New Year’s Road Trip Stop 1: Taupo

We loaded the minivan and took off this week for a 3-day tiki tour* of some North Island sites we hadn’t seen.

First stop, Lake Taupo. Famous for various athletic pursuits, gorgeous scenery, etc. We tried to have lunch in a café but the high prices and lack of service convinced us to eat the ham sandwiches we’d packed in the chilly bin.

We walked around the village for a while. It boasts the “World’s Coolest McDonalds.” You can go inside the plane.

New Zealand is a land of roadside attractions… not much here is at Disney scale. We found ourselves mesmerized watching people smack golf balls into the water. If you get a hole in one you win a prize, which apparently happens every couple of weeks. This guy didn’t win, but he had a nice stroke and hit the platform about three times out of four.

* Don’t know exactly what a tiki tour is, but Kiwis say it a lot. I think it just means a trip that rambles around and makes a lot of stops… possibly too many.

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Happy New Year

We set an alarm so we wouldn’t miss fireworks from the Sky Tower. Luckily all we had to do was go across the street!

Looked way better in person, especially through the binoculars.

From one of the first places to arrive in 2019 comes one of the last greetings you’re likely to receive: Happy New Year 🎊🎆!!!

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Hu’s on first

– Hey I saw this shop for lease down in Newmarket. It would be perfect for your shop. And the agent is my friend Ken. You should call him.

– Cool, i will. Ken who?

– Right! Do you know him? He’s so great.

– I don’t know. What’s his last name?

– Hu.

– Ken, the agent.

– Like I said, Ken Hu!

– You said he’s your friend.

– …

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Milking it

It’s great when the system works! We planted some milkweed a couple months ago in hopes of attracting monarch butterflies, and here they are.

We now have monarch caterpillars happily munching away, preparing to pupate… if they can avoid getting eaten by wasps first. Apparently the milkweed makes them toxic to many predators, but the wasps are a problem.

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Martha’s Backyard

“The American Store”.

We’d heard about this place, and so when we happened to drive by the other day we stopped to check it out.

They have a lot of food and drugstore stuff that is not easy to find here. Plus a bunch of stars and stripes stuff for people having parties.

We don’t lack for good food here, but we did buy some things anyway: the local mac ‘n’ cheese is terrible, and the tomato soup doesn’t taste right. One reality that doesn’t sit easily with some red-state voters: most of the food we miss from America is Mexican.

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Goat Island

Our plan for last weekend was to dive Goat Island on Saturday before continuing up to the Poor Knights on Sunday. Goat Island is about as easy a dive as you can do… leave from shore, not much over 20 feet, in a marine reserve area with lots of fish. Perfect for the first time in the water for a while.

But the weather was uncooperative, so we rescheduled the dive for Thursday. Our friend Astrid was off work, so she came along and snorkeled with Lee.

The spot is pretty nice, and the dive operator very friendly, although it took them/us a surprisingly long time to get geared up and begin the dive. GoPro still not working.

The dive itself was pleasant… nothing too memorable, but it was fun to swim around in the kelp and explore all the volcanic fissures. Perfect place to go with a buddy, not much need for a guide after the first time.

After, we had lunch at the Leigh Sawmill Café. It is just about exactly the country roadhouse I would want to own if I owned a country roadhouse. It’s actually an old sawmill, with a great garden courtyard. Good food, a nice craft beer selection, a few rooms for tourists who want to hang out a day or two. And a reputation for good music… in addition to the published lineup, apparently it’s a place where big names show up unannounced from time to time and play a set.

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Christmas dinner

We had a sumptuous Christmas buffet dinner with Alicia and Nat at the Stamford Plaza hotel. It cost a ton, but not actually compared to cooking. These cute gingerbread houses were out in the lobby.

Among several helpings of everything else, I did a thing I’ve only done once or twice before: truly ate all the oysters I wanted to.

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The true meaning of the season

Boxing Day sales means no more huddling over the laptop.

The last TV we bought ourselves was in 2007. It cost three times as much, used more electricity, had a much lower resolution, no internet connection, etc. Moore’s Law is still in full effect, I’d say.

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Whangarei Detour

We stopped off for lunch in Whangarei on the way back to Auckland Monday. You could feel the hustle and bustle of last minute shopping and final preparations.

Other than lunch, our main goal was to visit the Clapham’s Clock Museum, a roadside attraction if ever there was one. It was fun! All the running clocks are purposely set to different times so you get a constant dose of chimes and cuckoos. In the picture above, I’m posing near an Ingraham banjo clock very similar to one that sits in a box in Brattleboro waiting for me to finish the steampunk restoration project I imagined a couple years ago.

We also stopped in at the very impressive hospice thrift shop and admired some art. We came away with a set of ramekins that are the perfect size for baked eggs. Which we had for breakfast a couple days later. Score!

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Run Tutukaka

After diving Sunday, we were headed back to Auckland for Christmas Eve dinner at Tom’s house. That gave me plenty of time for a run to explore the surrounds.

From the hotel, I went past the Holiday Park, but then changed my mind and instead went up a little path we had found the night before. That took me to a park…

which supposedly led to a lighthouse. But I found myself at an impasse, after descending a couple hundred steps…

If I’d stopped to read the directions, I would have known to turn right and continue on, but I didn’t…

I found another little beach with a great bach (the Kiwi term for a holiday house) on it,

and a whole field of snowball bushes. That’s as close to a white Christmas as I can get this year 😀.

By that time it was raining hard, so I headed for home.

Every time we go anywhere we imagine what it would be like to live there… all that peace and quiet, the lure of the sea… But if I’m honest, a town I can explore end to end in a single slow-ish run probably wouldn’t keep my attention for long enough. There’s a reason all those properties are for sale…

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Poor Knights Dive

Merry post-Christmas! My present this year was a weekend of diving…

The first day’s dive was scuttled due to weather, more on the rescheduled trip in another post. So we drove at a leisurely pace up to Tutukaka for Sunday diving. We had a nice dinner and went to bed early. It’s just as well that’s what we wanted to do… there ain’t a lot of choices in Tutukaka once the sun goes down.

Tutukaka and the Poor Knights rose to prominence after Jacques Cousteau called it one of the best dive sites in the world. That must be 50 years ago, and as far as I can tell it was the last big thing to happen there. Other travel writers have generally agreed, but they all quote M. Cousteau.

The dive shop (Dive Tutukaka, highly recommend) was already in full swing when we got there: paperwork done, get your suit and fins, grab a muffin, see you on the boat in 10.

It’s about 45 minutes (22 km) out to the islands. We took a small detour to check out a large school of fish that had come up the surface. More fun to watch than the photo suggests… That rock in the distance is one of the Poor Squires, which sit close to the Knights. And where we did our first dive.

The weather was rainy on shore, but it lightened up as we got away from the coast. We did not need our emergency beacon, I’m glad to say, but our skipper told us about it in the safety briefing he delivered with the str-r-r-r-ongest Welsh accent I’ve ever heard.

The whole area is preserved, above and below the water. That whitish stripe between the cliffs and the green part is a colony of Australasian gannets, who enjoy the solitude and freedom from mammalian predators.

7mm suit plus a 3mm hooded vest… more Neoprene than I’ve ever needed before. Water temp about 16C, about 61F, and I was still chilly down there. All that wetsuit meant a lot of weight was necessary to sink below the surface, but then once you get down there the air bubbles compress and you can drop quite quickly. So overall I felt quite awkward in my gear.

Due to technical difficulties, I didn’t have the GoPro, so no underwater shots. Lots of fish, some bright things on rocks, a couple of rays and morays. Kelp.

We dove two different sites, both featuring an underwater arch to swim through. I struggled a bit… my first dive in two years, cold, quite a bit of swell, not used to the gear, fairly challenging terrain (diving on a wall with no visible bottom so constantly monitoring depth), cloudy day so dim underwater, etc. On each dive I was the first in the group to run out of air. There was lots of marine life, no complaints in that department, but overall I was glad enough to head back in afterwards. It felt a lot more like a technical exercise than a fun outing.

Now that I’ve got my first taste of cold (er than the Caribbean) water diving, I look forward to going back. Preferably on a sunnier day, maybe to an easier site, with my camera working, so I can commune with Cousteau about what a fabulous spot this is.

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Gee the traffic is terrific

Today we drove from Auckland to Tutukaka for a dive tomorrow at the famous Poor Knights Islands. We were girded for bad traffic as Auckland empties out bigly over the holidays, but apparently they don’t come up here… everything went smoothly.

We took the scenic route along the coast and made a couple of stops along the way. The Mangawhai Heads beach, about an hour and a half from downtown Auckland, stretches for miles and is amazingly flat. We’re into peak season so the crowds are shocking. Not.

The volunteer surf lifeguards only patrol a section about 100 yards wide, so the swimmers were all jammed up in there. I dipped my toes in, too cold to go further. For tomorrow’s diving I’ll be in a 7mm suit with a 3mm vest and hood on top of that, so should be toasty.

Found this lazy sea star in a tide pool.

Then we stopped to see the Whangarei Falls, very nice. Assuming that some of the trees are kauris, then we hit the trifecta: beach , waterfall, and big tree!

Now we’re all checked in to the hotel and hoping the rain lets up for the boat ride out to the islands tomorrow.

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