Soccer Trip to New Plymouth

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Note: This is a journal entry from when I was an exchange student in 1994-1995. The photos have been scanned from the original prints.

We went up to New Plymouth for one night. We were meant to have a game in Wanganui on the way up, but it was cancelled, so we had time to stop at Mount Taranaki, where we played in the snow left behind by an avalanche.

There is a saying in this part of the country--"If you can't see the mountain, it's raining. If you can see the mountain, it's going to rain." Well, the clouds were high enough that we could see Taranaki (except for a few rogue clouds clustered around the top), and we could see the other volcanoes in the centre of the North Island--the snows on Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngaruhoe show up on the horizon of the panorama photo above.

In New Plymouth, we met our billets from the host soccer team. Our billet took us out on a boat with her dad, to pick up a pilot who helped a big ship get out of the harbour. It was a bit dodgy, climbing down the ladder from the dock and into the boat we were in, and on the way back, but it was cool. It was dark, so there wasn't much to see (or take pictures of), just a feeling of being really small in the darkness.

The drive back was fun--thanks to my friends on my soccer team, I learned about the Kiwi pastime of making fake teeth out of milk bottles (a candy/lolly I'd never seen before). And we stopped for a stretch at a park with a castle and a giant whale...

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Photos

Avalanche Path on Mount Taranaki
On the left side, about mid-way up is a line of dots--that's my soccer team, climbing up on the snow.