Hamilton, New Plymouth, Taupo and the road to Napier

We set out from Auckland on the blustery morning of September 29. We are headed toward Wellington, where we will take the ferry to the South Island on October 10, and we are zigzagging down the North Island. In the past five days we have visited (in this order): Hamilton, New Plymouth, Taupo, and Napier. This map helps you visualize the zigzag we have chosen:

The purpose in Hamilton was a former student of mine and his wonderful family. We had an hour or two to spare, so we visited the formal gardens along the Waikato River. The daffodils and primroses were on their last legs, but I saw several beds of hellebore, a plant I had never seen before finding it in the garden of our house in Dunedin where we lived from 2007 to 2017.

I don't know when I last saw forget me nots in a garden, but there they were, along with fuscias and climbing geraniums in full bloom.

The garden featured numerous tree ferns, native to New Zealand. In the days of driving that followed, we saw hundreds if not thousands of tree ferns on hillsides. Here's a close up so you can see their unique shape. They grow up to about 15 feet tall.

Foolishly I neglected to take any photos of my former student. Instead I captured his wife Jessica's work of art: a Maori ceremonial cloak with real feathers from six kinds of birds. 

While we were there, she was working on a smaller similar work, using Maori hand weaving techniques. 

Auckland to Hamilton took about an hour and a half, Hamilton to New Plymouth took 3 hours, passing through gorges and hillsides covered with tree ferns. If you look back at the map, New Plymouth sits on a curved piece of land formed by a volcano, Mount Taranaki. On our way into town, we could see the base of the mountain but not the top. We took some terrible photos because we wondered if that might be the only glimpse of the mountain that we would get. (Note to friends in Washington State -- they call it "the mountain" -- which felt familiar as we kept looking to see if "the mountain is out.")

We stopped just north of New Plymouth for lunch, and saw our first red billed gull. They are beautiful gulls that delighted us when we lived in New Zealand. Their legs are red as well as their bills, giving such a lovely color combination of white, red and gray. In the first photo below, the gull is pretty blurry, but I'm including it because you can see an off-shore oil drilling station (as well as my lovely Dave). The Taranaki area has a lot of offshore oil drilling and oil refining. I'll also paste in my favorite photo of a red billed gull, that I took about a decade ago.

The blustery weather you can see in the photo above disappeared the next day, and we could see the tip of Mount Taranaki (but not the bottom), and again we took photos. But that evening we were rewarded by a full view of the mountain, hurrah. We drove around town trying to find a good place to get a full view, and found an empty horse racing track.

A couple of other views of beautiful New Plymouth. The first one has New Zealand flax in the foreground, and the second one has a Norfolk Island pine.

On Friday October 2, we set off to drive east across the widest part of the North Island, our longest day of driving at about six hours. I had never seen Lake Taupo, the biggest lake in New Zealand by far, so we chose a route that would enable us to drive along the lake. First way northeast, then south east -- many more miles that a crow would fly. As always, Dave had his binoculars handy. The boat in the background is some sort of tour vessel.

I have always loved swans and had never seen a black swan before living in New Zealand. The ones we saw on Lake Taupo were more gray than black, and has some white spots. Behind the point of land in the distance is the bulk of Lake Taupo, 46 km or 28 miles in length.

After we left Lake Taupo and continued to head east toward Napier, we saw many hillsides covered with tree farms. Big hillsides. One hillside after another. I wrote an earlier post on this blog about the differences between native forest in New Zealand and tree farms. Take a look at the photos that illustrate the differences. We also saw lots of young lambs with their mothers. They were the age that I call "teenage." We were driving too fast to take photos, but I'll include a few photos I took when we lived here so you can see the cuteness of baby lambs in the spring. The sad or amusing thing is that the farmers grow the lambs until they reach 17 kilograms or 37 pounds, and then they are turned into delicious, tender lamb chops. We can remember spring after spring driving outside of Dunedin. First you see adorable tiny lambs close to their mothers. They really do jump straight up -- so very cute. Then they get to be teenage lambs, hanging out in groups of two or three with their friends. Then the next time we would drive past the same field -- all the young lambs would be gone. These are South Island photos, but what we saw the other day looked very similar.

Napier deserves its own post because of the amazing art deco buildings, the Norfolk pines everywhere, and the two paintings Dave completed there. Coming soon. If you missed the earlier posts about our arrival in New Zealand, here they are:

First week in quarantine

Second week in quarantine

Spring in Auckland

My own website is here with weekly blog posts about Christian spirituality: lynnebaab.com