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North Island Trip

Kapiti Coast and Wellington

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The day we traveled from Taupo to Wellington started out cold and rainy. About halfway through our travels that day, however, the sun came out and by the time we got to the Kapiti Coast, just north of Wellington on the Tasman Sea, the weather was delightful. We stopped for a little while at a carpark facing Kapiti Island and had fun exploring the rocks.

Miss Joy had great fun collecting shells!

Mr. Imagination was just glad to be out of the van. Notice all the action in the next few shots!

We noticed a commuter train going along the cliff towards Wellington.

Bluebottles were washed up along the shore.

Lots of seagulls around!

That evening we went shopping for a few ingredients for our dinner and the next morning’s breakfast. I notice dragon fruit at the supermarket, so we bought one just to see what they were like. We all enjoyed it!

The next day we went to church with some friends in Wellington. When we left the hall to go to their house for lunch, the van wouldn’t start. The battery was flat. They came to our rescue, and after lunch the men and boys went back to work on the van. It turned out that some tiny piece of rubber had perished, making the brake light stay on all the time, draining the battery! A clothespin took care of that problem. We ended up spending all afternoon with our friends, and going back to their church for the evening service. In between, some of us drove to a windmill up the hill from their house and had a good view of Wellington from that vantage point.

And that’s the end of the pictures from our big trip! Now I’ll try to catch up with the other pictures we’ve taken so far this year. It’s been a very busy summer and not likely to slow down for a few more weeks.

Huka Falls

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Our last stop that morning was Huka Falls. Now, what do you think about when you hear a term like that? I picture a vertical waterfall, and since this was such an attraction I figured it would be a very tall one. What a surprise, then, to walk through a row of trees from the carpark and see this! The first picture is the view upstream, and the second is looking downstream from the bridge over the falls.

I called Simon on a video call while we were on the bridge. He had tried to call me the night before and I missed him, so since this was his lunch break I got hold of him. That way, he got to see what we were seeing, in real time, and we could hear about what had just happened to him. The gear box on his truck had blown up the day before, and he was borrowing one of our vehicles, so we had some things we needed to discuss (no, it wasn’t a problem that he was borrowing a vehicle from us!).

Looking back upstream toward the bridge, after we walked down to another viewing platform.

At the end of the narrow gorge, the water leaps over a ledge and rushes away.

And, of course, we took a video of this, too! It has to be seen in action to be believed.

Huka Falls was not quite our last stop of the morning. Before heading back to our friends’ house for lunch, we stopped at an overlook from which most of the city of Taupo could be seen. My favorite part of the scene was the mountain that stands over the city and the lake.

Late that afternoon, Gayle took the children to swim in the lake. It was chilly, so they didn’t stay long, but they had a lot of fun collecting pumice that washed up on the shore. When they got back, we gave the girls a bubble bath–the first one in their lives! What fun!

Craters of the Moon

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While we were in Taupo, we wanted to see Craters of the Moon. This is a geothermal valley with steam vents everywhere you look. The walk through that valley was my favorite place to explore in that area! It started raining while we were about halfway through the walk, but that didn’t last long and we soon dried off afterwards. It did make it a bit confusing for me to sort through our pictures and put them in order, because I switched from taking pictures with my camera to my phone, as it is supposed to be waterproof.

It’s pretty amazing to look out over a valley and see steam coming up everywhere! As Miss Joy said in the first clip I included in the video tour in this post, it looked like a lot of fires–she thought it was houses burning!

The children were getting goofy!

Miss Joy wanted to take a picture of the three of us.

Esther wanted one of the three sisters.

Part of the track went along the top of the hill at the edge of the valley.

Aratiatia Rapids

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We spent two nights at the home of some dear friends in Taupo the first week of February. The morning of the day we were there was spent doing some sightseeing in the area. Our first stop was the Aratiatia Rapids on the Waikato River. A dam was built there to produce hydroelectricity; because there is such a drop in the river at that place, the dam does not have to make a very big lake. The gorge below the dam has very little water in it because of the dam, but several times a day, at set times, water is released so that tourists can see the gorge fill. That was fascinating to watch! When we first arrived, one of the gates was open a little, so there was some water in the gorge, and that was beautiful. Then, the gate was closed for ten minutes, and almost all the water drained out of the top of the gorge. Soon, the siren started going periodically, to warn people who might be in the gorge below that the water would be coming soon. Then, both gates were opened, and we watched the river fill up. What a sight!

I put together a few video clips to show some of what we experienced here. Warning: this starts with a loud siren, which is intended to warn people to get out of the gorge before the water starts coming.

On our way to the next attraction, we passed this plant which produces electricity from geothermal energy.

On the Road

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We didn’t take a lot of pictures while we were driving, so here are the few we got between Auckland and Wellington.

This first group of pictures were from the day we traveled from Drury, just south of Auckland, to Rotorua. We had a lot of fun, as we drove through Morrinsville, spotting the statues of cows. They were all painted differently, and there were a lot of them! This is the only picture I managed to get, though.

The Waikato is a beautiful area!

I can’t remember which town this statue was in. It seems like a lot of towns have statues along the main road.

These next pictures were taken the next day, as we traveled from Rotorua to Taupo.

That is not a nuclear reactor. It is a geothermal power station, if I understood right.

After two days staying in Taupo with friends, we drove to Wellington. It was chilly and dark a lot of the day, but we enjoyed the scenery anyway. First, we drove around Lake Taupo.

Someone was feeling carsick, so we stopped for a few minutes. That few minutes turned into more minutes when blackberries were discovered! Gayle and the younger children ended up picking several cupfuls of blackberries for our lunch.

I believe this next area is what is known as the Desert Road. It certainly looks like a desert!

We saw several of these statues in the town of Bulls.

Toward the end of the day, the younger children were getting quite crazy. I challenged Mr. Imagination and Little Miss to see who could spot five interesting things in five minutes. After the first round or two of that, I handed out notepads to them, and a piece of paper to Mr. Sweetie and told them to draw or write a few words about every interesting thing they saw in ten minutes. This was Mr. Sweetie’s notes; the other two each had a lot of little bits of paper which I couldn’t really photograph, given where we were. That activity really helped keep them going!

The Green and Blue Lakes

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On our way to Te Wairoa, The Buried Village, we passed the Green and Blue Lakes. They are in the Tikitapu Bush, which is mentioned in Fire in the Sky, a book we read on our way. We stopped and walked down to the Blue Lake, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery. This first picture is the Blue Lake, seen from the road.

The sign at the beginning of the track.

Someone grabbed a couple of pictures of Miss Joy, showing two facets of her personality, while we were there.

The Buried Village

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A week or so before we left home for our big North Island trip, I spent a little time one afternoon online, checking out things we could do around Rotorua. When I stumbled upon the website for The Buried Village, I knew that was a place we wanted to go. We have a book (supposed to be on the shelf, but I couldn’t find it today to take a picture) titled Fire in the Sky, a fictional diary of a boy who visited the Pink and White Terraces days before they were destroyed in the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. We read the book once, probably about 12 years ago. Esther and I decided we should take it with us and read it aloud before we went to Rotorua. She read the entire book to us as we drove on our first few days. When we visited the archeological site, which has been partially reconstructed, it really came to life, since we had read the book, which is set in the village of Te Wairoa. This was the entrance to the village. There were signs set up along the path, each of them displaying a fictional letter written by someone who had visited the area around the time of the eruption.

This is scoria, or volcanic ash, from the eruption. All the paths are covered with it.

The rock in this picture is volcanic ash, which covered the ground two meters (about six feet) deep.

This was the site of one of the hotels, which has been excavated down to the original ground level. The case holds items found on the site.

A reconstructed Maori whare, or house, on its original location. A lot of the buildings collapsed under the weight of the volcanic ash.

From the village, the track led into the bush and along a beautiful creek.

Along the creek was a shelter holding an old waka, or war canoe. The children were reading a sign posted on the ceiling, part of a treasure hunt they had been doing throughout the village. Because they found the end of the hunt, here in this shelter, and were able to repeat what it said to the woman at the desk in the office, they were each given a chocolate coin.

Just after the waka, the track divided. Gayle was tired, so we took the easier fork and were treated to this view, with the sign that explained what we saw. During the eruption, the hill in the distance shielded Te Wairoa to a certain extent from the ash; everything that landed on the village had to come all the way over that hill.

The other branch of the track went to this waterfall; the older children walked around there.

After leaving the village, we drove up the road a short distance to an overlook and were able to see Mount Tarawera. What a view! It is the flat-topped mountain on the right side of the picture beyond the lake.

Right after I published this post, I received an email in response to it. The reader commented: I doubt if you would have read of the Christian man killed at the village you visited the Buried Village. He was a young Englishman who was at the hotel when the eruption began all those years ago. When the eruption began he gathered the people together with awful danger increasing by the seconds he shared the Gospel urging the people to get right with God. After sharing the Gospel an attempt was made by the people to seek better shelter. Sadly this young man was not successful and crushed to death under the weight of the ash on the collapsing hotel. Many years ago I visited his grave in a cemetery outside Rotorua. Actually, we did hear about this person. There is a museum attached to the village, which we wandered through before exploring the site. The only exhibit in the museum which is not a still display is a room with a man sitting at a desk. When you enter the room, lights start flashing in the window, and the room rumbles and shakes. The man starts talking, saying the words the Christian man (Reverend Bainbridge, if I remember right) wrote just before he died, calling people to repentance. And then, suddenly, all goes dark and quiet after a final crashing and rumbling as the hotel collapsed.

Rotorua

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One place we were looking forward to visiting was Rotorua, where we wanted to see some of the hot, bubbling mud and steaming hot pools we had heard about. We had lunch at Kuirau Park and then started walking around to look at the sights. At first we were quite disappointed. The first track we walking around had a few spots where bubbles came to the top of the water and popped, but that was it. Then, as we wandered on farther, we started seeing more of what we had heard about. The farther we went, the hotter things got! And, the more strongly the air smelled of sulfur. We ended up spending two or three hours wandering around that park from one fenced-in area to another, seeing more and more amazing spots. Be sure to watch the video if you can; it gives you a much better idea of what we saw than the still pictures.

Can you see the steam rising from this?

This pool was quite hot!

This mud was constantly bubbling.

A loud boiling sound came from within that cluster of boulders!

On one side of the steaming lake we found this. The water level had risen, and the moss was encrusted with minerals.

Keep in mind that we were there on a hot day–see that steam!

This was a hot stream going away from the lake.

These boys got tired!

Devonport

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On the afternoon of the day we spent in Auckland, we took a ferry to Devonport, on the other side of the harbour. That was more of our field trip–to experience riding a ferry! This cruise ship was tied up to the dock near where the ferry docked.

There were also a lot of huge freight ships.

When we landed in Devonport, we started walking toward Mount Victoria. I quickly realized, though, that I wouldn’t make it much farther, as my sciatic nerve was playing up. Gayle and all the older children went up to the top, so these are Esther’s pictures. They saw this banyan tree along the way.

At the top is a gun bunker leftover from World War II.

A view of the Harbour, with Auckland on the other side and Devonport in the foreground.

Meanwhile, Mr. Imagination, Little Miss and Miss Joy stayed with me at a playground at sea level.

After the children played for a little while on the playground, they wanted to check out the beach, so we wandered over there.

I watched ferries go back and forth while the children played in the sand.

Mr. Imagination was delighted to find a crab in the rocks.

Soon it was time to return to Auckland. We went back to the ferry dock and watched it come in, then boarded.

We noticed several Navy ships tied up on the other side of the harbour.

When we reached Auckland again, we caught the train and returned to Drury.

Auckland

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Most of us were dreading our trip into Auckland to take care of government business. It wasn’t the meeting with the United States Consulate that we were afraid of; it was navigating the Auckland traffic and finding parking in the CBD. We were delighted to learn from our friends at Drury that we could take the train! The first station on the rail line was about a five-minute drive from where we were staying, and if we bought the cards used for Auckland public transport, we wouldn’t have to pay as much as if we bought tickets–and, as well, we could use the cards to take a ferry across the Auckland Harbour to Devonport! It cost more to take all nine of us on the train than if we had driven… but remember the thing about parking? No brainer. We counted it as a field trip–learn how to use public transport. The train ride was about an hour; a train leaves approximately every 10 minutes throughout the day, and the end of the line was a five-minute walk from our destination.

This was later in the day, when we caught the train again to go a short distance in central Auckland. It was very helpful to learn that there was a $20 cap on charges for the day–no matter how much we used the buses, trains, or ferries in the city, we wouldn’t be charged more than that. I don’t know how that works now, since fares went up a few days after we were there, but that’s how it was that day.

This country girl was rather impressed with the tall buildings!

We walked through a park at the top of the hill not too far from the Consulate. It was a beautiful day!

I was intrigued by this palm tree with another tree growing out of the top of it!

Our first glimpse of the Sky Tower.

Next, we walked over a bridge across a highway and up a steep path through another public garden.

We stopped halfway up for a rest, and ate the apricots I had bought the day before.

At the top, we reached the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

This window is in the roof, three floors up from the entry area.

We found this piece of shell artwork quite fascinating.

Miss Joy was delighted to discover these drawers of specimens. She wanted to open and inspect every one! I was so hungry and tired by then that I just wanted to move on, but we stayed for a little while for her.

This is the view from the front door.

When we left the museum, we walked back into the commercial district to look for some food. Because we were using public transport that day, I decided not to take a lunch along as we normally would, since we had only three backpacks with which to carry things. We were looking for fish and chips, but Elijah decided he wanted something nicer and offered to pay the difference. We ended up at a small, family-run Thai restaurant, and really enjoyed that treat. It was a great place to rest, delicious food, and large portions, and we were happy to help support a family. (It added to the field trip for the day–most of our younger children had never been in a sit-down restaurant!)

From here, we walked to a nearby train station and took the train back to where we had started that morning in the CBD, then took a ferry across the harbour to Devonport–that’s a post for another day.