After leaving my campsite at Taputaputo Bay, I started heading south thinking I was going to have to find a panelbeaters (NZ for body shop) to get my alignment looked at. But miraculously, when I started to push 85kmph the wobbling was no longer an issue. I took the car well over 100kmph and it was totally fine. Don’t know what it was about that night at Taputaputo Bay, but somehow my car got fixed. Awesome…I didn’t want to spend money on trying to fix it anyhow.
My first destination was the Hokianga Harbor. This is a somewhat isolated area on the west coast of northern New Zealand that is generally very poor and very Maori, but it is supposed to be beautiful as well. I saw on my map a way to see much of the harbor, including a car ferry across it, and decided that would be my route.
The drive was fun, more of the tight, narrow curves I’ve gotten used to driving around here, but the ferry ride was uneventful and not too impressive. The landscape was nice, mountains in the distance, but the water was an ugly brown and it smelled like brackish.
However, just a few miles (sorry, kilometers) down the road it became much more beautiful. The twin communities of Omapere and Opononi hug the Hokianga right before it meets the Tasman, and the area is dominated by a 500ft tall sand dune and beautiful blue water. I stopped to go for a short walk and take some photos and then got back on the road.
Next was the Waipoura Forest, famous as the last great grove of giant Kauri trees in New Zealand. These trees are similar to the Giant Redwoods in size (a bit smaller, but still massive) and in the Waipoura Forest there is one called Tane Mahuta which is a few hundred feet tall and nearly 20ft wide. It is a huge tree. Also in the forest, is the smaller but much wider tree known as the Father of the Forest, this one is over 25ft wide. In addition, there are several others of impressive height and girth throughout the walking trails. I spent an hour or so wandering through the forest, amazed at how different it was from the cape that I was at just hours ago.
The Kauris are not quite as big as the California Redwoods, but they are equally as impressive to see, and the surrounding forest reminds me very much of the Redwoods or Olympic National Park in Washington…they feel prehistoric almost, like you are walking back in time when you stroll by these ancient trees. Tane Mahuta is estimated to be over 2000 years old. That is pretty old.
After seeing all I wanted to see in Waipoua, I realized that I still didn’t know where I was going to camp, and that it was already 5pm. I asked at the visitor center if there was anywhere I could just park my car and walk into the backcountry and she recommended a place just south of Waipoua called Maunganui Bluff.
I drove for awhile down a gravel road and then it suddenly stopped, in a small town of about seven houses, right at the beach. There was a trailhead to Maunganui Bluff, but I looked at the trail and decided it was too serious a hike for this late in the day. It was 6km to the top and it was straight up from sea level to about 1600ft. Even if I felt like putting myself through that much hiking, I’d still have to do a good chunk of it in the dark…I quickly decided against it.
On the way out, I tried one more access road to Maunganui, and got just near to what had to have been the end of the road, when I was stopped abruptly again. This time not by the sea, but by a river of cows. As far as I could see down a crossroad, there were cattle, moving about two steps a minute as the grazed on grass. I couldn’t see a farmer anywhere and I couldn’t see an end to this convoy of cows. I waited for about 15 minutes, and then decided that if I didn’t find a place to stay I’d be sleeping in my car…so I turned around and continued south on the main highway.
After another 20 minutes, I saw a sign for Kai Iwi lakes, a set of three freshwater lakes that lay just a few kilometers from the beach. According to my guidebook, there was a “beautiful campground under a grove of pine trees” on the one lake, so I decided this was as good a place as any to set up camp. When I got there, I was a bit disappointed.
The lakes are apparently a pretty popular recreation area for Kiwis, and they are used for waterskiing, windsurfing, and general lake tourism, and to make matters worse, this was Friday of NZ’s Labour Weekend, a government holiday and the official start of summer. Needless to say, it was far from the remote, isolated, quiet campgrounds I’ve been staying at for the past three days. But whatever, it was a plot of land by a lake that I could set up a tent.
The lakes themselves are pretty cool. Kai Iwi means “Food for the People” in Maori, and they used to be filled with fish and eels. Which is strange, because they are dune lakes, meaning there is no inlet or outlet…they are just huge basins within an area of sand dunes. Their water level is completely dependent upon the amount of rainfall…at the time, they were pretty high because there has been so much rain this Spring. I tried to go for a walk around the one, but the trail head was completely submerged.
Anyhow, they are a pretty cool natural wonder, and less than 2km from the beach (I could see Maunganui Bluff taunting me in the background), but they are a little overused for my taste. I was starting to get spoiled by the previous campsites I’ve had. I went to sleep anyhow…and faintly in the distance I could hear the surf crashing…that’s four nights in a row now.
The next morning, I woke up and drove back to Auckland, with a lunch stop at the farm in Paparoa to return a book I had borrowed. It was a gorgeous day and I saw a good amount of countryside on the way. When I got back to Auckland, I wanted to upload all of my photos, but couldn’t manage to get any uploaded at the hostel…I will get around to that eventually…I promise. For now, you’ll have to do with just text entries.
