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Published: April 19th 2008
On tuesday, after a lot of sleep, we awoke to torrential rain so we decided it was best to head into
Whangarei city to do some boring stuff. We set up bank accounts, bought some gear at Kathmandu (outdoor shop), looked at mobile phones in the Vodafone shop, looked at pianos, guitars and amps in a music shop, checked out CDs and DVDs in a record shop and so forth. Afterwards we had a quick lunch in a cafe (the pies ARE a good as we remember!) and then headed out of town to "The Warehouse" for some food shopping. By the time we had bought plenty of Speights beer, some Wither Hills wine and some general supplies the sun had come out, so we headed up to
Whangarei Falls for a late afternoon walk. The waterfalls are very impressive, and were even more so with all the rain that had been falling in the last 48 hours. That evening we made veggie chili in the backpackers and were delighted to discover that stick insects are wild in New Zealand. Luckily we managed to remove the said stick insect from the kitchen or we might have ended up with non-veggie chili!
That evening, there was a terrfic thunderstorm accompanied by some tremendous forked lightning across the skies.
The next day, we awoke to sunshine so we headed over to the
A. H. Reed Memorial Kauri Park. This reserve is what remains of an ancient Kauri forest. There were several walking tracks and we did all of them, including the walk up to
Pukenui Falls and the
Hatea River walk to Whangarei falls (which we approached from the bottom this time). We made it back to the car before the heavy rain started again and returned to the Backpackers via Dick Smith Electronics (for an laptop adaptor) and Countdown (for chicken sausages so we could make casserole). That evening we watched "Elizabethtown" (an excellent film, highly recommended) with a couple of people also staying at Little Earth Lodge.
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johnformby
John Crick
Nice
Just signed up to the travel blog so I can post comments :-) The forest and waterfalls look amazing. I am going to have to visit (now that you have mentioned pies :-) ) The backpackers looks really nice as well (better than some hotels I have stayed in). Do you just cook for yourselves in the kitchen or is a group thing?