North island adventure

March 27, 2022

Introduction

I've finally managed to tie in some annual leave with some work travel and have some adventures in the North Island. I'm dividing this blog by different areas I visited and there should be more photos than usual this time. Enjoy!

Taranaki

This is a region in the south west of the North island, above Wellington but off the beaten track a bit. The main city is New Plymouth which is quite a cool place even though everyone we asked about said it was beautiful but hadn't been there! I drove down to teach some postgraduate nurses on one of the courses we run. My colleague, Reuben, was meant to be running it but had become a dad for the first time 2 days earlier so I'd offered to cover. After the course, I drove over to Palmerston North which is towards the east coast to deliver some covid-related training to the hospital there. I'd gotten to know the staff there via zoom over previous training sessions on non-invasive ventilation so it was lovely to actually meet them in person. "Palmy" as it's known is an odd place which tends to be somewhere you stop on the way to Wellington although it has some pretty riverside walks and cycles. However, this is their slogan?!!

Getting some cycling kilometres in Palmy

Palmerston tourism.....

I then headed back to New Plymouth to await Jonathan who flew down to join me for a week. We'd originally planned some more adventurous activity but a temporary back problem meant we had a little more sedate activity instead. This included cycling along the coastal path and walking up Mt Egmont (the big extinct volcano in Taranaki.) We finished February's Bike Aotearoa challenge by cycling down to Cape Egmont the scenic (i.e. hilly!) way and then back along the "highway." This was a decent 106km ride which helped contribute to my university team winning the corporate challenge apparently.

Jonathan on Mt Egmont

Mount Egmont

Coastal path in New Plymouth

We enjoyed some time exploring the art galleries and restaurants in New Plymouth too. It's famous for the Wind Wand which is a kinetic sculpture by Len Lye but the gallery has a lot more of his innovative work too. The botanical garden is in the centre of town and really wonderful. I can highly recommend the fern house.

Fern House, New Plymouth

Wanganui

So Jonathan had to go back to work but I managed to have another week off work and "gatecrash" a trip down the Wanganui river. This group consisted of Jenny (who I met through the Auckland canoe club) and 3 of her friends from the South Island: another Jenny, Libby and Karyl. I was the youngest of the bunch by a decade but we spent a great 4 days doing one of NZ's "great walks" which is a paddle down the Wanganui river. You can do this guided but most people just hire canadian canoes and expect to swim for some of it. It's famous for it's rapids which can be rather intimidating. I'd had friends who'd done it in low river levels needing to wade/pull their boats over rapids and other friends who'd had to be helicoptered out because the river levels got dangerously high! We scored low river levels which made the paddling much harder and the rapids apparently more likely to through us in! There's a particular rapid at the end called "50:50" as that's the normal odds for making it through. However, it was renamed to 80:20 the week we did it (odds not in our favour.) We had 2 canadian canoes and a sit-on-top kayak as we were an odd number. Jenny and I were obviously paddlers but the others had zero-minimal experience so Jenny and I decided to split the kayaking between us, knowing we were more likely to have an unexpected swim.

It was definitely an adventure! We were the only people camping although the campsites were great. The very few other people undertaking the adventure stayed in lodges or bunkhouses. The last place we stayed was a Marae (Maori courtyard and meeting house) where the ranger embellished the difficulty we were to encounter the next day to the extent that the group deemed that I should be put in the kayak as safety person (being the strongest paddler) and we made the 2 canoes into a raft by lashing them together. Ironically the only people who fell in throughout the whole trip were Jenny and Karyl on the very first rapid! Libby made an heroic exit to manoeuvre her and the other Jenny's boat off a log on a later day. Despite the odds (but with a lot of bracing strokes!) I managed not to fall out at all! Despite probably paddling some of the biggest rapids I've ever encountered. The photos below show none of this obviously as I was far too busy paddling over the rapids! The scenery was absolutely spectacular though.

View from the river

Karyl, Jenny, me, Libby, Jenny & Timbo at the Marae

Canoes rafted up for the last rapids

By the bridge to nowhere.

The river

Sit on top kayak

Waterfall - you can see the height of the river

View from the kayak

Dept of Conservation campsite

Taupo region

After the excitement of the river, we stayed for a couple of days near Taupo in the centre of the island. This area is famous for it's thermal activity which we saw when we went to Tokaano, a village when Jenny's great grandfather used to be the policeman. Apart from the thermal pools themselves, the creeping geothermic activity can be seen everywhere, including in the road!

The Timber Trail

Jenny and I then said farewell to the South Islanders and moved on to a farmstay to join 4 other ladies from the Auckland Canoe club who happen to be cyclists. We spent the next couple of days cycling the Timber Trail ( a cycling "Great walk" equivalent.) We spent a very enjoyable night glamping before returning to Auckland and back to work. So here's a few last pictures from my adventures.

Please keep in touch!

Janice x