Tsunami Alert

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Again the weather looked to be in our favour as we headed for the cape. By now we were on the smallest peninsula of New Zealand headed for the very top. It was on this morning that Garreth got a call from his mum in Ireland asking if the Tsunami had hit yet. Until that point we had heard nothing of it. It turns out that an Earth quake north of New Zealand could have possible triggered a Tsunami. Well we weren’t going to let a bit of water get in our way. It had taken us three days to get up here. We continued on our way and went to 90 mile beach. Well if it was going to happen we wanted to get a good view. Despite the lack of a wall of water the beach was very impressive. The state highway number 1 runs all the way up to the very top of the Cape but like everything in New Zealand they haven’t bothered finishing it. The last 21km of road give up into a gravel track. Standing on the very end of the country we were 20000km away from London. Once all the photos were taken we headed back a bit to some mighty big sand dunes. We hired a board and headed of up the mountain of sand. After practicing on a smaller drop we went for the big one. By now it looked like we were in the Sahara. Nothing but sand in all directions. From the bottom the dune didn’t look to big but after five minutes of climbing it I changed my mind. Standing at the top looking down was like looking off a sky scraper. Oh well what can go wrong? Jump on the board and throw yourself over the edge and down the dune. After about 10 seconds you have built up enough speed to do some serious injury but a few seconds later you drift to a stop miles away in the distance. It all seemed relatively easy until Carol Anne had her go and managed to come off and tumble all the way to the bottom. Fortunately for my insurance company I couldn’t do to many of these as climbing the dune was exhausting. After covering every inch of ourselves and our clothes in sand we headed back to Henderson Bay where we got a chance to watch the news to find out what was going on with the Tsunami. It turned out that the BBC had jumped the gun an even though New Zealand authorities had not issued a warning hundred of residents were heading for the hills after being contacts by overseas relatives after they had watch the BBC new. It was quite strange seeing hundreds of people pack the highways heading for high ground and we had spent the day on the beach.
The next day we headed back to Paihia to drop off Carol Anne. She has a few extra days in New Zealand and was going to spend them in the Cape. We said our good bye’s and continued down to Omapere. But not without some drama. On the Way to drop Carol Anne off I noticed that the tyre pressure light had come on. We had stopped in a garage and they pumped up our rather deflated front tyre. On the way back through after dropping Carol Anne off we had to stop again for air. We decided to make it to Omapere and change the tyre over for the one in the boot, currently hidden by all our bags. We may have done it sooner if not for the pouring rain.
By the time we pulled into the hostel the front tyre looked almost flat. As the car was going back in two days the plan was to drive on the spare tyre then swap it back just before dropping the car off. This wasn’t going to happen as the spare type looked like a bicycle tyre. To make matters worse on expecting the tyre we found it had starting to disintegrate. The guy from the hostel called a garage and we limped the 10km to get it changed. By now the hire company had already agreed to foot the bill. The garage said the tyre could have blown up at any time. Oops.

The next morning with our brand new tyre we headed down towards Auckland. We stopped off to visit the biggest tree in New Zealand. It takes 17 people holding hands to circle the tree. Not having 17 people to hand we had to believe them. It was bloody big though. We stayed the night just outside Auckland in Orewa. We cleaned the car up a bit as we seemed to have several tones of sand in it and thought the hire company wouldn’t want that. We did get a bit carried away and ended up washing it as well.
This was Oriel and Garreth’s last night. The next morning we were up early despite the wine the night before, and heading off towards Auckland airport.

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