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Published: February 11th 2009
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You will be pleased to know that the weather in Britain has made the news in New Zealand!! As you are all probably stuck at home in need of entertainment, we felt duty bound to provide you with another blog.
Highlights of the last couple of weeks include our walk out to Cape Kidnappers. I know what you are thinking, what a cool name. Well it appears that when Captain Cook was heading down the east coast of the North Island of NZ he started to run out of names of rich British dignitaries and started to have to use his imagination. In this instance one of his crew was picked up by some Maori in a canoe (or for fans of the Maori language a waka) and is now Cape Kidnappers. Similarly, the other day we went to the incredibly windy (our tent was literally bending double in the wind {Fear not Brendon, it is still intact}) Castlepoint; unfortunately no castle, but Cook thought the rocky outcrop looked a bit like it should have a castle on top of it (it now has a light house on top).
Anyway I digress. We stayed at a camp site about 10km
from the end of the cape and we were able to walk to the end and visit the gannet colony (interestingly they smell - a lot!!). This was made slightly more tricky by the fact that the foot path is only available in daylight for about five hours a day, as it is on a beach. The other side effect of walking in the sun for the period of time with no shade, on one of the hottest days of the year in NZ is that it is quite hard to avoid sun burn. I am the proud owner of a pink back despite having had a t-shirt on all day!!
So our last blog was only a couple of weeks ago (must be some sort of record??) and we left you in Wanganui. From there we headed up the Wanganui River Road and found a nice little free campsite where you could swim in the river. We set off the next day to do a decent walk but 45 mins in and we came across a barrier telling us the track was closed due to some illegal cyanide poisoning. Balls. Well as luck had it, we bumped into
the DOC warden on our way back down. He had just come back from his Christmas holidays and was on his way to re-open the track so we were able to do the walk after all. It was quite long and very up and down but the views were great and we only bumped into one other couple all day (who amusingly had decided that they were immune to cyanide). A nice cool off in the river nicely rounded the day off!
We continued up the river road a little bit to see a church that is very much over-rated by the Lonely Planet but which was pretty all the same. Then headed back down to Palmerston North so that John could finally get a look in the National Rugby Museum (he worked in Palmy for 3 weeks when we first got to NZ and the museum was only open during working hours...). I call it a museum but really it’s just a couple of rooms full of stuff. Quite interesting though!
In advance of our assault on the Tongariro crossing, we decided to spend a few days by the beach on the Kapiti coast. It was really
nice to chill out and we were so successful in our chilling that we realised we had taken no photos, eh sorry. We then headed north again and did a good long walk (‘sledge track’ - no obvious sign of sledges on the track) near Palmie to fine tune ourselves in advance of the crossing; although arguably all we achieved was to gain some extra sand fly bites to add to our impressive collection.
On our way up we stopped off at the farmer’s market in Feilding and then went to the NZ war museum, which is pretty good; I find it absolutely amazing that young men and women happily headed off to the other side of the world to fight in wars which had no direct impact on them and died in their tens, nearly hundreds of thousands. Amazingly, per capita NZ suffered the highest number of casualties in the first world war and were second only to the USSR in the second (possibly says more about Stalin’s attitude to human life...)
We met up with our friends Brendon, Faye and Neil at the Tongariro Holiday Park and attempted the crossing the following day after an evening
of hydrating on beer and carbo loading on salmi and spag bol; dinner of champions. Predictably we flew up the Devil’s Staircase the following day and enjoyed ourselves crossing the top in the shadow of Mount Doom (it has a real name, but starts Nga, vowel, vowel, consonant, consonant and then I get confused). It is a really amazing walk and looking back towards the red crater, all of those physical geography lessons begin to make sense.
After the Tongariro, the plan was to take it easy for a few days in Taupo (pronounced phonetically, or ‘Toor-po’ in equal measure by the people that we have met) and check out the possibility of Jo doing a ski dive. This is something that Jo has planned to do ever since we left the UK and has been quite a big deal for her. With this in mind it was probably fortunate that when we went to the tourist information office in the town centre the lady said that the conditions were perfect and booked her in straight away, giving her no chance to worry about it! I am not sure if Jo enjoyed herself, but she did say, ‘that was
so cool’ a lot over the next forty eight hours, interspersed with, ‘I jumped out of a plane today / yesterday!’
What else? Well we headed off to Napier in Hawke’s Bay and did a cycle wine tour. That was great fun and gave you the false impression that you were taking part in a healthy activity. For me it seems to offer the perfect solution to the threat of drink driving provided by a standard wine tour; that said, apparently being drunk in charge of a bicycle is and equivalent offence under NZ law.
We have had a couple of attempts to get the maximum value out of our back country huts. We climbed up to Sunrise hut in the mountain range just to the West of Hawke’s Bay and woke up early to see the sunrise. Unfortunately the clouds came it at just the wrong moment, but we did get a lovely shot of the early morning sun shooting through a break in the clouds.
Just last night we returned from a circuit around a track located near Masterton at the bottom of the North Island. Again slightly weather affected and some of the views
that we would of hoped to have enjoyed we only managed to enjoy on the morning that we walked down.
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