We braved the weather on Saturday to make it up to Cape Reinga, the northern end of the North Island. It is over 100 km from the nearest small town and truly feels like the end of the world.
Cape Reinga is extremely important in Maori mythology. This is the place where the spirits of the dead travel so they can begin their journey to the afterlife. They travel down the roots of an 800 year old tree and and descend to the underworld to return to their traditional homeland of Hawaiiki-a-nui, using the Te Ara Wairua, the 'Spirits' pathway'.
When we got there the rain had temporarily let up, but the wind...wow the wind. If I didn't have both feet planted firmly on the ground I felt like I was going to be picked up and blown away!
We
were blown down walked down to the lighthouse. On our way down we noticed something unexpected. The waves of the ocean were coming in a different directions. We hadn't realized that Cape Reinga is considered the separation marker between the Tasman Sea to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east. So were were watching the two seas clash to create unsettled waters just off the coast. The Māori refer to this as the meeting of Te Moana-a-Rehua, 'the sea of Rehua' with Te Tai-o-Whitirea, 'the sea of Whitirea', Rehua and Whitirea being a male and a female respectively.
We made it down to the lighthouse in one piece. To celebrate Keith had to do some handstand push ups!
After that we hung around a near by beach for a little bit, but I was fighting a cold I must have picked up on the flight and wasn't up for any kind of long walk.
We had seen a couple
Kauri trees while we had been in the far north and we only knew a little bit about them. They are amazingly huge trees and to us reminiscent of the redwoods-they grow over 160 feet tall and over 50 wide. Keith had read about a place that sounded kind of cheese-tastic called Ancient Kauri Kingdom and wanted to stop-we don't usually stop at tourist traps with 'Kingdom' in the name, but maybe we should more often. This place was kind of amazing. They have giant stumps out side and an amazing giant Kauri staircase inside. They have a number of products made out of Kauri-but not using the protected tree. They extract ancient Kauri stumps from swamps on the north island and the stumps carbon date to 30,000-50,000 years old-amazing!! My first question was how are these stumps not rotten? This is what they say:
Buried just below the surface of the ground and preserved in the water of peat swamps, the Ancient Kauri wood has neither petrified nor turned to coal. This underground resting place, sealed from the air, became a perfectly balanced cocoon that preserved the giant trees. OK, sounds kind of like the
Bog people to me, I get it. This is a finite source, they think that in about 50 years they will have found all the ancient Kauri-obviously that means this stuff is expensive! A small bowl is about $150, a coffee table is a few thousand...not really in our price range. But they had a back room where things got more affordable and was actually pretty cool. You can buy unfinished pieces of Kauri and they give you the instructions of how to finish it yourself-sign me up! We got a small bowl and a lot of sandpaper, which is really just how you finish it. I've been working on it all week!
We made it to a backpackers called the
Tree House backpackers that sounded amazing, with little cabins nestled in the thick forest. If we had known that it was incredibly family friendly and that the communal kitchen and lounge was really just a day care full of screaming toddlers we wouldn't have checked in. After a eating a quick dinner in the 'kitchen' we retreated to the peace of our little room, thankful that it was away from the main building.
We were happy to escape from there early the next morning, besides we had places to go and people to meet. We had to get to the Waipoua Forest, which has some of the largest remaining tracts of native forest in Northland. Most Kauri trees have been lost due to milling or clearing the land for farming. A few massive trees remain, including Tane Mahuta and Te Matua Ngahere. We stopped at Tane Mahuta first. Tane Mahuta is the largest Kauri tree in New Zealand at 167 feet high and 45 feet wide and it thought to be between 1250-2500 years old. In Maori culture he is God of the Forest and is the father of all plants and man.
We also stopped to visit Te Matua Ngahere, the Father of the Forest isn't as tall or old as Tane Mahuta, but is quite a bit wider.
Mind you while we're checking these places out it is pouring down rain. We decide to hop in the car and try to find a museum or something to keep us dry. We ended up driving around most of the day in the car hoping it would stop raining. After deciding that we should just get to Auckland since we were flying out the next morning, the sky decided to clear. We found Bethells Beach and just happened to have timed our stop perfectly for sunset. It was so wonderful to be walking along the beach in just jeans and t-shirt and I really did not want to fly back to the frigid South Island the next morning.
But now we're back on the South Island and in a little town called Tapanui where Keith has been working part of this week. This is our first time here and the accommodations are pretty nice, well at least they have a pretty view and we're only a half hour away from Gore. Gore always gets a bad rap of being kind of the armpit of a town, but I think it's gotten the short end of the stick. I spent the day there yesterday and it was really a lovely little town. Since I compare pretty much every town we go to to Alex, I would say Gore is a huge step up-it has department stores, a movie theater, lots of little shops, even a little gourmet food shop-at least we're only in Alex for 2 days next week and spending the rest of the week in Tapanui!
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