New Zealand (Aotearoa in Māori)

North Island - 24th October 2008

The land of the long white cloud.

Got in from Hong Kong, by way of Thailand, and landed at Auckland - drove up to Huntaway Lodge, near Kerikeri way up in North Island.

It was warm and balmy, a very pretty coastline and what views ... we had been given the 'te Ngaere' room - the best in the Lodge - on the right hand side looking out over the coast. The Lodge is a splendid, modern timber house perched above 3 beaches and pristine coastal scenery. The first image here is the view from our room!

Huntaway Lodge.


It was warm and balmy, a very pretty coastline and what views ... we had been given the te Ngaere room - the best in the Lodge - on the right hand side looking out over the coast. The Lodge is a splendid, modern timber house perched above 3 beaches and pristine coastal scenery. The image here is the view from our room (!) - a picture Margaret took of both of us to prove it. The event involved the automatic self-timer on Margaret's camera and her throwing herself at me ... nice eh? But look past see and us that view ... pretty good, what?


Imagine waking up to this view every day whilst on holiday? Fabulous!

Looking the other way (South East) you see the Cavalli Islands - a small group of islands in Whangaroa on Northland's East Coast about 5 kilometres to the east of the mainland - (the islands of Motukawanui and Motukawaiti plus the islets of Motutapere, Panaki, Nukutaunga, Motuharakeke, Haraweka). The main island is used as a nature reserve, and some of the smaller islands are privately owned. Worthy of note was that, on December 2, 1987, the hulk of the bombed Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior was scuttled between Matauri Bay and the Cavalli Islands, to serve as a dive wreck and fish sanctuary.

Waipoua Forest – for detail see my blog of Kauri



We drove over to Waipoua Forest - the garden of Tane Mahuta. Waipoua, and the adjoining forests of Mataraua and Waima, make up the largest remaining tract of native forest in Northland. Most of Northland’s ancient forest cover has been lost to saw and fire, plundered for the precious timber of the kauri tree or cleared for farmland. However the forests are now under the protection of the Department of Conservation.

The drive over to the forest winds through magnificent stands of Kauri, Rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum), a large conifer (evergreen) native to NZ - a member of the podocarps (southern hemisphere conifers with great diversity, both morphologically and ecologically, with most generic variety taking place in New Caledonia, New Zealand and Tasmania - and found in South America / Indonesian islands), and Northern rātā, (Metrosideros robusta), is a huge forest tree endemic to NZ. It grows up to 25 m or taller, and usually begins its life as a hemiepiphyte high in the branches of a mature forest tree; over centuries the young tree sends descending and girdling roots down and around the trunk of its host, eventually forming a massive, frequently hollow pseudo trunk composed of fused roots. So a hemiepiphyte begins its life as an epiphyte but which later grows roots down into the ground.