On the road again

On the road again

It was time to get moving, so we said our goodbyes and hit the North-West Motorway, SH16.  Which rapidly became a country lane.  From Helensville the road starts to climb, and when you get to the summit there’s a great view of the sea – and nowhere to stop and take a photo!  This was the best I could do.

From here, SH16, or the Kaipara Coast Highway, follows the coastline to Wellsford, where it joins SH1.  This also marks the start of Northland, the northernmost district of NZ.  We have to keep reminding ourselves that in this hemisphere it isn’t going to be the frozen north; here it’s known as the winterless north.

We passed through lots of wide open spaces, with undulating hills, rather than the usual mountains.  Every now and then you come to a bend or the brow of a hill with trees on either side.  Then, as the limit point recedes, this magnificent vista unfurls in front of you and you can see for miles.  It looks like Hobbit country!

At this point, NZ is relatively narrow, and we were on a loop called the Twin Coasts Discovery Highway, that runs up the east side and down the west.  Except that we turned onto SH12 to go up the west side.

We stopped for the night at the Dargaville Kiwi Holiday Camp, which was quite deserted.  Other than some workmen with pickups, who seem to be there permanently, we were the only campers.  We discovered it is cricket season in Dargaville; the toilets and kitchen were full of them!

Dargaville is also the kumara capital of NZ, or maybe the world, depending on which web site you read.  Kumara is the local name for sweet potatoes, and you find them a lot more often that you would in the UK.  We’ve seen kumara in deli salads, smoothies, cakes, crisps, breakfasts, juices and even on their own.  Quite a versatile veggie!

Next morning we continued north, through the same meandering countryside to start with.  It was like driving through a selection of jigsaw puzzle scenes.

That is until we came to the Waipoua Forest, where we suddenly found ourselves in a narrow corridor with forest on either side.  It seemed that straight lines had been banned here, because we were in a continual S-bend.  At one point, we thought we’d got stuck in an endless loop as the same two bends seemed to come round over and over!  And no photo opportunities.

Until we got to our first stopping point, Tāne Mahouta, Lord of the Forest.  This is the oldest and/or tallest Kauri tree in NZ, possibly up to 4,000 years old.  (The widest is Te Matua Ngahere, Father of the Forest, which is also in Waipoua.)

You reach it via a short walkway from the road – and there’s a permanent guard at the entrance to make sure nothing happens to the tree.  You come to a point where the walkway widens into a kind of bandstand, and there’s trees all around, but nothing that special.  Then you look to your left and it’s another “Wow!” moment.  This tree is not just huge, it is magnificent!

Neither words nor photos can do it justice, you have to go there to see it.  Even though it was partly decapitated in a storm in 2007, it towers over the other trees and you can see the crown above them from the other side of the road.

Suitably impressed, we continued up SH12, rejoining SH1 at Ohaewai and on to Ahipara Holiday Park.  This is a lot busier than our last stay, but then it is bigger, warmer and a centre for surfers.