ruth and ed in nz

New years Eve

This was a lovely way to call in the new year in the absence of friends. With not a rendition of Auld lang syne in ear shot.
Having gone round the east cape we ended back up at Gizzy (Gisbourne to non residents). Our intention was to go to the Rhythm and vines festival as it was well advertised on the internet and some good kiwi bands were playing as well as a european DJ headlining (Mylo). When we arrived in Gizzy we went to the i-site to pick up some last minute tickets. Worse than there being a shortage, there was ANOTHER concert to choose from. So the seeds of indecision were sown and we spent the rest of the day deciding what to do and sunbathing/picnicing/swimming. By the time we had tossed a flip flop to choose between the two Rythm and vines had sold out. So we headed back up the cape a bit to Tolaga bay and the Ru Uawa festival.
Just to put the area in context Gizzy is the first City in the world to see the sun every day, so new years is a big event. So big in fact that the town population had doubled. This meant it was nice to get out of the relative crowds (it was like Brighton on Saturday morning or Guilford late night Christmas Shopping crowds, except most people were wearing shorts and sun glasses)
Once in Tolaga bay we found a nice campsite spot amongst the hundreds of freedom campers pitching in for the new year. So we had a few “Steinies” and some local wine whilst watching the waves come in. So once in the mood and as the sun was heading towards the sea for the last time in 2006 we made our way to the festival site.
In the queue at the gate we were the only ‘Pakeha’ (spotted by a camera man and interviewed a bimbling Ed in full public school boy speak!) We were also the only ones without wellies and an umbrella. The lady on the gate giving out the hand stamsp had the traditional Maori Lady lower lip and chin tattoo. Once inside and having negotiated various piles of haystacks we got a good spot in the crowds and watched some good bands. As the evening progressed we found out more about the “east coasty party” and how Renee Gaia is a popular country singer. It didn’t matter when the new year was called in 6 minutes late as the Maori new year is in june sometime…..

28th December 2007
A walk around Lake Tutira to kick off the morning (a very sunny morning typically – as we had chosen not to do Tongariro due to bad weather yesterday) before a long drive to Gisbourne (Gizzy to the locals) where we asked in a garage about the ‘jingling’ noises coming from the wheels when we go over bumps. Yep – the shocks are wearing out and it’s $500 to fix. Can it wait a few weeks? Yes – safe to drive – ok we’ll sort it in Christchurch once we have jobs.
Quick food shop and continued round the cape and up to Tolaga Bay. Stopped at Cooks Cove and walked over farmland, down in to some lush forest (about 350 steps down) to more farmland and the sea. The tide was out so we walked over the rocks (past a very smelly dead cow) round the corner of the cove where we could see the wharf at Tolaga Bay – NZ’s longest pier! We walked to the Hole in the Rock – a natural archway formed out of the limestone rock.
Took a walk as the sun was setting along the beach at Tolaga Bay and merrily found a pub at the end for a quiet drink before walking back in the moonlight. Spent the night free camping kiwi-style on the beach.

29th December 2007
Drove up to the top of the cape (Te Araroa) and found NZ’s largest Pohutukawa tree in the grounds of a local school. Pohutukawa trees are also know as the NZ Christmas tree as it flowers red around Christmas time – they are huge and get really old and knotted. They don’t grow so tall, but they wind around and their branches hang down to the floor. They’re really beautiful and this one was massive.
Drove round to Hick’s Bay in the hope of getting a fishing charter but he’d already gone out for the day. Found a beautiful hidden bay and swam for as long as the cold water would let us. Continued round the top of the cape to Hawai – a long stretch of grey sand covered with driftwood and chilled out at the campsite in the sunshine for the afternoon.

30th December 2007
Drove round to Opotiki – a relatively large town – for some internet and, on the off chance, called my mum’s work friend, Joan, who lives in Ohope for the best 6 months of the year. Ohope is a small town just west of Opotiki looking over the Bay of Plenty. Joan was very welcoming – especially as we had called an hour before we turned up on her doorstep – and took us for a walk along the beach which was totally deserted, then fed us a yummy lunch.
We got on our way again after lunch as we wanted to walk the Tauranga Track in the Waioeka Forest. It followed a river along one side through forest, offered us a ‘boots off’, refreshing river crossing, then a meadow walk back along the other side. We spent the night in the Manganuku Gorge courtesy of another DOC campsite.

27th December 2007
Well we drove to Whakapapa Village, the start of the infamous Tongariro Crossing with emerald lakes and scenes from Lord of the Rings. As we drove, the clouds got lower and the rain worsened. Fearing the crossing would be rubbish, we asked at the visitors’ centre and were told that, yes, the winds were ‘gale force’ on the mountain – strong enough to rip branches off trees – and there wouldn’t be much to see up there.
After much umming and ahhing over whether we were ‘wimping out’ or being ‘sensible’ we decided to give it a miss and spend the time driving around the East Cape instead. So we headed up towards Hawkes Bay via Whanganui and spent the night on the shores of Lake Tuiteri.

CHRISTMAS EVE
It’s always going to be a weird one – Christmas when you don’t really know anyone or have anywhere in particular to go. New Zealand definitely does Christmas, as do the marketing companies, but not quite to the extent of the UK and, as we weren’t watching much TV and mostly out of radio reception, we hadn’t quite been fully Christmas’d up. Christmas shopping in Taupo had got me going a bit, as did the twinkly glowworms at Waitomo – very festive!
We decided to spend Xmas by the coast (hoping for a sunny day to spend on the beach – ha ha) and chose New Plymouth so that we could be by the sea and find a restaurant that would be open for Xmas lunch. Obviously this assumed that we would be blessed with good weather – hmmm…
Christmas Eve evening we partaked in traditional drinks and found a good local bar with some live reggae music playing. NZ reggae seems to consist mostly of Bob Marley songs but it was good. We shared a table with a local kiwi guy called Grifen who was working at an environmental centre down the road. Turned out he was trying to set up some kind of corporate volunteering programme to get mentors for the teenagers at the centre and I promised to pop in there on our way out of New Plymouth on Boxing Day. He said the centre runs permaculture courses and that we could volunteer there for a bit if we liked. We had planned to do some WWOOF-ing (Working on an Organic Farm) over Xmas/NY but hadn’t found a place we liked so this sounded intriguing…
After we awkwardly ran out of conversation with Grifen (who called us his brothers and sisters… man) we left him to his other hippy friends who were dancing in circles with flowy skirts and long hair to Bob Marley classics. A rainy walk home to the hostel where we got very excited about having a TV in our own bedroom (small things…)!

CHRISTMAS DAY
As it should always begin… a long lie-in followed by TV, present opening and champagne (kindly provided by the hostel’s host). Our coastal beach plan was scuppered by the fact that it rained – lightly – but solidly ALL DAY!!! Unperturbed, we braved the elements and walked along the seafront to the Port (about an hour). Along the way, we met a local guy who said he had been told that there was a group of whales swimming about 50 metres from shore. No amount of scouring the ocean helped us to see them but we like to think they were there somewhere wishing us a Merry Christmas!!
After a quick G&T in a local bar, we went for our big feed at the Devon Hotel. We had booked a buffet lunch – the 2.30pm sitting. We arrived as they were clearing up from the previous sitting so we had time for another G&T (best make it a double this time) before dinner.
We paced ourselves and managed a total of eight courses:
Tomato Soup
Salad
Seafood (the bonus of being in NZ for Xmas)
Meats (turkey and beef) and vegs
Puddings (lots of chocolate, meringue, fruit)
Cheese and Biscuits
Coffee
Chocolate (Roses – the bestseller at the Warehouse (a big store) this Christmas season apparently!)
We were beaten, and slightly nauseous, by the end of all that. So there was only one thing for it – a sofa and a huge widescreen TV to watch movies. It started with MI3, followed by Wallace and Grommitt, Sea Biscuit (?) and then a UK drama about a family with autistic boys…
I called home and wished everyone a merry Christmas/Chanukah and then, while Ed spoke to his family, I drifted off in to a movie-filled sleep…

BOXING DAY
After more phone calls and slightly successful photo uploading on to CDs (it’s such a parlarva!), we headed to the Puke Ariki museum which houses tons of beautiful Maori artefacts. All the museums and displays here are presented so well – this one is particularly modern.
We decided we would drive out to Inglewood to meet the mystical Grifen again. The environment centre was a ramshackle place at the end of a very suburban cul de sac. The dancing girl from Xmas Eve was there – she is bizarrely also called Ruth Cohen (spooky!). Out popped Grifen (we’d woken him up) and he didn’t seem all that bothered by our arrival.
We sat, not really talking about anything for a while and then Ruth offered to show us her macrobiotic thing in a bowl that she grows in a cupboard under the sink. Quite weird but intriguing. We had a look at their ‘garden’, a sort of overgrown patch of ground with some sticks and things – not quite the organic farm as had been suggested. Deciding that it wasn’t really the place for us to stay for a few days, we asked if we could chat about the volunteering stuff that I had come to talk about.
Out came Jane – an Ozzie youth worker who wanted to start a school for kids revolving around permaculture, etc, and was staying at the centre to work with Grifen on their project. I imparted some knowledge about employee volunteering and they gave me some insight in to how it all works over here – government departments, funding, mentoring programmes, etc. All a bit weird but possibly a helpful connection…
Drove around Mt Taranaki – as it was named originally by the Maoris – or Mt Egmont as it was renamed by the Europeans. Why they feel the need to do this I don’t know and this one is quite a contested name change it seems. Spent the night at Karupokoru Beach campsite.

23rd December 2007
Have you ever done something on a whim and then wondered why you did it? My thoughts exactly on seeing the faces of the morning group who had just finished their Black Abyss trip down into the Waitomo Caves – knackered, horrified and sort of bent double. Oh yes, and absolutely drenched!
Anyway, off we went for our briefing with the comedy duo guides. They didn’t tell us much (probably best) and kitted us up in wetsuits and booties (still damp and cold of course), white gum boots (my feet were too small for the normal short boots so I got a full welly boot), climbing gear (again, just put it on and don’t ask why), and a helmet with a head lamp. Then we piled into the minibus and drown down a little unsealed road to the cave entrance.
First we had a quick lesson in abseiling which involved walking down a slope holding on to a rope to practice breaking. Then we walked over to the entrance which was a big hole in the ground. When I say big, I mean a 40 metre deep hole about as wide as a person so it was quite a squeeze, very dark, wet and slippery. Down the bottom the cave opened up in to a big room where there was a few clusters of glowworms on the ceiling.
We walked around the corner and the cave got bigger – it just went on and on from big rooms, to narrow corridors, to rivers. We walked, crawled, swam, and waded through very chilly water. We walked along one particularly narrow corridor and then I heard Ed scream like I’ve never heard him scream before. He had just done a ‘Flying Fox’ (aka zip wire) in to the Black Abyss – a big black space of nothingness. He says that he was told to scream like that to scare the rest of us – hmmmmm…. It worked though – jumping from a little ledge in to a big black hole is pretty scary!
We stopped for tea/coffee and a yummy cave cookie – things were looking up – then we were handed a big black rubber inner tube and told to jump down off the ledge in to the black water below. ‘Just keep your legs up and you’ll be fine’ the guide said as we jumped in to the ice cold water below. From there we merrily floated along the water through more of the cave and then we joined up in a line and the guide pulled us along while we laid back and watched all the glowworms on the cave ceiling above us.
We stopped again to warm up with some warm orange squash – some to drink and a little down the back of the wetsuit for extra heat. The exit from the cave was, of course, another adventure. We had to climb back out of the cave through a load of waterfalls. The guides shouted at us where to put our feets and sure enough – even with a wetsuit and a pair of wellies on – we were able to climb up and out in to daylight.
Back to base for a hot (ish) shower, soup and a bagel and a slide show of how silly we looked in our outfits. Awesome day!!
p.s. we bought the CD of the photos so we’ll upload them somewhere when we can…

Hbbiton aka Matamata is where this fairy tale begins. In actual fact waking in a holiday park that had free thermal baths so we had a dip in these before heading into town to shoot up the elves…
Matamata was a typical New Zealand town set out on a grid with one main street and tons of car parking. At the end of this main street was the Hobbiton tours shop, full of every nationality in the world trying to get a piece of the small furry action. It looked so trafficked that we decided to give it a miss and leave the harried halflings to themselves.
Following our noses we headed down the “thermal explorer” highway. The first thing of any great impression was the power station firing out great gouts of white smoke and steam amongst an unfathomable medusas head of shiny pipes.
Following this and a fresh tank of gas we came upon a little enclave of entertainments before Rotorua.
Firstly – Prawn World. Pay to go and fish the worlds first geothermal prawns. We did not try our prawn pinching hands but we did eat some lovely fishy delicacies. There was also the opportunity to hit a golfball into the lake under the pretence of trying for a hole in one which was fun.
Secondly – Honey World. Just down the road from their aquatic friends their flying insectoid neighbours were busily cranking out the golden sweet stuff. Not only the edible type but for cleaning, waxing, moisturising, healing and doing just about everything, ingenious and fun to watch in their see through colonies.
Thirdly – but not least at all was Huka falls. A short fall at 7 to 9 m high but more powerful than a truckload of energizer batteries. This raging torrent of water comes from a river about as wide as a couple of football fields and funnels into a channel about the width of a single lane road. This little geological corset sends the water into a foaming bright blue bubbly sucking and slapping frenzy. Then to muted gasps of tourists shoots the water 100m further down out about as far as it falls down, a place where swimmers would end up like that one sock that always goes missing in the wash.

Refreshed from the falls we headed into Rotorua and out the other side in search of a decent camp site and not too bothered with the fleets of campervans covering every parking inch of the town itself.

Following a good tip off a man from Ipswich in last nights campsite we found a big thermal park called Wai o Tapu where we were made sick with the smell of Sulphur and amazed by what actually comes welling up out of the ground in all its strange mineral colours. Slightly worried that the world might collapse under the feet, or explode into the sky we left for the night vowing to return to the smell tomorrow to see an erupting Geyser.

Sticking to the trusty DOC camping strategy we came upon a nice lakeside venue next to a Maori spiritual mountain. The wardens of this delightful spot were 3 sheets to the wind and slurred us a nice introduction and told us of a nice walk by the lake. They took our money between them (man and woman) then bid us good evening (after mentioning that they had been to or knew people in London) hiccuped and bounced off each other as they tottered away.

So we walked and ate instant noodles and settled into a noght of squashing sacred Maori mosquitoes in the province of Rotorua.

Black sandy beaches and turquoise seas awash with ancient, gnarly Pohutukawa trees blossoming huge red flowers… it looked exactly as the tourist brochures described it, all the way round the coast – just beautiful. We started in Thames – a little town with old wooden buildings that had a western-esque feel to it. Then up the coast a little to Coromandel Town where we spent an age with the i-site (tourist info) lady who suggested we should really book our ferry (to cross the N to S island) ASAP for fear of not getting booked on one at all!!!
All ferried up, we drove up to the very tip of the peninsula over a ford (that we weren’t really sure we were going to get over at all – but after seeing a huge camper van and a hire car drive through we took our chances and it was easy peasy, apart from a little scratch to the under side of the car anyway!!).

The road ended at the DOC campsite at Fletcher Bay where we stayed that night – it was based almost at the tip of the peninsula. We parked up there and then walked around to Stony Bay lookout where the road starts again going down the other side.

Up at the crack of dawn we drove back over the ford (all good this time – must be getting better at this) and down to Hot Water Beach where we were assured that low tide brings areas of natural hot water if you dig in the right spot on the beach. We arrived to a heaving car park of campervans and a surreal herd of tourists wealding spades. After a walk down to see what the big fuss was about, we met a load of people who had dug big holes on the beach only to find that their hole was bringing in cold water. The only people who had managed to get hot water appeared to have taken up the whole space with a giant hole and had brought their entire extended family along to sit in it. I asked if they minded if I dip my toe in and sure enough it was very hot. Great, we thought uninspired, and wandered off for the next tourist trap…

Sure enough, all those campervans (and slow drivers)that we had seen at Hot Water Beach moved on to our next destination too (the strange tramlines of tourism) – Cathedral Cove. We hired snorkelling gear and walked down to a little bay along from Cathedral Cove – Gemstone Bay, with a DOC snorkelling trail – a few bouys dotted around the bay with information about what you’re likely to see below: loads of snapper, kelp, John Dory, etc… similar to what we saw in the Bay of Islands. A really lovely idea to make it a trail as the buoys also acted as floating handles to hang on to when you fancied a rest from swimming about. Jolly good idea, I thought 🙂

After our snorkel, we walked back up the hill sporting our very trendy wetsuits and received some rather intrigued looks from the tourists who were on their way down to Cathedral Cove. Changed and coffee’d up we too followed the herds back down to Cathedral Cove – a beach with a big arched rock over it. Then the rain began so we headed back up and drove to the Wentworth Valley for our DOC campsite fix.

We continued after our AA episode back down the west side of the north, north bit. Through a beautiful natural harbour called Hokianga Harbour and down in to the Waipoua Forest, home to the world’s largest kauri tree. We stayed over night there in another DOC campsite – this one even had hot showers – a real treat for us!!
Continuing down south we stopped at Piha beach – a surfer’s haven just north of Auckland. We had driven all day and arrived at about 5pm as the many city’s beach goers were just packing up to go home. Ed had a quick swim (bit chilly for Ruth) and then we walked over to Karekare beach – a deserted version of the same black sandy beach – just on the other side of the rock. It’s quite a bit further along the steep narrow windy road to get there so I guess that’s why the city folk don’t bother. That and the lack of life guards… Karekare beach is where the film The Piano was made and as we sat and watched the sun go down, the theme tune of the film drifted through my mind. They certainly do much to the beach in the film – it was exactly as I remembered it. Wild, barren and beautiful.

In the afternoon, in Kaitaia (Gateway town to the Far North), we managed to faff splendously for about four hours – getting lunch, doing some internet stuff – before heading on our merry way back south along the west coast. We decided to stop in a layby (Mangamuku peak) at the top of a hill with a good view to eat our PaknSave picnic. As we stopped, we noticed a very large amount of water escaping from under the van…
Having noticed the irregular pool of water and gurgling hissing noises coming from underneath of the car, we decided to have lunch. Whilst consuming chips and dips we decided to call the AA. A 40-minute call out time was predicted by the lady on the phone and they made it too. The 40 minutes was just enough time for Ed to mess around trying to guess what was wrong. He correctly identified a ruptured cooling pipe (clever him). In the process, a discovery was made that not only the passenger seat flipped up to reveal the engine, but the drivers’ side did too. Something our dodgy Auckland dealer neglected to show us. Clever him – as the second hand car book had said something about a snakes’ nest of cooling pipes that tend to perish on older Nissan Serenas…
So, the nice man from the AA turned up with his Jack Russell. He popped his head under the drivers’ seat and his Jack Russell went off sniffing around the bushes. Ed’s diagnosis was confirmed quickly and the offending pipe was soon removed. We had luckily caught the problem in time before the engine cooked.
It was then up to Ed to negotiate two wheel ramps on to the truck. Done with only a raised eyebrow from our toothless Maori saviour and a loud sigh from Ruth. The Jack Russell had taken the rattle of chains and creaking sounds of the car as his cue to jump back in the tow truck cab. Ed and Ruth got in to the ailing Nissan on top of the truck for the very windy ride back down the hill we had earlier climbed. Driving this surreal and slightly scary roller coaster ride, the mechanic would occassionally give us a toothless grin over his shoulder and say something to the Jack Russell.
When in town the parts man provided the new pipe and clips which came to $18 and the mechanic fitted these at the yard and we were on our way south once more.