Bay of Islands

March 18 - It was cold this morning! I guess it’s coming to their fall here and it certainly felt like it when I got up. But once the sun comes through all is good again. We drove up to the Bay of Islands today, ending up at the main tourist town of Paihia. John is not impressed! Not many boats to be seen and all the usual touristy stuff like gift shops and ice cream places. On the way here, we stopped at the Kawiti Glowworm caves. Thank goodness I can wipe that off the bucket list now! We have had many chances to see glowworms from day 1, but somehow we just haven’t quite made it and I was sure we would be leaving NZ without seeing them. But there they were as we drove by, so we swung in just in time for the tour. We went quite deep into a limestone cave with lots of stalactites and stalagmites and then the guide turned off her lantern and there they were! It took a while for our eyes to acclimatize to the darkness, but as we did, the little lights got brighter and brighter. They look just like stars on the roof of the cave - thousands and thousands of little bugs with glowing poop which attracts their prey onto their “fishing lines”! It was certainly worth the trip. We wandered around Paihia when we got here - had fish and chips while looking over the bay and I had a haircut (the first one for 3 months!!) We have landed in a very pleasant campground right on the water and we’ll stay here for a day or so before wandering off up the coast again. We’re not planning to go right up to the top of the north island, but will follow the highway around down to the west coast to see the huge kauri trees before heading back to Auckland. Less than a week to go …..
March 19 - Tall ship day today. I persuaded John that we were in the Bay of Islands, we’d better go see some islands! So we hopped on a gaff rigged topsail schooner with 9 other people (in the summer, they often get 35-40 people per cruise!) and off we went. There were 3 very pleasant young men sailing the R. Tucker Thompson (and it didn’t occur to me until now that I should have found out what the ‘R’ stood for). There wasn’t much wind in the morning, so we motored out to a lovely little island where we could swim or climb to the top of the island for amazing views (look very carefully behind us in the picture and you‘ll see the ship). There are 144 islands in the Bay, some of them very tiny, but it really was a wonderful sight. They cooked us a wonderful lunch and we had some wind in the afternoon, so we hoisted the sails and sailed home. I actually climbed up the rigging (not very far, but I did get up there!) just to prove to myself that I could do it. I didn’t actually DO anything while I was up there, but it was something that I can now say that I did. The other people on the boat were very pleasant and it turned out that I had a connection with 2 of them. There were a group of 3 women who had all been to boarding school together (Sherbourne) and when I said that I had been to boarding school in Bexhill, it turned out that someone I was at school with had been bridesmaid to one of the women on the cruise! Then it turned out that one of the other women had gone to school in Guildford (where I grew up) at the same school that my older sisters went to, although not at the same time. She had grown up in West Clandon, near Guildford, and we had some friends in common. She also played tennis at our local tennis club when she was younger. The similarities went on - her mother had been in the same nursing home as my mum, her name is Jill (like my sister) and she’s also a traveler (like my Jill!) and has just taken up golf and knows the women’s captain at sister Jill’s golf club - very weird!
March 20 - Hundertwasser’s loo (“toilet” for the un-English readers) in Kawakawa (note to Heather - I forgot to mention the tons of reduplicated words in Maori!!) was designed by an Austrian, Friedensreich H., who lived near the town in an isolated house without electricity from 1973 until his death in 2000. Are we surprised that he designed the most extraordinary public toilet building amongst other apparently famous structures? The building is covered in lots of wavy lines decorated with ceramic mosaics and brightly colored bottles, and there is grass and plants growing on the roof (see picture). Very strange but necessary to visit if you happen to be in the vicinity! Our target for today (other than Freidensreich’s masterpiece) was to go and see Tane Mahuta - the Lord of the Forest. He (or she) is the tallest tree in New Zealand, a kauri tree. He stands 51 meters high and has a nearly 14 meter diameter, so Mark - you can’t hug him! He’s about 2000 years old and is a really impressive sight. However it took us nearly 1 ½ hours to get there (those winding roads again ….) and when you’ve spent that amount of time in a vehicle, it seems kind of silly to take a photograph and turn around and go back again. But that’s pretty much what we did. We did stop off in a delightful little town called Rawene for lunch and to swap some of our miriad books. We went to a shop which indicated that we could trade our books and the slightly daffy lady owner absolutely insisted that we leave with at least one book even though we really didn’t want to! However, I think she actually has picked out a good one for both of us. We have been leaving a trail of finished books behind us and John is finding it hard to say goodbye to some of them.’ Just a few more days in the van (am I starting to sound desperate?) and then civilization in Auckland for a week. We abandoned our plans to drive north from the Bay of Islands and will head south towards Auckland tomorrow.