We knocked the bugger off

Herself is healing very nicely post op with the gall bladder thing & we were getting somewhat bored sitting around home staring at each other. Its not that we are sick of the sight of each other or anything you understand, its just that we have been doing a fair to middling bit of it lately & felt like a change, so a change we had.

Tuesday, we loaded Sherman with our worldlies, ( well, as much of them as we needed for a week or so anyway,) & headed north. Well, as far as Waipu anyway. A very dear friend of ours has this amazing place that her & her husband have created on 10 acres of beautiful land. THIS is it. No point in me raving on about it. Just go look at the pictures. Grant & Annette spoilt us rotten & we had a lovely time catching up on whats been happening in our respective worlds & exploring the area. Herself added to her experiences by going for a paddle in a kayak. I couldnt get my fat ass into one, so elected to puddle along behind in the little plastic dinghy. We went across the estuary & went for a walk along a totally deserted stretch of beautiful ocean beach. Lovely. Herself & I also got to see our first native Kaka in the wild in some trees on another patch of land that Annette owns.

This is what they look like. One of our few native parrots, & they are beautiful in the wild. There are 4 of them there, & it would be reasonable to assume that they were blown over to the mainland from Little Barrier Island where there is a reasonably large colony of them. They are very inquisitive & will actually come down & talk to you.


From there, we headed yet further North. Kaikohe in fact, to spend a couple of nights there with my old Fire Brigade buddy, Hawkeye. He generously agreed to accompany us to Cape Reinga, the most northerly part of New Zealand accessible to the general public. It's a long drive up there & I really didn't want to put Sherman on the beach, so we went by road. For those that don't know, Te Reinga is where the Tasman & the Pacific oceans meet at the top of NZ & it can be very dramatic. It is also a very important place spiritually to the Maori, as this picture shows.

Their belief is that this is where their spirits come to so that they can start their journey to the underworld. Standing there, it is very easy to believe it. This is the point mentioned in the previous pic Its all very dark & broody.
This is Herself standing in front of the sign that shows how far it is to all sorts of places. Its sort of obligatory to take this pic.



This is what it looks like where two oceans meet. Its very hard to do it justice. It was a relatively calm day up there, but it still looked like a washing machine with about 8 or 9 foot swells running


Cape Maria Van Deiman, named after the wife of an early Dutch explorer is just around the corner on the Tasman side. Its a lovely spot, but the day we were there , the wind was blowing quite steadily into the bay. It would not be a good place to be in a sailing ship. There is no way to get out of it. The end would be quite inevitable.

Anyway, so ends the first part of our travels. As we have already been to New Plymouth & Wellington, that only leaves the East Cape to go & we have covered all 4 extremities of the North Island. All up, we covered just over 1000 km's & enjoyed every inch of them. More later...