Seeing the wood from the trees

Tuesday 6th March 2007
In Ahipara again today - when I was planning this part of the trip I thought we would probably do a coach trip along 90 mile beach to Cape Reinga, the very top (northern) part of New Zealand today. You're not allowed to do it in rental cars and they have specially made coaches that can go in the water when the tide washes over the beach - there's also a proper tarmaced road to Cape Reigna. But when we arrived yesterday, we were so knocked out by our fantastic apartment, right on 90 mile beach (it's called that, but is actually ONLY 60 miles long), that we decided there was no way we wanted to spend 10 hours on a coach today. The coach takes sand tobogans on board for the sand dunes on the way, but we'd done that on our South Stradbroke island weekend with the kids. So this morning, we set off to the nearby Karikari pensinsula and stopped at a few of the bays along the way - they were lovely but didn't match the view from our terrace
so we decided to head back, stopping at Ancient Kauri Kingdom on the way. Now this sounds a bit naff and we'd have given it a miss if we hadn't heard from the chap who owns our apartment, that it was really worth seeing. And it was - just a brief stop. Ancient Kauri comes from a number of buried prehistoric forests that grew between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. The trees (absolutely massive) were buried under peat swamps, apparently before the last ice age and were sealed from the air, thus preserving them. They now extract the logs and make furniture and other things from them - some really nice pieces and some you wouldn't give house space to!


A real bonus since we've been in NZ is the weather. Absolutely lovely - great temperatures and strong sunshine, with some fluffy cloud. Wonderful, just sitting on the terrace. Heading south tomorrow to hit some geysers at Rotorua. May not have such good internet access again for a few days.