Opononi to Port Waikato

Opononi itself is a beach town bounded on one side by a beautiful bay and the ocean on the other. The sand dunes on the headlands are some of the biggest that I have ever seen. If we had more time we would have taken the water ferry over to them and sand boarded down the dunes. Sounded like a lot of fun to me. Not so much to Lana.

The hills in the northland are, well, hilly. There tend to be a lot of them and while they are not large by BC standards but they do make for twisty turning roads. Once again the standard speed limit was 100 km but nobody is doing over 80km and frequently only about 60 km. My left arm, which is my new shifting arm, is developing rapidly.

The landscape reminds me of Hawaii with the hills, although covered in either trees or lush green grass look new or unfinished. Many of the ridge and bluff lines are sharp edged and haven’t been worn down yet by eons of rain and wind.

One thing that has been missing, compared to my visit over 20 years ago, is the sheep. Back then there were literally sheep everywhere and now all we see is mostly dairy cattle. The locals have told me that everyone got out of sheep years ago due to a bad wool market but it still looks strange and not quite right. My completely unscientific theory is that the cattle are quietly eating the sheep at night. By day they look harmless but at night….. There is probably a bad horror mo

vie script in that somewhere.

On the way down the west coast, we stopped to walk into the forest to see the largest Kauri trees now growing in New Zealand. One is called the Lord of the Forest (Tane Mahuta) and the other is Father of the Forest (Te Matua Ngahere). They are estimated to be from 1500 to 2000 years old. We got there very early so the only ones accompanying us on the trek in were the native birds as they called in the cool of the morning.

The trees are in a 15,000 hectare reserve (what they call parks) and it was preserved only because it was the most difficult area to get at for commercial logging. It took 70,000 people, signing a petition in 1952, to get the area declared off limits to logging.

After we descended from the reserve, on really narrow roads, we hit some more open areas near Dargaville. It is at the meeting of two rivers and once was an important logging town. Oddly e

nough at the museum at Dargaville they have the masts from the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship sunk in Auckland’s harbour, on display. Also in the museum, which is big for a medium sized town, is a display of wedding dresses and the largest accordion collection that I ever hope to see. Strange company for an old environmental warrior.

After that we drove south thru Auckland and out to the coast and spent the night at Port Waikato on the Tasman Sea. It is a little (very little) resort town on the end of a road that goes nowhere. It terminates on a big bay where there is a cluster of houses and an enormous black sand beach with no one on it.

The hostel was empty except for us and we walked the beach as the sun went down in the water. Other than a few surf fishermen and a couple of gulls it was just us.

Geez that sounds romantic doesn’t it but what really happened is that we walked a really long way on the beach. Lana floated on top of the sand and I sunk in it. Great beach but I found myself wishing for a pair of snowshoes.