Auckland to Kaitaia, North Island
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Well, the hotel room won its second gold medal. After sweeping the smallest room on the planet event, it also set a new world record for noisiest room. Between the regular traffic noise of a major street, multiple sirens and the jackhammers or whatever they were on the construction site next door at 6am it was quite a racket. We were three hours ahead last night so we didn’t go to sleep until after 1am. So with 5 good hours of sleep under our belts, we endeavored to find ourselves transportation.
Les started calling places. And at only 50 cents a call for the first minute and 5 cents thereafter, it only took about 10 dollars before we were able to procure a car from Avis. Well two actually. It seems you can’t take a car from the North Island to the South Island. And apparently, you can’t rent the car for less than three days. Could we drop it off early and pay? No. No? Can’t figure that one out except that all the good scenery is on the South Island and the government is trying to keep people up north for awhile.
The car wouldn’t be ready until after noon so we went across the street to Pie Mania for breakfast. Now before you get all excited about us eating pies for breakfast, these were meat pies in the traditional English style. And quite good. I had a chicken and potatoes au gratin pie myself. Les had the butter curry chicken.
We started heading towards Avis by way of the Sky Tower. The Sky Tower is the tallest building in New Zealand at over 200 meters. It’s just slightly taller than the Eiffel Tower. It looks a bit like the space needle at the top and like a Russian booster rocket at the bottom. The first thing we noticed, because it happened right above our heads, is that you can jump off it. They strap you into mountain climbing gear, attach you to some cables and let you free fall down. It brakes you towards the bottom and you land softly on a little landing pad about 10 feet over our heads. Looked like fun. But it was $195 and we’re saving our money for bungee jumping.
For only $18 you can go to the top and look out the windows. What a bargain (sarcasm, in case you missed it). So up we went. The view is great. It was a nice sunny day and you can see for miles. Auckland is a huge harbor. There’s water on both sides of the city and a bridge, like the Sydney harbor bridge only much smaller, over one part of it. We stayed awhile to take pictures and get the lay of the city (our maps don’t have a good city map on it). After we milked the $18 for all it was worth, we headed back down.
At the bottom we also found out you can do the “Vertigo Climb”. This is where you go up from the enclosed viewing area we were in, inside the radio tower at the top, and go *outside* on a little platform. There’s room for about 5 people. We could get a big discount because a tour was just leaving and it wasn’t full. But even with the discount it was over $100 and would take a few hours. We didn’t have the time and it was a bit spendy so we passed it up.
We picked up the car, a silver Holden Commodore. Holden is a GM subsidiary and the only car wholly built in Australia. It’s got a V6 and is very peppy. It also doesn’t ride like a truck, doesn’t blow in the wind and in all ways except cooking and sleeping is a superior vehicle to our camper van. It is *so* nice to be able to accelerate again.
We found our way out of town and headed north. Eve had told us we should go up to the northern tip to Cape Reinga. It’s a sacred place for the Maori and the scenery is supposed to be great. It’s where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet. We didn’t have any better ideas so that’s where we headed.
As with Australia, it didn’t take long out of the city before things turned very rural. Everything is very green, unlike Australia in most places. And very hilly. The grass is very short, probably from grazing animals, and as with Australia, interspersed nicely with trees making it look very park-like, except much more hilly.
Our first stop was a little beach where we stopped for a picture and to feel the water (it’s reasonably cool). It was covered in shells everywhere you looked. We were in the land of the ‘W’ where it seemed like every town and every river started with a W — Waiwera, Warkworth, Wellsford, Waipu, Whangerei. The names aren’t any easier to pronounce or remember than in Oz.
We started looking for lunch. There was a cafe at Sheep World. We thought we ought to see what Sheep World was like so we stopped. The cafe didn’t look very good. And even though sheep world promised eco activities, a nature pond, a farmyard, “adventure terrain”, sheep shearing and sheep dog displays *and* eel feeding, we decided not to pay the admission price and moved on. We ended up stopping at the “Top of the Dome” cafe, which was next to the Dome Forest National Park. We’re not sure what the Dome is, we didn’t ask. But our guess is it was the large round hill we were on.
Just before Whangerei was Portland (okay, not all the towns were W’s). We thought we ought to stop in. But it turns out Portland is really the Golden Bay Cement Company and its employees. There are houses, a fire station, a school and a rec hall, and the cement company. And that’s about it. Not a very pretty place really. And no sign saying Welcome to Portland to get our picture in front of.
In Whangerei we stopped at another beach, mostly to change drivers, but we went out to have a look. And strangely enough, this beach was completely clean. No shells, and really nothing else either. The tide was out and at high tide, reached a set of bluffs, so maybe everything just washes out. With the tide out, the sand was hard and flat. There was very little surf. A skim-boarder’s paradise. (If you don’t know, skim boards are round, thin boards that you throw along the edge of the surf, then jump on and slide.)
After Whangerei, which is the main city in the “far north”, we seemed to enter the land of ‘K’. All the town names started with K now. My favorite was Kawakawa, which we started calling ka-wocka-wocka.
At that point we had to make a choice whether to take the “tourist route” along the northeastern side of the island, or really try to make it to Cape Reinga. We’ve been so used to distances being so great and relatively short drives taking a long time, we were worried we wouldn’t be able to get all the way up there and still get back to Wellington in time for the ferry. But there really wasn’t much choice. We had headed this way originally to make it to the top, it didn’t make sense to turn around now. And after awhile longer, we realized we were covering a lot of ground. The roads are much better, or driving the car is much easier. But either way, we realized we could make it to within a couple hundred kilometers of the top before dark and that would be fine. We’ll have a long day Friday to get to Wellington but those are the breaks.
When we made the turn at Kawakawa, we saw a tourist attraction sign for the “Hundertwasser Toilet” which I thought was a bit odd but didn’t really think much more about it. But when we pulled into a gas station to ask about accommodations up the road, we saw a sign that said “World Famous Toilets” and had to ask about it. Well, Freidrich Hundertwasser was a famous architect, who gave it all up at one point and moved to New Zealand. When the town wanted to build a new public toilet, they got him to design it. Long story short, I guess he did a nice job, and in the process did much to promote community spirit. It has now “put Kawakawa on the international tourist route and travelers from around the world pay homage to the man and his unique architectural charm”. We didn’t go in. We instead had used the less famous, but equally functional Mobil gas station toilet. In point of fact, we couldn’t find it, and since it was getting towards evening and we wanted to get as close to Cape Reigna as possible before dark, we had to move on.
The non-tourist road heads through the Mangamuka Gorge. A twisty turny road that goes up and down over a set of hills/mountains. Very pretty actually, so I can imagine what the tourist road looks like. We stopped near the top for sunset pictures.
We ended up at the town of Kaitaia at the historic (i.e. old) Kaitaia Hotel where for $60 we got a room with two twin beds that were separated by at least 6 feet and did not include the free jackhammer upgrade.
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