Rotorua – Bay of Islands – Auckland, New Zealand - 25-31 May 2006

The heavy rain we had in Rotorua followed us as we drove to the Bay of Islands, with an over night stop over in Auckland. We passed lovely green rolling hills that looked like a Windows XP desktop background. In Auckland we had a brief respit from the rain in the evening so we took a walk to the Sky Tower, billed as the highest structure in the Southern Hemisphere. Auckland is the largest city in New Zealand with about 1 million people. It is a nice city roughly the size of Baltimore in the US. The height of the Sky Tower, about the size of the Eiffel Tower, is impressive, but even more impressive are the bungee jumpers jumping from the top to the ground (see movie below).

The morning, after we arrived in Kerikeri (located at the north end of the North Island), the rain was gone and for the rest of our visit in New Zealand we had beautiful sunny days and felt as if we were in a tropical paradise. It was much warmer and we dove and walked through rain forest vegetation with huge fern trees, banana trees and palm trees with all kinds of other sub-tropical vegetation. The first day we visited some of local sights such as the Old Stone House (first stone house in NZ, ~1840), Rainbow falls, Waitangi Treaty house (Birth of the NZ nation) Paihia and a ferry to Russell. In Russell, an old whaling town, where we saw a nice art gallery (Owned by a Jewish lady from Colorado) exhibiting, among others, lovely felted tapestries by an Israeli artist. The second day we took a drive north from Kerikeri along the east coast of Northland. There were several beautiful, almost deserted coves, any one of which could have been Laguna Beach 100 years ago. We got to the south end of the Ninety Mile Beach. This is very wide, firm, seemingly endless beach. Since the tide was low, and we saw other vehicles driving up the beach we decided to take a spin for a couple of miles just for laughs. There are very large sand dunes along this beach some as high as 250 ft!!! Kauri trees are among the largest trees in the world (Somewhat similar to our redwoods) and they grow along the west coast of the North Island. There used to be forests full of them but now they are quite rare. We stopped at a shop that specialized in Kauri wood Furniture, using gigantic, timbers of old Kauri tree trunks. In one of them they carved a spiral stair case. (More on Kauri trees later.) On the third day we took a boat cruise on the Bay of Islands. The boat stopped at some of the islands and dropped off mail to some local people who owned the islands or parts of them. The highlight of the cruise was when out in the open South Pacific Ocean we arrived at an island with a hole in it big enough for our 50’ boat to pass through. Hence its name “Hole in the Rock” On the way back we stopped at another small island which is publicly owned and offers nice camping facilities, where we actually disembarked and took a lovely walk with beautiful views across the bay.

The following day we headed back to Auckland along the west cost, called the “Kauri Coast”. This drive went through some pretty isolated areas to a Kauri tree reserve that had some of the largest Kauri trees alive today growing in the rain forest. The largest one left is called “Tane Mahuta” tree (God of the Forest in Maori) which has a 14 foot diameter trunk and is 160 feet high and is estimated to be 2000 years old. See if you can see Dahlia in picture of the tree below. We also stopped at the Kauri tree museum at Matakone that had displays of the enormous trees and the equipment that was used for logging them from about 1900 to 1920. From there we headed to Auckland where we are staying at a hotel in City Center for two nights before we are off on the next leg of our trip to Australia. In Auckland we took walking trips to Mt. Eden, a volcanic cone that gives a great view of the city, and we checked out the shopping possibilities. On our last night we had a lovely dinner with the Anguses who live in Auckland and we had met a couple of weeks ago while traveling on the South Island.

We feel that we have gotten a thorough tour of New Zealand and have really enjoyed our stay here.