New Zealand, North Island Adventure

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Home

Sorry for so little content on this trip, we were quite sick for around 10 days and just did not see all we wanted to.
Home now and recovering.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Te Kuiti

Still in Te Kuiti on RAR today, it is raining so we had a look around town and did a little Geocaching.

Rail Viaduct on road to the Gorge

Monument to the Giant Wetas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_weta

Monument to the Shearers

Te Kuiti is a small town in the north of the King Country region of the North Island of New Zealand. It lies at the junction of State Highways 3 and 30 and on the North Island Main Trunk Railway, 80 km south of Hamilton.
As of the 2001 census it had a resident population of 4,374, a decrease of 5.1% since 1991. The town promotes itself as the sheep shearing capital of the world and is host to the annual New Zealand National Shearing Championships.

Oakura Beach

Today we left Oakura Beach and our little beach cabin and headed up to Te Kuiti.

The owners of the Oakura Beach Holiday Park, Jan & Al were wonderful, even gave us a fresh feed of fish caught that afternoon for our dinner.
The weather was absolutely perfect.
http://www.oakurabeach.com/oakura-beach-holiday-park/welcome_idl=2_idt=4027_id=23147_.html

Oakura Beach

Oakura Beach Holiday Park Office

Different views of Mt Egmont as we head off.

The New Plymouth Power Station was a 600 MW thermal power station at New Plymouth. Located at Port Taranaki, it was dual fuelled on natural gas and fuel oil. Constructed at a time of major hydro and HV transmission developments, it was New Zealand's first big thermal power station planned for continuous base load operation. Now Decommissioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Plymouth_Power_Station

Waitomo Glowworm Caves

The fascinating life of the Glow Worm very well explained by our guide.

These are only found in Australia and New Zealand, the other countries having Fire-Flies ect.

Glow-worm larvae Feeding webs

Glow-worms

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Where we are staying and travelling internet access is scratchy so you will have to bare with me.
We had two days in Wellington, then drove up to New Plymouth on the west coast. We are in a small beach side town of Oakura and today the weather was perfect. We are having two nights here then start moving back up the island towards Auckland.

Wellington

Cable car Wellington

Mount Egmount near New Pymouth

Mount Taranaki, or Mount Egmont, is an active but quiescent stratovolcano in the Taranaki region on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island. Although the mountain is more commonly referred to as Taranaki, it has two official names under the alternative names policy of the New Zealand Geographic Board. The 2518-metre-high mountain is one of the most symmetrical volcanic cones in the world. There is a secondary cone, Fanthams Peak, 1,966 metres (6,450 ft), on the south side. Because of its resemblance to Mount Fuji, Taranaki provided the backdrop for the movie The Last Samurai.

Wind farm

This area is big in pine log export.

The 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake, also known as the Napier earthquake, occurred in New Zealand at 10:47 am on Tuesday 3 February 1931, killing 256 and devastating the Hawke's Bay region. It remains New Zealand's deadliest natural disaster. Centred 15 km north of Napier, it lasted for two and a half minutes and measured magnitude 7.8 M_s (magnitude 7.9 M_w). There were 525 aftershocks recorded in the following two weeks. The main shock could be felt in much of the southern half of the North Island.

Because of the era, the town was rebuilt in Art Deco style with some beautiful examples of that architecture.

Nice beer

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Rotorua to Napier

Left Rotorua Wednesday and travelled all along the rugged coastline to Gisbourne for the night, next day headed down to Napier and stayed with my third cousin at Clive. Today we drove right down to Wellington staying at a nice little motel on the bay for two nights, Photos tomorrow.