Back to Ranui

Back to Ranui

When we booked our motorhome, we arranged to spend our final night at their B&B at Paihia and be driven to the airport the following day.  But the more we thought about it, the less attractive it became – we’d be sitting around for a whole day and then taking a 3.5-hour drive to catch our 25-hour flight.

So we contacted the hire company and arranged to leave Ermintrude at Auckland airport instead – in the McDonalds car park, of all places!  This meant we could spend another couple of days at our favourite campsite at Ranui and then have a 35-minute drive to the airport.

So we left Paihia heading south again on the very hilly SH11.  As we approached Kawakawa, we saw a billboard advertising a vintage railway and the hundertwasser toilet.  We were so intrigued by the concept of a toilet with 100 waters that we had to go and have a look!  It turns out that this is just a “normal” toilet in a building made entirely of recycled materials by an artist called Friedensreich Hundertwasser.  It is the most photographed toilet in NZ and an attraction for tour buses visiting the region!

We joined SH1, which is a pretty good road at this point, apart from the frequent sets of road works.  Deciding it was time for a coffee, we turned off onto a scenic route to One Tree Point.  This was a lovely little village facing onto Parua Bay, with some very spiky hills on the other side.

A little further on, we just had to stop again when the satnav told us we were passing Hen and Chickens Islands.  We weren’t quite sure which was which!

By the time we got to Wellsford, the road was getting very busy, so we diverted onto the Hellensville road, the one we’d come up on our way north.  We had lunch in an old tavern at Kaukapakapa and got talking to an old guy who’d last been in the pub 50 years ago.  After that, it was a long slog back to Ranui.

Next day at the campsite we joined in a wine trail.  There were four stops around the site at different people’s pitches, with a different game at each one.  At the first, we played “Music for the People”, where the host played a riff and the other players followed – like musical Chinese whispers.  After that we had deck quoits, followed by horseshoe throwing and then a creative hat competition.  This was followed by a BBQ/pot luck dinner, but we’d ducked out by that time.

All this activity on vacation is just too tiring!