08/07/2010 Cape Rangitanga

OK, this brings me up to what I've got ready to go, I have two more days to write up but my flight back home is in 11 hours and I want to go see a Maritime Museum, buy some Kiwi Chocolate, and try one more time to find some of the Dog cartoons that Dot asked me to find.

08/07/2010 Cape Rangitanga
Went up to the very tip of NZ, where we saw the Pacific Ocean meet the Tasmin Sea. The trip up was very beautiful. On the way we visited a Kauri forest preserve. These trees are coniferous natives of NZ that were voraciously harvested by the Europeans for pretty much anything that could be made out of wood. The wood was prized because apparently it had a very even grain, has very few knots as the lower branches fall off, and the trunk is very smooth and round. The problem is that each tree takes hundreds of years to mature, so the supply started to run out fairly quickly. The harvesting was only banned in the 1980s on crown land and in the 90s for all of NZ.

We also moved along a very long strip of coast called the 90 mile beach. It is actually more like 90 km, but the name was apparently made to beat the Aussies who have a beach called 80 mile. We were in a standard tour bus though with knobbly tiers, so the sand was impressively compact to permit the movement with ease. Then we went over to some dunes that we slid down on what were essentially glorified flutter boards. Kind of fun, but I think that I prefer snow over sand as it melts when it gets in your hair, nose, eyes and mouth.

On the trip back we stoped by the “ancient Kauri kingdom” a place that sells Kauri wood carvings and furniture. This may seem strange, what with the whole, “can’t chop down any Kauri trees” law, but they found a large number of giant trees that were blown down about 40-60 kyears bp (by radiocarbon) and preserved in a swamp. So now there is an industry of extracting timber from these ancient Kauri trees, hence the name. Some of the carvings were the usual boring stuff of bowls and plates which were particularly uninteresting because of the lack of knots in the wood. But others were more interesting tables and chairs. They even had a spiral staircase to get to the second level that was a hollowed out Kauri tree, you climbed through the middle to get up. Very neat. I ended up buying a small carved Kiwi bird that was 35$ to use my prize money from the fencing.

Finally we stopped off at a fish n chips shop that advertised itself as “world famous” but after the meal me and a British guy concluded that it was good but certainly not up to the hype. He said “well there’s a better chippy chop just up the road back home.”