ellen fun-ness!

Hey look! It's Ellen Victoria Johnson! Josh and I drove up to Auckland Friday night, then went to the airport to meet Ellen's plane at 5:25. That's am. Ouch. But it all worked out 'cause we left the city early enough that the driving was fine (it's Queen's Birthday weekend, so it's along weekend where basically everybody gets Monday off). On the news there was a protesting caravan that was going to be driving 15km/hour from Auckland going north on Friday afternoon. Ouch.
Anyhoo, the plan was to explore Northland. And keep Ellen up at least till about 7pm (thereby making her total time awake something like 38 hours). We started driving north and to the west coast, but first we had to have breakfast.

Oh, and we saw this guy, whose leather jacket reads: 'Jesus is Lord' across the top, and 'The Redeemed' on the bottom. I think my mom should join that gang. Is it a gang, then? A gang for the Lord? That sounds bad. :)

Continuing on, we stopped in a tiny town called Matakohe and saw the kauri museum, because I love the big trees. It had lots of other random bits in it, including a room full of horse racing trophies, tea cups (including one for mustaches), and these weird little guys that look like bobbleheads, but are actually pitchers. Like, for pouring.
Is that an airplane in your lap or are you just happy to see us?

Mighty fine missile. Hee hee.

And the whole downstairs is dedicated to kauri gum, which is like amber--it is the resin of the tree, and people used to dig for it and then use it for all sorts of things, including carvings, varnish, and linoleum.

Here's a dude who was going up the tree to harvest gum directly from the tree, called bleeding. It was discontinued in State forests when the Department realized that it was injurious to the trees.

And then there's a lady's bottle collection. A seriously huge amount of bottles that one woman collected and stored in her home...don't know where they all fit.

Josh and Ellen sittin' in a tree...

Drove north a bit and went to Bayly's Beach, just outside Dargaville. One of my books tells me it's the longest beach in NZ, at 100km. AND it turns out that it's a public highway. Seriously.

Cool cliffs with lava looking sand.

There were some great waves to watch, and pretty rocks to look at...

And cute old man with super short shorts. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but the shorts are called stubbies, and are actually a macho thing to wear.

Yes! I have a partner in crime when I make Josh stop the car so I can take pictures!


Funny! These are not in very many places...we've only seen three kiwi crossing signs now.

And then we got to the Waipoua Forest Park, which has NZ's only primary kauri forest. The fact that it's in the middle of nowhere and hard to get to prevent it from getting logged when everything else was, and has been a sanctuary since 1952. We got to see really big trees. I love them a lot. I really want to see the redwoods, too...speaking of trees...
These are the Four Sisters, a group of (you guessed it) four inseparable (roots and branches all intertwined) kauris.



Josh and Ellen are in front of the 'Father of the Forest,' which is the world's second largest living kauri--a mere 1500- 2000 years old! It looks small in the picture, but it really is HUGE. But they need to protect the root systems so we're standing a good 20 feet away. It has a girth of 16 meters. We also got to see the 'Lord of the Forest' which is the oldest at 2000 years old, 52 meters high and 14 meters wide.

Rooster! (Always makes me think of Carol Burnett in Annie).

Great view as we came to the harbor towns of Omapere and Opononi. Across the harbor you can see big ole sand dunes....you can surf down them into the water. We didn't get to do that.

We headed across (east) to get to Paihia in the Bay of Islands, which is where we were staying for the night. Our motel had an awesome hot tub outside. Yum.
Woke up in the morning to some gray, stormy weather...unfortunately didn't get to see much of the Bay of Islands 'cause of the clouds.

So we went to the Haruru falls...

KeriKeri, where we went to the farmer's market (LOVE those things), and saw this cool sculpture.

Heading out of KeriKeri we stopped at Makana Confections...yay for chocolate!


There are 21 wineries in the area as well, and since the weather wasn't cooperating, we went wine tasting! First to the Fat Pig.


There were very few leaves left on the vines...

And then stopped at Ake Ake vineyard for lunch (super tasty) and more wine tasting.
Then we started driving south on the east coast, stopping in Kawakawa to see the toilets. Yeah, for real. The attraction is actually the toilets. First off, they really do have a great system here--almost every town has a public toilet. The small town of Kawakawa went all out for their toilets, though. So these were designed by Kawakawa's 'adopted son' Friedrich Hundertwasser, the 'internationally regarded architect and ecologist,' who was born in Austria in 1928, came to live in NZ in the early 1970s, and lived a reclusive lifestyle on a farm with outdoor plumbing. The toilet block has ceramic columns, garden roof, and used local talent and resources.

The windows are made of old bottles from the district.

The garden roof and columns.

Then we drove back down through Auckland, and over to the east coast of the Coromandel peninsula, and stayed the night in Hahei. The next morning we headed to Cathedral Cove, a beautiful beach with pretty rocks and stone archway...
Here's Ellen and Josh at the start of our fun walk--the weather was misty and a bit rainy...

but it cleared up beautifully for pictures!

Half the sky was blue and the other half was crazy gray and stormy looking.


And here's the stone archway that we were not actually supposed to go through. We pretended not to see the sign.

Then we drove over to the Hot Water Beach, which was beautiful but at higher tide, so no hot water. Sad. It's basically a free spa, when nature cooperates, anyway!

And the waves here were fantastic--Josh was salivating. Too bad he didn't have his board.

Then we drove around the Coromandel, including going on the 309 road where we talked to this cute hobbit man (he had hobbit toes, even) whose pets include like 57 little piggies, who were all quite tame. He doesn't eat them, but apparently sometimes other people buy them to eat.

The colors in the sun are so vibrant!


Looking over Coromandel Harbor.

More pretty Coromandel pictures.

So we drove down the gorgeous west coast of the Coromandel, stopping in Thames to pick up our dinner from the grocery store, and then headed to Coromandel Forest Park, to the Kauaeranga Visitors Centre to pick our hut tickets. The plan was to do the walk up to the Pinnacles Hut, which is a mansion of a hut, with 80 bunks. 80!! AND a barbeque, solar lights, and showers. Crazy. In Josh's walks book, they had it marked as an easy walk, meaning not much of a grade, well formed trail, etc. Turns out it's a million stairs. A MILLION. Poor Ellen. We wanted to share the fun outdoorsy stuff of NZ, and figured a nice easy 3 hour hike and fun hut would be awesome, but we didn't realize it would be such a crazy hike. She's such a good sport. We didn't get started till almost 4pm, though...
Here's Ellen coming over her first swingbridge of the trail!

And one of the few areas it was actually flat...

One of the lots of great little waterfalls.

And then it got dark! We had our headlamps on and had a good 1-1.5 hours of a night hike. It was very cool--the stars were out and brillant (especially since there are very few lights out there), and you could still see all the dark shapes of the mountains all around us. We got there just in time--it started POURING rain 5 minutes after we got in.
Here's Josh in the mansion of a hut. This is the dining room--there are separate bunk rooms, bathrooms and showers.

We slept well and headed back down late in the morning. It got a little rainy, but then it stopped.

A look down the Kauaeranga Valley.


Stream crossings!

More pretty mountains.

Josh needed some decorations on his backpack.

More stairs on our 'easy' walk. These are actually part of the old railway that used to go from the top of the valley to the bottom, as a means to log the forests.

Another swingbridge! This one was a bit longer, and a lot more bouncy. Good thing Ellen REALLY loves bridges. (By the way, that's a lie.)


Here's some details on the track (Ellen, show Sean so he can read all about your crazy hike)--
Pinnacles Track follows the old pack horse trails from the car-park, over the river and up the valley to the Pinnacles hut. The track was used in the good old days to bring supplies up to the millers and tree fellers, who cleared out hundreds of acres of kauri trees in the valleys. In the late 1990’s, the track (which had become a bit scungy) was upgraded, and rebuilt. The result is about a thousand stone steps, wide enough for packhorses, dominate most of the track, crossing the river three times as it rises steeply to logging/power camp at the ‘near’ top.

The logging camp was also used as a base for the power company to helicopter huge power lines in that feed from Thames to Tairua etc. It’s a good place to stop and rest, have some food and appreciate how high up you’ve come.

From the logging camp, it’s an undulating walk of between 30 min to an hour to the Pinnacles hut.

On the way back we took the Billy Goat trail--Billy Goat Trail starts at the logging camp where you take MORE stairs. This trail undulates again as it winds around the sides of the hills and there are some steep climbs but eventually it peaks and you can stop by an almost hidden information post and have a breather and admire the view. The Billy Goat Trail used to have an old wooden bridged railway running from the top of the valley to the bottom. The trail becomes a gentle walk around the side of some more valleys (with remnants of train tracks and piles sitting about)…then the last bit will test the calf muscles…a step descent down to the valley floor.

And check out the mud on Ellen!


So we finally made it back to Hawera by about 11:30 on Tuesday night. It was a nice long 5 hour drive back. Wednesday I went off to work (sad) and Josh and Ellen wandered down by Whanganui, and then we had super yummy Indian takeout. I could eat naan every day. For real. Ellen had to head home on Thursday, so she and Josh headed up to New Plymouth...but not before stopping at Anderson's Pie Shop!