Picton to Tauranga

We stayed overnight in Picton in what must be the smallest site in NZ. It was in the middle of town & there was a pub nearby so all was not lost. The pubs all show the Super 14 Rugby matches on Friday & Saturday with 2 or 3 matches shown live on each day. The only reason they don’t show more is that some are on in South Africa in the early hours of Sunday NZ time.
Still we got down to the ferry terminal early Sunday for the 9.50 sailing only to be told that it would be delayed. The Picton to Wellington crossing, we are told, can be one of the roughest so we started to look concerned. After all the weather was sunny with hardly a cloud to be seen.
We needn’t have worried. The crossing was as smooth as it could have been & we arrived in Wellington in the early afternoon.
We booked into a site on the edge of town & then got a bus back into the centre where we went up on the cable car to get our bearings. We arranged a tour round the city for the following day which turned out to be quite informative. One of the things we learned was that the building of Wellington is based on San Francisco, both cities being situated by a bay, on a hill, on a fault-line. The reason that many Wellington & NZ buildings are built with timber not brick is because timber stands up better to earthquakes, brickwork tending to crack.
We were also told that the good weather was coming to an end & that rain was forecast. We left Wellington that afternoon & headed north. We didn’t realise just how soon the rain would arrive. It poured and we made a short journey up the west coast to Otaki Beach where we stopped for the night. The site was one of the few that had a restaurant & bar so we stayed there & watched the rain fall.
The next morning it was still showery so we set off further northwards. The further we went the heavier the rain fell so we stopped at Wanganui for lunch. While there the rain stopped so we booked ourselves on a paddle boat steamer up the River Whanganui. The steamer was built in London in 1899 & worked on the river for nearly 50 years before being withdrawn from service, needing a new boiler, & eventually sank in 1952 at her moorings. There she stayed until 1993 when she was salvaged by volunteers. In 1996 restoration work began in earnest & by 2000 the vessel ’Waimarie’ was fully restored.
After the trip we continued on our way until we reached Hawera where we stopped for the night. By this time there was one thing that dominated the landscape, Mount Egmont aka Taranaki. This extinct? volcano rises from nothing to over 2500mtrs and stands out like the mountain in the film ’Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. It is also, like most things are out here, a National Park & is reckoned to be NZ‘s most picturesque & most climbed mountain though not by us.
More our level was the water tower in Hawera at 150ft. The tower had hardly been completed in 1914 when an earthquake caused a 2’6” tilt. This was corrected & in 1932 neon lights were erected around the top as a memorial to the pioneers of the district. It was billed as NZ’s tallest lighthouse.
After Hawera we continued around the coast, with Mount Egmont always in view, to New Plymouth. We booked into a site on a cliff top & listened to the wind howl. We took a walk round the town’s Pukekura Park which contains an open bowl for concerts, a cricket ground & an organic brewery as well as being beautiful in it’s own right, covered as it is with temperate rain forest.
It was our wedding anniversary so we decided to have an Indian meal but, as usual, Pat got half-way through hers and had to give up.
We continued northwards the next day & arrived at the Waitomo Caves at which there is normally black water rafting but due to the heavy rain this had been stopped as had tours round some of the caves. The main cave was still open, however, & we went round. From here we had intended to go on up through Hamilton but as the town was expecting up to 150000 people for the V8 car races at the week-end we changed our route and went on to Cambridge for the night to & then to Tauranga. Before arriving we passed through the town of Matamata which has now become known as Hobbiton due to the fact that the opening sequences of the first & the closing scenes of the last Lord of the Rings trilogy were shot here. Time for another tour, at the end of which, a demo of sheep-shearing & Pat got to bottle feed one of the lambs.
After arriving in Tauranga, an area of approx. 100000 people, on Friday evening we phoned our ex-publican from Rose & Crown, Mr Alan Bonham, & arranged to meet the following day.
Saturday lunch-time Alan picked us up & took us back to his & Lil’s house for lunch & we spent the afternoon talking about the old times & how the village has changed in the 20 years, 17 spent in NZ, since they left the pub.

We said we would call on them again when we returned south.

Pics are Mt.Egmont, Us on our anniversary, Pat in Hobbiton & Alan, Lil & Dave Bonham