Return to Paradise or How We Spent the Kids' Inheritance, Chapter Two

Winery on Waikere

The Museum of New Zealand, Wellington

Auckland from Hauraki 

Chapter Two: North Island

If you have seen even one episode of the HBO series, “Game of Thrones”, you know the phrase: “Winter is coming.”  And for us, so it has.  

Everybody on the plane was getting into winter gear by the time the plane finally (10 hours later) landed in Auckland.   The clouds and rain had just cleared when we landed and all was clear, the sky incredibly blue and the air perfectly clean and cool.  We rented a car and headed into town.  We drove straight to the hotel, just off Queen Street, one of the main avenues of the city. 

New Zealand was everything we wanted: incredibly civilized, pristine, organized, and clean with sunny skies and perfect air.  The “land of the long white cloud” produced, just for us, 18 rainbows in 17 days.  

First and Second Rainbow

That first Friday we slept in, then toured the fern and rain-forest covered Waitakere Ranges just west of the city, ending up at a windy cold beach on the roaring Tasman Sea.  The road wound through hills with occasional striking views of the city. The beach, with low clouds and blue sky above the black sand, was a little like what we had seen of the Oregon coast…no caribou, but occasional fields full of sheep.

First Beach, Tasman Sea

Saturday, June 23, we drove around the city a little more and pretty much got over the jet lag, toured a strange underwater aquarium place built by an NZ guy who got famous in Antarctica, and researched a ferry trip to an island in the Hauraki Gulf, the bay east of Auckland.

Sunday, June 24, was Millie’s 17^th birthday.  We spent the day touring Waikere Island.  To get there we backed our Toyota four door SUV onto a Sea Link Ferry for the rainy, hour-long voyage. 

Waikere Island

The sky cleared and the island became a beautiful combination of hills, forests, beaches and vineyards.  Oh, and more than a few sheep. 

We drove around until we found a beach just as the sun came out.  We had breakfast at a Pacific Ocean-front restaurant, watched the surfers trying to catch waves, and then continued the tour.  The island is not that big, with a lot of residential property for sale; every house seems to have a great view.   We found a couple more beaches—real Pacific ones with sand, shells, surf and loud birds.  We also found a couple wineries, snacked and sipped at each, and cruised the island some more until it was time to head back to the ferry for the return to Auckland.  If you were looking for a retirement location, either Waikere Island or the Waitakere Ranges could work.

The nighttime voyage was absolutely brilliant—more stars than we had seen since Colorado.  The Southern Cross and a crescent moon followed us across the bay.  Back on Queen Street, Millie got take away sushi and shared her birthday cake before calling it a day.  Tomorrow, the road to Rotorua, hot mud and the Maori.

Geo-Thermal Wonderland at Rotorua--first Mud Pool.

Going to Rotorua June 25 was our first serious road trip out of Auckland.  The roads here are almost entirely two lane blacktops with narrow, sometimes one-lane, bridges, much like the roads in America before the advent of the Interstate Highways.  Consequently, getting anywhere takes longer than Americans expect, although, unlike Bangladesh or India, you don’t have to dodge animal-drawn or bicycle-drawn carts or pedestrians.  There is some traffic, but as it’s a small country with a small population, the driving is manageable. 

The countryside is beautiful the way Europe is—rolling, tidy and trimmed, with occasional small houses and buildings and manicured lanes.  The roads are rarely straight or flat, and the hills and woods are so much like Middle Earth that you expect hobbits to be crossing at every turn.  Of course, there are lots of sheep, but also cattle and, sometimes, deer, llama, alpaca.

Yes, this is a pond.

So is this.

New Zealand apparently had no indigenous mammals, just weird flightless birds. (The local indigenous Polynesian population---the Maori---migrated here and discovered winter, and had to keep warm with cloaks of feathers.) So all the mammals here were imported from Europe at some point, and in one way or another, made a mess of things.

Including the opossum, which we thought were only this widely popular in Missouri.  Apparently, they are also everywhere here in NZ.  The Kiwis (the people of New Zealand, not the peculiar, flightless nocturnal birds almost killed off by the aforementioned mammals) have turned Missouri’s most useless mammal into a resource. Possum hair has some admirable qualities, somewhat like those of wool, as it turns out.  Possums are trapped, killed and their hair plucked (not shaved or skinned, the sales lady insisted).  The hair is then woven into Merino wool and the resulting fabric then made into socks, scarves, caps and other winter garments.  Sounds like a cottage industry ready to explode in the Show Me State!

Rotorua, New Zealand’s geothermal capital, was beautiful, smelly and rainy, a kind of small town Yellowstone.  We endured the rotten-egg smell and drenching rain to tour an area park of geysers, multi-colored ponds, steam vents and boiling mud pools.  Unfortunately, in the rain, one geyser, steam vent and mud pool all look about the same. 

Maori Show

Since Rotorua is also the city with the highest concentration of Maori people, we rested up in the afternoon, and then took in a Maori show and dinner at the local culture center.  (Actually, the Maori came here only a few hundred years ago, so they aren’t exactly indigenous, but they did get here before the English or the Dutch.)  The culture center has a weaving school and a carving school to maintain the traditional crafts and its own geyser, so we got to see another one after all.  Given the smell, Rotorua, even with a beautiful lake, hills and forests, is probably not going to make the retirement location list. 

And Dance.

The next day we headed south to Wellington, the capital of NZ and second biggest city.  The road from Rotorua took us through some high country—got to drive in snow on the Desert Road, a relatively high elevation area with peculiar Arizona-like vegetation and New Zealand’s main military training area.  Eventually, we found the Tasman Sea again—still raging—and, after stopping by a Wal-mart-like store in the suburbs, made it to Wellington’s city center. 

Wellington

Wellington is a smaller scale San Francisco—some big buildings next to a bay, with lots of houses on hills and protected green spaces.  We enjoyed a clear day by taking the tram up the hill to the Botanical Gardens then wandered down through the rose garden, herb garden, statue garden et al, to the waterfront and the fancy new Museum of New Zealand, our only museum stop in NZ.  We felt we pretty much did the city in one day. 

The Botanical Garden at Wellington

Weird stuff shows up on the road from time to time.

And yes, this city is definitely one to add to the list.  The hills, the sky, the sea—all are stunning on a sunny day.  I just don’t know how many sunny days they get here.  And a couple days after we left, they had an earthquake.  So this might require some research prior to any investment.