16 March 2017 - Whangarei Central Holiday Park, Northland

This morning I paid for a further two weeks accommodation here at this very central caravan park, a spot we have patronised from time to time over the past few years. There is always an element of “coming home” as we are welcomed back by managers Brad and Claire, and the many permanent residents with whom we are acquainted.

The lull before the next round of travel further afield has been rudely interrupted by work; yes, that activity we have mostly avoided with success over the past six or so years. And this is real work, hard physical work, to which we are unaccustomed. Our one remaining rental property demands our attention, however I should be grateful that we were able to shift the squatters out with greater ease than expected. It seems that even squatters are accorded the same rights as legal tenants, which further emphasises that landlords are a hard-done-by lot, despite the bad rap they are given by the media.

We were left with a house-lot of furniture, little of which was collected in the extended period of grace we offered, and rubbish, all of which filled a nine cubic metre jumbo bin. Cigarette burns across the vinyl, years of splattered fat throughout the kitchen, carpet so ridden with spills that it had to be torn up, the garden overgrown with rampant feijoa and grape vines, and a fast growing litter of kittens who had to be re-housed. I could go on and on and on, but will not except to say that my very practical and talented husband has once more stepped up to the plate and as I write this is preparing walls for repainting while the plumber does his preparation for the extensive plumbing fittings we are installing. The floors in the plumbed areas have all had to be torn up and rebuilt, and the walls in part re-gibbed. Yesterday my efforts were limited to assisting with moving the heavy construction stuff up into the house. My strength is abysmal, so poor that I was guilty of causing one sheet of gib to break. I am best left out of all this, although will no doubt be required to move these same sheets into position when The Carpenter, my husband, is ready for them.

We have been on the job for almost three weeks now, although during that taken time out to attend the anticipated wedding which was, as most weddings, just beautiful; the weather gods, the bride’s exceptional organisational skills and the tireless efforts of her team of friends and parents must be given all credit.

Intrepid or crazy tourist campers

The following week saw us head down to the Waikato for my boarding school hostel reunion, and again the weather stayed with us. We stayed at the Classic Car Museum in Hamilton which opens its car park to fully self-contained campers, not just members of the NZMCA. While there is a water tap in a rather obscure spot, the facilities are limited to those within the café, which is obviously closed during the night. We were quite shocked to find a roof camper parked up beside us one morning, with little or no other facilities, then even more shocked to see a young couple and baby emerge from the canvas. To their credit they did go in and spend an inordinate amount of time at the café, more than the use of the bathroom facilities would demand, so one can only presume that their spend made their stay more profitable to the museum than ours was. 

We four were the boarders of A1

Initial reunion at Sonning Hostel, now a carpark

And as for the reunion which I had been both looking forward to and dreading; this turned out to be a wonderful success, all credit to the ‘girls’ who spent so much of their time organising the event. This eclectic group of women, all approaching their mid-sixties with little in common but having lived their childhoods in isolated rural parts that required moving away from home to attend high school, embraced each other with warmth and laughter and there was no need to engage in  quizzes which were organised as awkward-silence-fillers; there was absolutely no silence to fill!  

Personally I attended the luncheon, the river cruise and the dinner, but left the Sunday activities to those others who stayed on, some of whom attended the church where we had once had to walk to in crocodile fashion, dressed immaculately in our Sunday dresses, panama hats, gloves and blazers, then sit before the congregation in the choir stalls where we were least able to escape notice. 

Instead we headed across to the Bay of Plenty to catch up with Larissa and her family, staying at our regular spot at the Waihi Beach RSA. Here again the weather was with us and we took full advantage of the east coast sun. We lunched at the Surf Shack, where our two teenage grandchildren were working. While they slaved away over sink and tables, we enjoyed huge platters of gourmet delight, enough to feed an army which we managed to consume without such help.

Later when the children were free of their weekend work, we all headed out into the Tauranga Harbour in the family’s little motor boat, settling into a secluded little bay. We paddled our legs in the fish filled saltwater while watching young Jackson and his mother take wild rides on a sea-biscuit and admiring India exhibit her growing skill on skiis. We would not be enticed into the water ourselves, even though we had secreted our togs into the bottom of our bags. I was a little tempted but then wondered how I would dry them out in the motorhome; a poor excuse I know.

Sea-biscuiting grandson

The following day with everyone returned to work and school, we headed north once more, now with the trailer which had been holidaying at the beach, and swung by our son’s place in West Auckland to collect our lawnmower, all in readiness for the task ahead of us on the southern edge of Whangarei.

Since then, the North Island has seen a deluge of weather; flooding, slips and other storm damage particularly throughout Northland, the south eastern reaches of Auckland and Coromandel. Fortunately for us and ours, there has been no residual damage. In fact my daughter-in-law sent through photos of the two city grandsons playing in surface road flooding. There it was a novelty, just miles away it was a catastrophe; such is the random nature of weather events. 

For me personally, despite the hard grind tales at the beginning of this post, I have had down time in which to catch up with friends and family, some of the former not seen for some years. The weeks ahead will give me opportunity to fill in the gaps of time and friendship, so long as I apply myself to the priorities: being available to gopher for The Handyman and see that he is fed well and in a timely manner, that his clothes are washed and his slippers warmed; in essence I have only to play the perfect wife.

So you see there has been little news by way of travel adventures to interest anyone but ourselves, however I did think I should check in. We are almost one month from our departure, and with such time pressure, the weeks will fly. We have yet to figure out how we will get ourselves from motorhome storage spot to the international airport, but solutions to this and other minor matters will evolve, as always.

14 February 2017 - Parua Bay, Northland

We drove out of Petone and the Hutt Valley mid-morning on Waitangi Day, after listening to radio discussions about this our “National Day” and arriving at the same conclusion we had the day before. Waitangi Day has indeed become a “cultural cringe” as our new Prime Minister suggested some weeks ago, and there are few who wish to see it as more than an excuse for a day off work and school.

Wanganui River from the Aramoana viewpoint

Instead of returning toward Wellington and heading north on Highway One, we drove up over “the Haywoods” coming down onto the west coast at Paremata, then continued on north after shopping for fresh bread for lunch and the Wellington newspaper, which we decided is not a whole lot better than the Christchurch Press; perhaps even worse because at least two of the feature articles had been published two days before in the Press. 

Our journey saw us meander slowly up the North Island with plenty of time to return to our home base. The weather did take the shine off some our tikki-touring, but there is not much one can do about that apart from remarking from time to time that we thought we had left the lousy weather down in the South Island.

On a whim we decided to come up the Wanganui River Road, a road untraveled since it has all been sealed. The sixty four kilometre road which follows the river from just north of Upokongaro on State Highway 4 as far as Pipiriki was first opened in 1934 and took thirty years to construct. Since then nature has made sure roadwork teams have been kept busy; more recently after the floods of mid-2016. When we drove south almost three months ago, then travelling on the Parapara Road which was beset with devastation during the same weather events, this lesser road had been spent periods of time totally closed and others open for limited periods. Fortunately for us, now months on, the road was passable, although still pitted and pot holed, narrow, slumped and slipped.

A sleepy section of the river

We stopped at the top of the one real hill along the way, the Aramoana Viewpoint. I have taken photos from this very spot throughout the years, and am never bored with the view. The Wanganui River at this lower reach is more sluggish than further up where there are untold rapids that challenged the riverboats in the first part of last century, and these days thrill and excite the canoeists and jet boat travellers. 

Roadside pigs

There are numerous maraes all along the route, evidence of a strong Maori presence in years gone by, long before Europeans settled upriver themselves. While some of the whare nuis have disintegrated into the landscape, some have been restored to their previous glory and are in use for locals or those who are invited. Naturally we did not fit into either category. There are still Maori families who live along the way, and others who live in the same casual manner, as was evidenced by the number of pigs loose in domestic gardens and in a couple of instances, all over the road.

There are also a couple of Catholic Churches, one at Ranana and the other at Hiruharama / Jerusalem, this latter home of the recently beatified Mother Marie Aubert and later to poet James K Baxter and his hippy cohorts. In fact that community did not close until after Baxter’s death in 1972. There are still nuns and the like wandering about the place or at least there were when we called up to the convent ten years or so ago. The church features a beautifully carved altar in Maori design and kowhaiwhai panels adorn the walls. Once the home of an orphanage where little Maori children were converted to Catholicism, and hopefully nothing else, the convent now hosts retreats. 

A local about to head upriver

Not too far from Jerusalem is Moutoa Island, the scene of a short and fierce battle in 1864 between Wanganui Maori and an invading Hauhau force. The battle helped to establish a close bond between local iwi and European settlors. The battle has been memorialised with a monument in the Moutoa Gardens down in Wanganui itself.

We arrived at Pipiriki by lunchtime and parked up just above the wharf where a local man had just arrived with his son, daughter and grandchild in his dinghy. We learned that he lives upriver and the only access is by boat. The rest of the family were heading back home, wherever that be, after spending part of the summer with him in isolation. We watched as he headed back up river; he was a taciturn type, well suited to his otherwise solitary life.

Today Pipiriki is gateway to the upper Wanganui River and all the adventures that tourists enjoy thereon and thereabouts, but once it was an important staging post for the paddle steamers that plied the river with cargo and passengers. My mother remembers the hotel that stood grandly above the wharf, hosting those like her family who were obliged to pause their journeys here before taking smaller vessels upriver. The hotel burnt down in 1959 and is now only a memory and part of the paddle-steamer history of the river and the entrepreneurial Hatrick family.

Arrival of canoeists at Pipiriki

We watched canoeists straggle in off the river, some wet from having been tossed out in the rapids immediately upriver. The plastic barrels being unloaded reminded us of our own river journey taken about eighteen years ago, and while I remember it fondly, particularly the fact that Chris and I did not capsize our Canadian canoe, I would not like to tempt fate by trying to relive the experience. 

From Pipiriki, we travelled eastward back to Raetihi on a better road, twenty eight kilometres up through high dense native forest, many of the aged trees bedecked with Old Man’s Beard moss.  Pungas and manuka grow down to the edge of the road and where repairs had cleared the edges, Himalayan Honeysuckle is taking over. We continued on the short distance to Ohakune where we camped up Mountain Road at the Mangawhero DOC camp, one of only four parties for the night. The weather had turned as we came away from the River, and by nightfall, rain was falling steadily.

Unfortunately the morning was little better and we ditched our plans to walk The Old Coach Road at Ohakune. This is a fifteen kilometre walkway, now part of the Mountains to the Coast cycleway, this part from Ohakune up through to Horopito, which lies 150 metres higher than Ohakune’s 610 metres ASL. We were keen to do the first section to take in the views of Hapuawhenua Viaducts. The Old Coach Road formed an integral link between the two rail heads between 1906 and 1908 before the Main Trunk Line was completed. Alas it was not the day to see this for ourselves; the clouds were low and the temperatures low and mountain weather can change at the drop of a hat. Next time hopefully!

Makatote Viaduct

And so we came on north sooner than expected, on past National Park, the central mountains and paused for morning tea beside the Makatote Viaduct, which is still very much in use today. This is 79 metres high (the third highest rail bridge in New Zealand) and 262 metres long, built between 1905 and 1908 by a Christchurch crowd, although the steel was actually fabricated on site. This viaduct, the last structure on the line to be completed, has always impressed me, ever since I first passed this way as a small child, but now it looks even more impressive with its new red iron-oxide coat of paint.

We were delighted to find ourselves only the third ever party to overnight at the NZMCA’s brand new park over property at Otorohanga, adjacent to the Waipa River. Right now it seems an absurdly large area, but no doubt as members learn of its existence, it will become as popular as Ardmore or Taupo. After dinner, as the starlings settled down to roost in the boundary trees, we watched the changing skies as the sun disappeared beyond the horizon, the horizon lying in the direction of Honikiwi, the rural area I spent the first nine years of my life. I thought it quite fitting that we should be among the first here at this park, when it was this very town that had been “our local” as I spent those formative years.

Further north on our journey, we detoured to Lake Puketirini on the western edge of Huntly for the sole purpose of exercise. We had happened upon this recreational lake a few years ago after driving up from Kawhia through the mining area. This time we were intent on walking its perimeter.

The lake is a relatively new feature of the township, developed from a disused coal-mined pit and ready for use in 2007. The Waikato District Council owns the park and promote its existence for use such as kayaking, water-ski-ing, boating, waka ama and of course walking. 

Huntly's diving school

En route, we came upon a Scotsman with three very boisterous dogs, and fell into conversation with him after the dogs had settled down from their excitement about us. There is a large diving platform in the centre of the lake and we were curious as to its purpose, given that it more like dredging equipment. It turns out that this is the operational centre for the New Zealand  School of Commercial Diving, which according to the local dog-walker, charges about $40,000 for a six week course, and if you graduate from here you have one of the best diving qualifications in the whole world. Further checking did substantiate the fact that the school offers courses internationally and you can graduate with a screed of letters after your name, however the training time and cost must be left as hearsay only.  This same man told us that the water in the lake is very clear and that mining machinery was left in the bottom of the mine which serves the same as shipwrecks for the learner divers. True or false? It’s a good story anyway.

As we passed through Auckland, we did a drive-by of the house we worked on last year before it was sold; the property we had restored the driveway by hand, blood and guts, had the fence repaired and generally restored the tidy little house standing on a large corner section. We were appalled to discover that a tiny little brick residence has been squeezed onto where the driveway was, not only negating all the hard work we did, but surely creating one of the ugliest little unliveable homes in the city. We guessed the new owners were reaping the greatest rentals from this now double producing property, and most likely far in excess of double what we had earned ourselves. In fact we would guess they are earning five times as much! We were shocked, numbed, although glad to have rid ourselves of our troublesome South Auckland investment.

We have been “home” for a couple of days now. Our motorhome is set up on our bush boundaried sea view section “Jumbo” (our white elephant for those not in the know). The weather has been warm and sunny, quite tropical and a far cry from that experienced over the last couple of months. We have yet to catch up with all the family, but have managed to book our air tickets for our next stint in the UK. In the intervening ten weeks there is much to be done, not least the wedding of my niece to attend and a boarding school reunion, the get together of a gaggle of sixty-somethings after a separation of fifty years. We do intend to get away travelling at least once more before we head overseas, even if it is simply to attend that dubious reunion. (I dare to say “dubious” because I am always wary of social gatherings and it will require courage on my part to walk into the room, although I know in my heart of hearts that it will be an absolutely brilliant “homecoming”. The anticipation of reunions is the scary part.) In the meantime I shall languish in the humidity and not complain at all!

5 February 2017 - Petone Working Men’s Club

We were away from our racecourse camp early yesterday morning, and even after dumping and filling with water, across at Havelock an hour before our rendez-vous time with my cousin and his partner. Greg and Jenny have lived in the idyllic seaside village of Havelock for nearly twenty years and this was to be our first visit, despite having driven past their home at least half a dozen times in the last decade. We spent an hour and a half describing our families, admiring the décor and discussing the frustrations of life over a pot of tea and then it was time to go. They were keen to see our own little “home” and while they were full of admiration, they probably wondered how we could live so many years in such a tiny space. Some things are best left unsaid; however we did express our desire to call in again when we were next this way, and I had no reason to suspect their reciprocated murmurings were anything but sincere. 

The last of the sunshine on Ngakuta Bay

So we pressed on beyond Havelock, this time on the Queen Charlotte Drive, the winding road that hugs the coastline and offers the spectacular views firstly into Grove Arm and then into the upper reaches of Keneperu Sound, particularly on such a glorious sunny day. We slowed down by the DOC camp at Aussie Bay and agreed it looked too intimate to accommodate a vehicle such as ours, and then pulled into that at Momorangi Bay, which looked more like a commercial motorcamp than a DOC camp. We parked and started for the office, noting the per person tariff and thought we had better check our DOC camp literature, now suspecting it to be one of the serviced camps that are excluded from our annual pass. Finding it to be so, we left without further enquiry, but did ring ahead to a POP further along the road. 

At Ngakuta Bay we were welcomed  warmly by Judith and Gary who offer association members powered or unpowered sites at an absurdly low tariff, one which we topped up to a more realistic level. So we plugged in and spent the afternoon relaxing, reading and enjoying the surrounds. Up in a little valley, the birds sang of their joy for the fine weather, undeterred by the few vans occupying the grassy paddock.

Later after dinner we wandered down to the bay and found the place a hive of activity; families playing after-dinner tee-ball and cricket, families paddling about in kayaks, some with lifejackets and some without, children fishing off the jetty with lines and nets. The sun was already low in the sky, its rays only kissing sections of the bay. It was quite lovely and I regretted that we did not walk out after dinner often enough.

Children net-fishing at Ngakuta Bay

This morning we headed off in a leisurely fashion, after heartfelt thanks to our hosts. We were a mere 11 kilometres from Picton so were soon there, even though we paused at the lookout high over the bay. Once parked up we spent a couple of hours wandering about the charming little township, bubbling with activity as it must every day during “the season”, because the ferries come and go whether it is the weekend or the weekday, school holidays or not. The bright sunshine made for more vibrancy and brought those waiting for the ferry out onto the esplanade.

We discovered the National Whale Centre on the waterfront, a mini museum of New Zealand whaling history with interpretative displays, films and literature for sale. Panels explained how the Marlborough Sounds was the epicentre of 19^th and early 20^th century whaling enterprises, and that for nearly 140 years, whales on their annual migration north were sighted by whalers from hilltop lookouts at the entrance to Tory Channel.

Overlooking Picton

We found it quite fascinating, even more so because there was mention of the local Norton family who one of my cousins married into, who with fellow descendants of the first whalers were still amongst the crews of the whale-chasing boats when the shore stations finally closed after nearly a century and a half. I recall Tom Norton speaking of those whaling days at my father’s eightieth birthday celebration.

Our sailing was uneventful despite the wind and the sea I felt rise and fall beneath the vessel whenever I stirred from my seat. The rest of the time I reclined comfortably in the on-board cinema, dulled by seasick tablets and the mindless comedies shown, the sort full of kindergarten potty humour. However I was pleasantly roused from this stupor by the announcement of our arrival in Wellington, and felt better than I had during and after all such recent marine journeys.

The arrival in Picton of the Bluebridge Ferry

We rang ahead to the Club and were told that while the car park was busy, there would be room for us, however on arrival found this not to be so at all. We parked some distance away, then came across to the club to dine and be entertained by the live music and dancing before retrieving the camper and moving into this now slightly less busy spot. I imagine the next hour or so will see the car park empty out and we will be left pretty much alone.