Month: January 2018

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Mt Maunganui to Taupo

We arrived to an Airbnb in Tauranga last night, it was a beautiful little one room cottage newly built on a small farm. Yanmei got a few fresh eggs from the chickens.

The next morning we headed to Mount Maunganui, which is a very small mountain on the coast at the tip of the peninsula. We could see it from our room (on the right, below).

It is part of the Bay of Plenty and is a popular beach destination, especially now in the summer. Hiking up Mt Maunganui is one of the top recommendations on TripAdvisor.com for North Island, so that was our goal.

First we took a few photos in the harbor.

Our host recommended we start early because it gets hot, but of course we didn’t listen and started our hike at 10am, and it was starting to get warm, although is was partially overcast as you can see from the pictures. The hike was moderately challenging. Yanmei really enjoyed the views and wants to come back.

We made it to the summit in a bit over an hour, then headed back down a different route. As we got closer to the beach we could see there was lots of activity.

We had lunch and then headed to our next stop: Taupo. Taupo is a large lake in the center of North Island. They call it the Great Lake. It was about 160km. Shortly into the drive it started to downpour rain, and there was some lightning and a few big cracks of thunder.

After the initial downpour, the rain eased up and after about half an hour it was over. We got to Taupo safely and checked into another good Airbnb picked by Yanmei, with a little bit of a lake view. After resting a bit we decided to check out Huka Falls, which was okay, but we’ve seen a lot of great waterfalls, so…

More interesting to me was this sign:

It’s the first “no drones” sign I’ve seen. I bet they will become a lot more common in the next few years. Anyway after that we headed back to our room for the night and there was a pretty go sunset from our view.

David

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Auckland 2

This morning we checked out of our Airbnb and headed to downtown Auckland for a free walking tour. Free walking tours are usually good because the guides are working for tips and this one was no exception. We didn’t actually see anything too special, but there was a lot of good information and history about Auckland and New Zealand.

The above picture is of the British governors office from the 19th century. The interesting thing about it is it is made entirely of wood, but it is shaped and painted to appear to be stone, to give an appearance of solidity and wealth. It is now part of the University of Auckland campus.

After the tour we had lunch and left Auckland for our next stop. A friend of a friend of Yanmei’s had a small farm just south of Hamilton. The drive was pretty nice, but nothing spectacular yet.

The farm was a lavender farm.

I happened to get a cool shot with the telephoto lens.

After the farm we headed to our next stop, which was another Airbnb near Tauranga.

We have a pretty busy schedule ahead of us, because we have to be in Christchurch on South Island by January 16th to pick up our RV.

David

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Auckland, New Zealand

We arrived yesterday in Auckland, after a long day of travel. It started with a short flight from Kauai to Honolulu, where we transferred to Air New Zealand for our flight to Auckland. We arrived around 5:30pm local time, and by the time we got through customs it was a little after 6pm, but still plenty of sunlight since it is summer here and the days are long. I called the car rental company for their shuttle to pick us up and got a voicemail that they closed at 6pm. WTF? We ended up taking an Uber to our Airbnb.

Yanmei said it was my fault for not calling to confirm our arrival time. However, that’s not the lesson I’m taking from this, my lesson is not to book with the cheapest no-name company online. I should have paid a bit more for one of the big name companies like Enterprise or Avis. What kind of airport rental car company closes at 6pm? Anyway the bright side is we didn’t drive while tired from a long flight, and possibly make a mistake since they drive on the opposite side here.

We ended up going to get our car this morning, then doing a bit of shopping for supplies. Driving on the left isn’t too bad so far. The biggest problem is I keep looking up and right for the rear view mirror, when it is to my left. I’ve also turned on the wipers a few times when trying to signal a turn 😀.

The Airbnb is nice and we’ve been taking a rest day and planning out the next several days of our trip. The weather is sunny and warm.

David