North Island - part one

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We point Boris south and step on the gas. The New Zealand springtime is treating us to some sunshine, so we wind down the windows and turn up the music. This is what we’ve been waiting for.

We come off the highway, not too far south of Auckland, and head for the coast, to Raglan. Raglan is famed for its surf and we drive down to a few of the bays to see what’s going on. We find a lovely spot at Manu Bay to munch our sandwiches and watch a lone man learning to ride the ocean on his paddle board. It’s very entertaining.The poor guy can just about stand up on his board but hasn’t yet got to grips with coping with those pesky waves, which puts him at a bit of a disadvanatage out there on the sea.His fairly rotund body falls off the front of his board, off the back and off each side, every time in a style worthy of a You’ve Been Framed slot.He shows remarkable tenacity and remounts his board everytime, which means we have half an hour of side-splitting giggles, leaving us wiping away the tears.We know it’s immature, and that we will be paid back royally by some form of surfing karma, but we can’t help it. In fact, Kate has to be restrained from filiming the guy.

We find an opportunity for the karma to come back and bite us pretty quickly when we both book ourselves in for an afternoon’s surf lesson at one of the main beaches.Raglan has New Zealand’s longest left hand breaks, with some back off waves that dump without peeling. There are gnarly barrels and rips to scare off the bogus surfers, so we don our baggies and head down to do some serious shralping. We have no idea what any of this means, but surely once we pick up the lingo we’re half way there, right?!

We spend an hour or so off the water, learning the maneouvers, before getting our wetsuits on and being given our boards.The boards are huge floats, reminiscent of the floating map which Fred the Weatherman used to jump around on to amuse fans of daytime telly.Only numptees could fall of these things. Kelly Slater may as well throw in his towel now.

Ok, so … it seems surfing is trickier than it looks. We expected our four months of snowboarding earlier in the year to have given us some transferrable skills, and for us to be able to ride the waves like the best of them. But 90% of the challenge is catching the waves sweetly in the first place.Most of the time, the waves have the cunning knack of using our own surfboards to bop us on the head.But after an hour or so of eating sand, Kate does at least manage to stand on her board and ride her wave in.Iv is mightily impressed, especially as he himself has failed to moved beyond wobbily kneeling on the middle of his floating island.

After 3 hours or so we’re shattered, but have had lots of fun.We decide to stay in Raglan for the night, so find a site high up in the hills with stunning views out to sea, plug Boris in, cook up a storming curry, and sleep like logs.

We wake up early the next day to drive to the Tongariro National Park.On the way down we stop at the Waitamo Caves.Neither of us rank caves highly among our favourite natural phenomena, but we’re both pleasantly surprised.A guide provides an interesting narrative that effectively balances natural history with Maori culture and local anecdote.

The light grows dimmer as we descend further into the labyrinthian underworld.We enter cathedral-like spaces, with stalactmites grandly rising on one side like the pipes of an ancient organ.Its as if we’ve entered nature’s sculpting studio – the stalactites and mites forming all manner of shapes and allowing our imaginations free rein to find faces and pictures in their forms.

We move through the cavern and onto small boats.They glide serenely over the pitch black waters of the cave’s floor, through a darkness which draws our attention to the hundreds of tiny gloworms hanging from the ceiling above.We’re mesmerised by the galaxy of tiny insects, griping their midnight sky to the cave wall.It’s a magical sight.We ask our guide where else there might be such a magnificent display of gloworms.He says that there are a few similar locations in Australia, but smirks that their gloworms aren’t as bright. The lightshow only begins to fade as our craft is guided silently out of the cavemouth and into the river waters of the dense NZ bush.

We drive on to Turangi a small town on the edge of the Tongariro National Park, and find a campsite that will be home for the next couple of nights.Kate haggles out a discount for our pitch and somehow manages to get free walking gear thrown in.Early the next day, we don our walking gear and drive out to the foothils of the National Park.From there we head out on our first trek (or ‘tramp’ – as the Kiwi’s say).It’s a seven hour, 17m walk over the crossing – not practical for us even if we were physcially up to it, as we’d be stranded on the other side.So we decide to just walk as far as our common sense takes us, and then turn back.It’s a pleasant trek, with the weather fine.A mist hangs heavy on the imposing volcano that stands high above us and whose toes we are tickling.The more forbodding volcanic areas within the park were used as locations for Mordor and Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings.The perfect cone top of the volcano we’re skirting the base of, is covered with snow, and the temperature drops as our gradient steepens.We make easy going of it at first, as we’re being chased up by the sulphurous smells of the nearby spa pools.We find a sheltered spot between two clumps of volcanic rock to eat our lunches and, tempting as it is to tramp on, we make the call to turn back. We’re glad we did as, by the time we reach Boris, Kate’s done in.We’ve managed about 11km. Luckily, a few kilomoters along the unsealed road are thermal baths, where we are able to soak our tired limbs before heading back to the campsite.

Our final big drive in the North Island is a long one, taking us down to Wellington.We are keeping an eye out for a suitable stop to swap driving duties when we come across a sign: “Bulls, there’s no udder town like it!”.Yup, that’s right, a town called Bulls that has a penchant for punningl We pull in near the visitor centre and find a map showing the town’s attractions: “Delect-a-BULL (the Deli); Consta-BULL (the police staion); Read-a-BULL (the library).The list goes on and on.Iv’s keen to stop a while, find this town’s mayor and shake him by the hand.He comes up with a NZ bull joke that he wants to share with the locals.Kate, however, has a rather panicked look about her.She jumps into the driving seat, keen to moooove one as quick as possible.Terribull….

We make it into Wellington by early afternoon, and are treated there to two nights of fantastic hospitality and cuisine from Ian and Barbara, our brother-in-law’s parents.We pass our time there as fully-fleged tourists – spending hours at the national museum, even longer at a bird sanctuary, and enjoying the café culture and beautiful coastal drives that this windy city has to offer.Wellington is the city that kept Kate’s sister, Sarah, in New Zealand for a couple of years (with quite a lot of help from Wellington inhabitant Mark), so it’s lovely for us to see the place.It’s a beautiful city with houses sporadically hugging the hills above a string of bays.When the sun’s out it is glorious, but the weather here is highly changeable – in our short stay we experience sunshine, tropical storm-like rainfall, and some seriously strong winds.

We’ll be back here when we return to the North Island in a few weeks, but for now, it’s on to the South Island.

(p.s. we didn’t find any locals for Iv to share his bull joke with – maybe it was siesta time and they were all bulldozing – so for the sadists among you: … Two cousins, an Aussie and a Kiwi, inherit a family ranch.After only a couple of years, they’re in financial trouble.To keep the ranch from going deeper in to the red, they decide to purchase a prize bull so they can breed their own stock.

The Kiwi takes out their last $600 and heads west to another ranch where a man is selling a bull.He tells his cousin, “When I get there, if I decide to buy the bull, I'll contact you to drive out after me and haul it home."
He arrives at the man's ranch, inspects the bull, and decides to buy it – at a cost of $599. He drives to the nearest town to send his cousin the news.

At the telegraph office, he explains that he needs to send a telegram to his cousintelling him that he’s bought a bull for the ranch and he needs to hitch the trailer to thepickup truck and drive out so they can haul it home.The telegraph operator explains that he'll be glad to help then adds, "It's just 99 cents a word."

Realizing he only has a $1 left, he smiles, and says, “No worries – send the word ‘comfortable’ – my cousin’s Australian, he reads slow…”

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