New Zealand

A quiet free overnight by an inlet watching the fishermen and a walk around the town of Mana that sits on a peninsular so there is a shore on the other side with houses built on stilts. The New Zealand humor is very good as you can see by the house names.

We drove past the Ngawi site and onto another gravel track to go to Cape Pallister Lighthouse and climb the 250 wooden steps plus 3 concrete steps to the base of the lighthouse. Then back to Ngawi for an overnight. Sideways pictures again. The one thing to notice, New Zealand has public toilets everywhere even at the end of a gravel track, and a Tsunami zone.

With Waiohine behind us we stopped at Henley Lake carpark overnight, a freeby. Changed plans and headed for Pallister Winery for lunch and wine tasting. Excellent.  Then on to the next site at Ngawi.

We planned to go stay for 2 nights at the campground in the Waiohine Gorge. This is accessible via a winding, steep gravel road with fords, it sounded interesting. I have never driven a vehicle on such a rough road since I had a Land-rover. The van made it no problem, we were a little shaken about. There were a few vehicles at the end of the road at the campsite, but no-one arround! It reminded us of the film "The Wrong Turn" were the "family" at the end if the road lived off the people who took the wrong turn. It rained incessantly. We had lunch, took a look at the suspenson bridge and decided to get back to civilisation. 

We stopped at Palmerston North Holiday Park the get showers and sort the washing and freezer packs for the fridge. Nearby is the He Ara Kotahi Bridge, a modern foot bridge built as a tourist attraction. Is is stunning when lit up on an evening .

On our return from Sky Waka, there is a pleasant walk to some falls and a pool, made famous in the film the Hobbit. It is the location of Goloms pool.

We have this thing about cable cars, so we couldn't resist going on the Sky Waka up Mt. Ruapehu the top station as t at 2020 metres AMSL. Beautiful trip up, but as we reached the top we were into cloud, and unfortunately the walk we were going to do had been closed as you could hardly see the path. So a leisurely coffee at the top and we headed back down, only this time the cloud base was even lower, all the way to the bottom, very eerie.