the beejebus out of acrophobics. That’s not me, luckily, so I was more than happy to go stamping around on the clear plexiglass 1,000 feet above the ground. Others in the family did not find this as amusing as I did. But eventually we all got into the game of leaning out against the clear panels and looking straight down. For my money, all big towers should have this feature. (You can also pay to walk around the top of the tower and then bungy jump off the side, but Sara put the kibosh on that idea. Oh, well.)
The important part of the visit, though, was what happened to Alison. She was cheerfully running around, acting like the two-year-old she is and generally ignoring everybody who didn’t come directly into her path (and a few who did), when Scotty, the Sky Tower mascot, came off the elevator. Scotty spotted Alison, went to her, bent down in a completely friendly, non-threatening manner, and said “hello.” Alison turned around and … completely flipped out. I wasn’t there, but I’m told it was a scream to end all screams, something never before witnessed from any of our daughters at any age. Scotty (or “the Sky Tower Man,” as Alison now calls him) was of course apologetic and immediately plied her with chocolate treats, which seemed to defuse the situation. But to this day (and I’m writing this two months later), the Sky Tower Man tops the list of scary things in Ali’s imagination, and she’ll regularly mention him out of the blue. I’ve included a picture of him below and you’re welcome to look… if you dare!
The Auckland Sky Tower doing its sky-towering thing
Is that a target for jumpers?
Auckland’s a pretty big city
Goofing around in the Sky Tower
Megan! Watch out! The Sky Tower Man’s behind you!
There are no small number of penguin-themed attractions around New Zealand, and if Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter & Underwater World isn’t the best, well, at least it probably has the longest name. It also has penguin tetherball, penguin suits, and a special penguin race-track. Which was pretty much all we needed.
Penguin Tetherball
Mommy Penguin and her three Little Penguins
Sisters Race
And because you really need to see it to believe it…
Sara reminds me that these two attractions weren’t the only things we did in Auckland, but admittedly the rest of our days there were less exciting than what you see above: we shopped at Victoria Markets, walked in some nearby parks, read, did laundry, and so on. The one event that I’m sorry I didn’t get photographic evidence of was Meg’s dip in our hotel pool which, seeing as how it was an outdoors pool, was freeeeeeeezing. Even the hotel owners came out to watch when that happened.
[Back again to the details of our North Island Trip, which we took mid-April during the girls’ mid-term break.]
There’s a hilarious scene in one of the episodes from the first season of The Flight of the Conchords where a stranger says he loves Bret & Jemaine’s act because pretending you’re from “some nowhere place nobody knows anything about, like New Zealand” is pure comic genius.
Jemaine: But we are from New Zealand.
Stranger: Oh, right. No, really, I love New Zealand. I mean, Lord of the Rings, am I right!? And uh, … hobbits and stuff. And … Lord of the Rings. [pause] But hey, don’t let me bore you with all my knowledge of New Zealand!
We got a similar reaction from folks when we told them we’d be living in NZ for several months. Heck, I think that was pretty much my reaction when Sara suggested the sabbatical in the first place. But for a country whose current most widely-known claim to fame is being the backdrop for Lord of the Rings, there are surprisingly few vestiges of Middle Earth left here. You can take any number of LoTR tours, but all the guides can do is point out a meadow or a mountain or a river and say, “now try to imagine that Frodo and Gandalf…”
This was actually intentional. The agreement that Peter Jackson reached with the New Zealand government was that they’d leave no trace of the filming behind. Everything that was built was torn down; everything dug up or taken away was put back. In one case, though, the plan wasn’t completely carried out. The Alexander family farm outside of Matamata, which stood in for Hobbiton, Frodo & Bilbo’s home village, was hit by a fierce winter storm before the sets could be completely dismantled. The movie company pledged to return to finish the job in the spring, but in the meantime friends and neighbors asked to see the remaining set, and the Alexanders decided it might be worth keeping. Several years of legal wrangling later the Hobbiton Tour and Sheep Farm Experience was born.
As you can see from the map, Matamata (B) wasn’t too far out of the way on the drive we were taking from Rotorua (A) to Hamilton (C), so on Easter Sunday morning, we woke up, spent some time hunting for jellybeans the Easter Bunny had kindly left in our hotel room, and headed out for our Hobbit (and Sheep Farm) Experience!
Easter Morning, Rotorua
Counting jellybeans
Joking aside, the Hobbiton tour was worth every penny. Not so much for the LoTR tie-in (though seeing the remaining set and hearing stories about interns cutting the grass with scissors was fun), but because it gave us a real sense of a central-NZ sheep farm. As I may have mentioned elsewhere on this site, there are ten times as many sheep as people in New Zealand, and as far as I can tell they mostly live on farms like the one we visited. The weather was gorgeous, and I think the fact that we were on a tour with a bunch of people who also paid good money to look at fantasy story left-overs meant that nobody was too self-conscious about taking silly pictures or posing like a hobbit.
(At one point the guide suggested that we do our best hobbit-dance across the field to the “party tree”, and our family quickly complied, followed by the remainder of the tour group. Later, I heard the guide say that it was the first time she’d ever actually gotten everyone to dance. We’re trend-setters, I suppose. Or goofy enough to make everyone else feel comfortable.)
Welcome to Hobbiton. Population: Us!
Is this how hobbits dance?
Our family visits Bag’s End.
Even without the sets, it looks like The Shire
The second part of our visit (after the “Hobbiton Tour”) was the “Sheep Farm Experience”, and I liked it just as much. Alison, for her part, talks about “the man cutting the sheep” almost as much as she does “the Sky Tower Man” (who’ll be featured in a later post). Katie got to feed one of the lambs and we all got a taste of a working sheep farm. By “taste”, of course, I mean very little, since we didn’t get dirty, we weren’t hot and sweaty when it was done, and we didn’t have to get up at dawn. Best of all worlds!
“I surrender!”
Mid-shear
Katie had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb
Like these? Many more pictures available on our Picasa website. Enjoy!
NOTE: It’s taken a while to get my act together & start posting about our North Island trip, which actually took place during the last couple weeks of April. But now that I’ve started, hopefully I’ll be adding entries on a regular basis. Also, we’re trying to figure out a system that lets both Sara & I add notes about the trip. So from here forward, you can assume all of the brilliant, poetic observations come from her.
UPDATE: Lost the map first time around. Not sure how. Anyway, here it is…
Having successfully navigated around the South Island of New Zealand during our first few weeks here, our next big adventure was a tour of the North Island, planned for the girls’ two-week fall holiday during March. The trip was a huge success, and we took plenty of pictures, so I’ll break up the narrative into bits, just like I did for the South Island Trip.
First, though, some thoughts about the North Island vs. the South Island.
It’s probably not surprising that when you have two regions of a country with such obvious geographical boundaries, you end up with slight variations in culture and at least a little bit of rivalry. I’m hardly an expert on NZ geography/culture, but I think I’ve learned a few things worth passing along. Maybe Katie’ll get her Kiwi friends to read this post and teach me a thing or two in the comments.
First thing to note is that the North Island contains more than 3/4 of the country’s population, as well as its capitol (Wellington) and largest city (Auckland). Pre-European settlement was also mostly in the North Island, and even now that’s where you’ll find most of the Maori in New Zealand. (Interestingly enough, that was not the case for the early European settlers, which is why the South Island was once, and is still, called “the Mainland” – though I imagine with a touch of sarcasm these days.)
When you couple the low population density (even low for New Zealand) with the larger land area, you can see why the South Island has a more “bush” (read: backwoods) feel to it. The Dunedin beer company Speight’s (“Pride of the South”) has a “Southern Man” marketing campaign which is a lot like the old Marlboro Man, but with a bit more wry humor. (I was going to embed a couple of Southern Man Speight’s ads that I found on YouTube, like this one or this one, but I can’t for the life of me understand what they’re saying.)
So while the South Island has beautiful scenery (like the Fjordlands) and a couple of big cities (like Dunedin), the North Island is more a combination of big cities (like Auckland) and beautiful scenery (like the Northlands). Hopefully now you’re straight on all that.
Day 1: Getting There
Our first day’s trip was a long one. The goal was to make it from Wellington (A) about 6+ hours north to Rotorua (D), a tourist town known for its hot springs, steam vents and mud baths. On the way we passed through Foxton (B), and happened upon “Foxton’s Fantastic Festival of Murals” there. The town square had eight or so murals-in-progress and we duly voted for our favorites. I might not have mentioned it except that later in our trip I noticed another small town was having a mural contest. Murals, it seems, are all the rage these days.
Watching the muralist at work in Foxton
We had hoped to make it to Lake Taupo (C), which is pronounced “Toe-poe”, before dark, but we got a later-than-originally-planned start and then hit an honest-to-goodness traffic jam on the highway going north. North, remember, is warmer down under, and it was Good Friday; it seems that we weren’t the only people heading out for the Easter holiday. So we ended up going through Taupo well after dark and simply imagining its beauty. But we made it safely to Rotorua that night, with minimal complaints from our passengers.
Day 2: Spluttering Mud: Rotorua
The first full day of our trip was split into two halves. In the morning we dropped by a park full of steaming vents mostly because, well, wouldn’t you? I mean, the idea that it’d be necessary to fence off parts of a city park in order to keep people away from the boiling hot steam rising from the ground sounds like something fit for downtown purgatory. And the smell only emphasizes the analogy.
Steam vents in the park
We then enjoyed the parks and playgrounds surrounding what used to be a Rotorua Bath House, the kind of place rich Britons would go to improve their health. The building itself was huge and gorgeous, but my favorite part was the croquet grounds. We were able to watch what I can only assume was croquet the way it’s supposed to be played: the grass was completely level & well-groomed, and while one player took his/her turn, opponents stood to the side in the shade under lean-to-like covers politely clapping or discussing the difficulty in finding scullery maids these days or something.
Note from Sara: This (the Rotorua Bath House and cricket grounds) is one of the few spots I remember vividly from visiting when I was Katie’s age (when we went on sabbatical to Australia). It felt, and still feels, very colonial, which felt romantic when I was young.
Rotorua Bath House
After some rest time back at our bed & breakfast we headed off for Te Puia, “New Zealand’s Premier Maori Culture & Geothermal Visitor Experience”, where we experienced both Maori culture and geothermal activity. Who’d have thought?
The guy on the left made it all worthwhile
Te Puia Woodcarving
Kids in the Mist
I like this evening shot
Bubble, bubble, boil and trouble
As always, there are plenty more great pictures on our Picasa website. Check ‘em out!
