We left Houhora and travelled south towards Ahipara. In-car action shots:
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Ahipara seemed to be a pretty small town, lots of houses but very few facilities. We saw a school but no supermarket? There was a cafe called ‘Gum Diggers’ that was run by four young girls. Stopped in for a beverage and blue berry pancakes. Went to have a look at Ahipara Bay. A beautiful stretch of sand and some big waves.
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Next a drive through forest areas and some seriously twisty roads. This took us near to the town of Kohukohu where we queued up to catch the Hokianga vehicle ferry. Quite a jovial place for the waiting. Music playing, drinks for sale, some ball being played. We missed out on getting onto the ferry that arrived about 20 minutes later by zero cars. Thus we were first in line for when the ferry returned about 30 minutes later. A family appeared to have produces a set of twins, a single girl and a set of girl triplets (left pic, second row). I was fascinated. The ferry trip across the inlet took about 10 minutes and dropped us in the town of Rawene. Pretty little place. Probably deserved a stop rather than the drive through that we did.
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In-car action shots. Saw plenty of bee hive farms (are they called farms?) on all the days . The wood crates always painted in different pastel shades. Wondered about the pastel colours. Why not red and yellow and purple?
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Next stop was Opononi. Beautiful little town with a massive Info Centre.
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Stopped for a walk at Omapere (just a few km south of Opononi). Went to the Arai Te Uru reserve to check out the look out point. Quite beautiful.
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Even further south towards the Waipoua forest. Quite a change in scenery as we got closer.
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The Waipoua forest is filled with Kauri trees. These grow to be pretty massive. We stopped to take a look at the largest living Kauri tree. A monstrous 212m tall. Photographs just don’t explain how majestic this tree is.
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Out of the main forest and on the road again.
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Stopped at a Kauri shop. This place sold ‘Ancient Kauri’. These are trees that fell thousands of years ago into peat swamps. Trees over 45000 years old have been dug up and converted to furniture, art and household items. These trees grew for about 2000 years before falling down.
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A bit further south and a detour off to see the Kai Iwi lakes. These are a set of lakes a few km from the ocean. Usually these lakes are surrounded by pine trees, but these have recently been logged. Maybe it was the lack of scenic pines, or maybe we were saturated with beautiful-ness; but these lakes left us a bit underwhelmed.
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A stop in the biggish town of Dargaville. Not the prettiest town you’ll ever come across. It has a brown river (the Wairoa) and is the Kumara capital of NZ. More importantly for us it had some shops and we stocked up on a few things for supper.
A back track drive northwards took us to the Kaihu Holiday Park. We set up our mini BBQ/braai and put together (more!) prawns and sausages. Together with coleslaw that made a lovely supper.
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Day 9: about 320km travelled
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