Blogs from Whangarei, North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 9

It was nicolas big day her graduation.! the ceremony was held at forum north. a very interesting hour.they marched through town with banners and all in colourful dress.... read more

Our final day in Whangarei came around way too quickly but one of the benefits of renting a house from the hospital is that we don't need to vacate until 3pm. And that meant we had pretty much half a day left to enjoy ourselves before packing up and heading home - awesome! We were up in time for sunrise and were treated to a lovely light show despite the grey looking skies. Minutes later, a light drizzle set in and some even more stunning colours began to emerge in the sky in the shape of a double partial rainbow. I took a walk to the end of the drive, crossed the road and could see the pretty colours bending out across the Onerahi coast. Just lovely. Now, on Thursday night as we were driving up ... read more

Having enjoyed our stay in the hospital owned house down in Rotorua, Glynn and I were keen to try out another one of the cheap to rent holiday homes and enjoy another fun weekend away. This time we headed up to the city of Whangarei, capital of the Northland. We left on the Thursday night after waiting for the post-work rush hour traffic to subside. It took us just over 2.5 hours to get there, making use of the Northern gateway toll road for the first time which cut out a good 10km chunk of twisty roads that we would otherwise have taken. On arrival, we were surprised to find an even more awesome house than the Rotorua one had been. This time we had a double garage with electric door, a huge kitchen, huge lounge ... read more

The bus journey up to Whangarei was around 2hrs 30 long and it rained almost all the way and with a slight hangover i couldn't help but to liken it to a normal saturday back home travelling to rugby. when we arrived in whangarei the rain had stopped but it was still quite overcast and humid so the 20 minute walk up hill most of the way to find the hostel was a bit of a nightmare. My first impressions of the hostel (YHA Whangarei) were that it was a little bit of a stick it to the man type of place but after i had met a few more of the people staying here i felt totally different. its a nice little hostel set well of the main road and up in the hills and ... read more

We took advantage of the long dry spell to have the pond cleaned and all the weed removed. A contractor with a digger tidied up all around the edges and took out some six truck loads of soil/mud. This was tipped on the adjacent paddock until it was removed with tractor/front-end loader and wheel-barrow. It took eighty barrow loads to move it and this was all taken to the vegetable garden. This should make a big difference to the fertility of the garden as it was mostly clay previously. Although the pond is low (not really tidal!!) it has still about two metres depth in some places. The boat came in very useful to travel across the pond removing all the pond weed. This took several half-days!! (George got too tired to do longer shifts!)... read more