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Published: August 31st 2009
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One weekend in May, we went for a drive around the south of Auckland, firstly stopping at
Otara Market, which is billed as a real mix of Pacific Island, Maori, Asian and
Pakeha (European descent) stallholders each Saturday, creating a uniquely New Zealand multicultural experience, where Pacific Island elders sell traditional cloth, next to their younger counterparts selling satirical t-shirts and streetwear, with Indian and Chinese and fast food stalls all competing for business.
This was a pretty fair description, as there plenty of Pacific Islanders, as well as bearded Sikhs, head-scarfed women and Chinese grocers. As well as a selection of Maori t-shirts and Polynesian music CDs (complete with a live singer), the market was mostly fruit and veg; a mixture of the familiar (apples) and the exotic (Fijian ginger), and a good chance to stock up. We also saw our friend Bryan at his honey stall with plenty of different varieties, including the Kiwi favourite
Manuka, and also honey from the pohutukawa tree (the red-blooming NZ Christmas tree) which was really creamy and different to any other we have tried before. An obligatory stop at a bakery was also made.
While this far south of Auckland
centre, we went to a few other places that had been recommended to us, including
Clevedon for some fish, chips and oyster fritters; pretty
Kawakawa Bay, and
Maraetae Beach, where we met a sculptor with some of his cool wooden sculptures (see photo).
Also in this month we noticed this terrible smell from a nearby street, it smelt like vomit but never went away! Eventually we learnt that it was the rotting fruit of the
gingko biloba tree, which lies on the ground for around 6 weeks a year. We took gingko biloba tablets when we were doing the Inca Trek in 2007, because it is supposed to be good for altitude sickness.
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May saw us host a few visitors, first was my cousin
John and his belle, Andrea, over from Perth. They were half holidaying and half visiting Andrea’s family, who are from Auckland. We insisted on forcing our travel tips upon them (!) as they headed off to the South Island. Second was
Maria my school friend who, true to her always-on-the-go style, e-mailed me and was on our doorstep all within the space of a week. With only two days in Auckland, I thought
where better to whisk her off to than a winery on
Waiheke Island, a short ferry trip across the Haruaki Gulf? This move was as much to give her a taste of NZ’s stunning scenery and impressive wines as it was an attempt to give her zero opportunity to feed her keen shopping habit! I gladly conclude that she was blown away with the beauty of the place as we tried our utmost to intellectually argue the merits of our wines during a tasting session at the award-winning Mudbrick Vineyard (the distant views of Auckland Harbour and nearby Rangitoto Island were faultless). Back at our flat, Maria was as content as a cat staring out the window soaking up yet more views - a very low maintenance guest! By the time she left the following day, she had decided that a stint living over here would be “sweet as”, as they say here. That’s what NZ does to even a self-confessed city chick and shopaholic!
We had not managed to fit in any
scuba diving in NZ during the warmer summer months, due to a combination of fulfilling plenty of other sun-kissed NZ travel ambitions and not being fully
Maria looking keen to enter Mudbrick Winery
Waiheke Island, a short ferry trip from Auckland aware that the National Geographic-endorsed
Poor Knights Islands were also rated by Jacques Cousteau as
one of the top ten dive sights in the world. Despite one false start due to bad weather, we headed to Northland to discover what all the fuss was about - concluding we’d rather experience the diving in the winter than miss it altogether.
On our drive up we were accompanied by our choice of the ‘Irish Sean’ voice on our new multi-national Sat Nav, guiding us in the voice of Father Ted. Allowing for a few hiccups, he was an otherwise trustworthy guide...
Having driven up in the dark after work on Friday, our first views were lots of stars. We awoke Saturday to a beautiful crisp morning and headed out on the boat to our dive site with
Dive Tutukaka. During a refresher course on the 40 minute boat trip out to the Poor Knights Islands themselves, we did our best to dredge up knowledge from when we learned how to scuba dive one year and a half ago.
The Poor Knights Islands, inhabited by Maori until the early 19th century and spotted by English explorer James Cook in 1760, are
a group of small rocky islands on the eastern coast of NZ’s North Island Famous for their cold water reefs, excellent underwater visibility and diversity of marine life, there are 60 different dive sites around the island; we made it to 2. As a marine reserve, actually landing on the islands is prohibited, which helps the survival of (among other creatures) the
tuatara, regarded as the world’s only living dinosaur as it is said to be almost unchanged in 200 million years! (We saw a real one in Invercargill Museum in July, see blog entry coming up).
On Dive 1, we first swam through thick green plant-like seaweed (like swimming a dense underwater forest) then saw snapper, bluefish, stripy red moki, spiky sea urchins, and molluscs. After resurfacing we hopped in the kayaks and paddled alongside steep cliffs to
Ricorico Cave, apparently the world’s biggest sea cave which has impressive acoustics, and concerts have even taken place there. Tiny orange and purple organisms living on the cave walls made it look like they had been painted.
The visibility on Dive 2 in the cave was even better than the first, at 40 metres! We saw scorpion fish, John
Scorpion fish
Poor Knights Islands
(Underwater photo courtesy Milan Marko) Dory, Lord Howe and pink and blue maomao. As we looked up from the sea bed we saw the
Big Blue effect, where the sun’s rays shone into the clear water, creating an amazingly blue hue deep down as far as the seabed.
As our boat headed back to shore, we could see the outline of the islands; one could well be convinced that their outline resembled a knight lying in his tomb, as their name suggests. The other story goes that Captain Cook named them the Poor Knights Islands after Poor Knights Pudding (nowadays called French Toast!) back home.
We did not see a huge amount of the nearest big town of Whangarei, since we arrived there for dinner after dark; I do remember however the abundance of palm trees growing alongside the shopping area pavements - another reminder of the tropical land we were in and thinking this is the kind of thing I would miss when back home.
We left Tutukaka and headed north to nearby
Matapouri Bay (where out to sea we spotted the Poor Knights Islands where we had dived the previous day), then beautiful
Whale Bay a little further on. Then
Tane Mahuta (‘Lord of the Forest’), NZ’s largest living kauri tree,
Estimated to be around 2,000 years old.
Height 51.5 metres. Can you spot Nick at the bottom?!
across country through Kawakawa to
Opononi - the name is reference to a Dolphin called Opo by residents when it befriended them back in 1950. Oponini along with
Omapere down the road enjoys a huge expanse of beach with impressive sand dunes in the near distance.
The day’s West Coast highlight as we headed back south to Auckland was the lush
Waipou Kauri Forest, home to several of the biggest known living
kauri trees, up to 2,000 years old and a girth of 16 metres - quite impressive up close and making the younger trees look like matchsticks!
Both of our work visas expire next month, so we have spent quite a lot of time weighing up the pros and cons of (i) staying longer in NZ, (ii) looking for work in Japan or (iii) returning to the UK. As it turned out, with the current economic climate, the first 2 options have not been practical so we spent a whole Sunday afternoon at a Chinese restaurant, getting too full on their buffet and poring over the NZ guidebook, seeing where to visit during July before coming home.
*****
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