Doris goes to the Far North

Doris is our 21-year-old campervan, and what she lacks in style (grimy pink carpet, blue upholstery, beige fabric lining to walls and roof, waterstained and a bit saggy in places) she more than makes up for in guts and determination.
Mind you, she nearly didn't make it out of our drive (have we mentioned already that it is really, truly steep?) on her first outing.  Me: 'are you sure she'll get up there in reverse?'  Dave: 'oh, it'll be fine.  Reverse gear has got higher ratio blah blah technical blah.'  Doris:  'grunt, groan, wheelspin, wheelspin, slippppppping.....'

So we learnt from that, and now we only attempt to get out of the drive forwards.  A couple of weeks ago we headed off for our first long trip, destination The North.  You can find a map of our journey here.

7 Feb: first stop Pakiri.
We camp for the night a couple of hours north of Auckland at a site where the river meets the sea.  New Zealand school holidays finished last week and we pretty much have the place to ourselves.

Happy campers under the awning

Tilly and Reuben are better at getting to sleep than on our first few outings but there's still a lot of wriggling before they final fall asleep.  We discover that Tilly is using Reuben's bottom as a pillow.  He doesn't seem to mind, but we move her to a more comfortable looking position.  Even so, the night is punctuated by Tilly trying to fling herself off the top bunk despite our best efforts at containment.  We become adept at leaping to our feet the moment we hear the first suspicious rustlings from above our heads and attempt to wrestle her back into her bunk space before gravity takes its course.  This becomes a common theme for the rest of the holiday...

8 Feb: Goat Island

We were intending to head north, but we've stayed at the Goat Island campsite before and Reuben and Tilly both loved the playground, so by popular request we end up heading a few miles south for another night's stay.  We spend most of the afternoon on Goat Island beach, burying our children in the sand and other standard beachy pursuits.  

Tilly was having fun, right up until this photo was taken.  Honest!

9 & 10 Feb: Oakura

In the morning we go north to Mangawhai Heads.  We drive along small gravel roads and don't come across another vehicle until we've been on the move for well over an hour.  The countryside smells of honey and citronella and the insects sound like a million tiny chainsaws all hard at work.  On the way we pass a rather sad-looking wooden church in need of some love and attention and a wonderful wizard carved from a tree trunk.  

The last time we were at Mangawhai Heads it was during what passes for winter in these parts and we spent a fun afternoon sliding down the sand dunes.  Today the black sand is so hot it is painful underfoot, so we give up after a quick slide.  But we still have a fun time on the beach with the 'bogie board' as Reuben calls it.

 

The campsite at Oakura is amazing - we're about 10m back from the beach on one side of a large inlet with views over to the other side of the bay and tonight we have the added bonus of a full moon reflecting off the sea.  It's such a lovely place we decide to stay for a second night.  We take a break from travel and stay at the site during the day.  The only downside is the bitey things that take a liking to us.  This also becomes a common theme of the trip. We never work out what they are - pinhead size black beetles - but the moment they get their chompers into you, it starts stinging like mad.

I'm sure this should be in an advert for something.  PS: I swam to the island
in the middle of the picture.  Hope you're impressed!

It's a bit of cliché, but the beautiful lady really does ride her horse along the beach through the waves. We see a succession of 4WDs pass along the beach too, and realise later on that driving along the sand is actually the access route for all the houses further around the bay.  Not sure what the average insurer in the UK would make of that!

Later on, Reuben decides he wants to compete in his own decathlon, and though some of the events aren't exactly standard Olympic fare, competition is at an extremely high level.  Here he is going for a record in the long jump.

11 & 12 February - Waitangi
We say a fond farewell to Oakura and carry on north, driving past glorious glimpses of coast to Paihia in the Bay of Islands where we stop for lunch and an icecream.  I am devastated to discover that my all-time favourite icecream flavour - blackcurrant - is on offer but is polluted by licorice.  It's an abomination - no other word for it.  Our campsite for the night is alongside the Waitangi River.  Like most of the sites we stay at, it's really well set up and maintained.  We do some washing and have a swim in the pool and borrow a BBQ to cook our dinner.  The children discover a treehouse and go for a play after dinner.  'Watch out for the deathly washing' Reuben advises Tilly as he ducks under some drying clothes hanging off the van.  Where did that come from?  Fortunately, whatever deathly power inhabits our soggy underwear appears to be dormant as the children don't obviously demonstrate any ill effects after their encounter with it.

Shoes off before going inside the Waitangi meeting house.
Reuben and Tilly know the protocol!

The next morning we visit the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi, the place where the representatives of the British Crown and 40 Maori chiefs signed a treaty in 1840, the exact meaning of which has been under discussion pretty much ever since.  It's an amazingly beautiful spot on a gently sloping headland looking out into the Bay of Islands and has a place in the national consciousness roughly equivalent in the UK to Stonehenge and the Houses of Parliament combined.  We look round the weatherboard cottage that was home to the British Resident at the time of Treaty's signing and the wharenui (Maori meeting house).

Woman, fire, ugg.

Back at the campsite, I discover a plentiful supply of firewood and cook dinner over an open fire, thus channelling my inner cavewoman, even if the food was fishfingers, mash and peas and the fire surround was made of breezeblocks!  A girl from a nearby tent comes over to ask if we can lend her a hammer or a mullet.  We have neither hammers nor fish, but she goes away with a large chunk of wood for bashing tent pegs and seems satisfied with this.




13 February - Whatuwhiwhi (Which is pronounced 'Fat oo fee fee' rather than 'What oo wee wee' did you know?)
We leave Waitangi and drive to Kerikeri.  Dave can't quite see why we bothered as the main street is pretty much like any other main street but I know I've read something about old things and Kerikeri, and behold! on the edge of town I find it:

The Stone Store, Kerikeri, est. 1835

Now this really is the equivalent of Stonehenge, because it's New Zealand's oldest surviving stone building and dates from 1835!  You may not understand my breathless excitement, but the lack of physically old things is really something I notice.  If I say that my ideal place to live in the UK would be somewhere like York or Bath, where you're falling over old stuff all the time, perhaps you'll see what I mean.  'You've got a roaring pig', Tilly tells the lady in the Stone Store (it's a stuffed boar's head on the wall) and she tells us about a small boy who pulled up short on the steps and gasped: 'Look!  Mummy! Stone carpet!'.

In the afternoon we drive north towards the Karikari peninsula.  It's a roastingly hot day and we pass a gentleman with a fine set of moustaches wearing Victorian garb on a pennyfarthing.  Is this a mirage?  He's on a gentle incline and already his face is beetroot red, and I worry that he's going to expire imminently.  We have to wait until we get home to find out that this is David Wilson who is cycling from Stewart Island off the bottom of the South Island to the top of the North Island to raise awareness about Victorian buildings in his home town of Oamaru.  It takes him three months and he has no support crew - just travels with the bags you can see on his bike in the picture.  He sounds charmingly eccentric.  Well done that man, I think.

Our campsite is right at the end of the Karikari peninsula, which sticks out like a crooked finger into the Pacific.  We make the arduous 2 minute trek to the beach and see a man chipping at some shellfish on the rocks.  These turn out to be oysters, so we chip away too and try some there and then.  They taste quite snotty, we're warned, and I have to say that yes, there is a strong snotty aftertaste which lingers rather unpleasantly.  Reuben tries one too and even he isn't keen on snot flavour, which is saying something.  So we leave the oysters and hunt pipis instead, which lurk a few centimetres under the sand in the shallow water.  We hadn't come prepared with a container so Dave's Tilley hat is pressed into service.  It did say on the label when he bought it that a zoo keeper had had his hat eaten by an elephant and it had passed through undamaged, so a few pipis are as nothing.  We cook them and have them with pasta for dinner and they taste like a milder version of mussels.  Later that evening, Dave and I inadvertently decorate Doris's interior.  We lose count after swatting 35 mosquitoes but the blood stains remain, perhaps lessening the wall-to-wall beige blandness by a degree or two.

Tilly at Maitai Bay

14 February - Shipwreck Bay, Ahipara
We spend the morning at Maitai Bay, on the northern side of the peninsula.  It's a real desert island beach, white sand and turquoise sea and we pretty much have it to ourselves.











We start to head south after lunch, deciding not to carry on all the way north to Cape Reinga, where New Zealand runs out of road.  The famous Ninety-mile Beach is ours for the taking, even if it is more like 90km, but there's only so much sand that Reuben and Tilly can play with, and we make do with camping at the southernmost end.  We try out the solar showers on the children and find that the water is really warm after only a couple of hours heating up in the sun.



15 February - Whatoro
It's our only day of rain and we draw the curtains to see Ninety-mile Beach has vanished into the gloom.

Today we're heading properly south.  The roads wiggle through vast expanses of trees and it feels like we're making no progress at all but we finally emerge on the banks of the Hokianga Harbour at Kohukohu, a village with a back of beyond feel to it which in the 19th century was the largest settlement north of Auckland when the logging industry was at its height.  We catch the car ferry over to the other side by the skin of our teeth and then a good deal more wiggling through the trees ensues.  Later on, Reuben and I take a short walk through the forest to visit Tane Mahuta, the lord of the forest, which isn't some Lord of the Rings spin off but the largest known kauri tree in the world, all 52 metres of it.  He's been around for an estimated 2500 years and is indeed very lordly and magnificent and impossible to photograph to give any impression thereof!  Our campsite for the evening has the best playground yet - 4 trampolines and a 'flying fox' (zip wire - if you're not up with the vernacular), which impresses the children.

16 February - back home
Our longest day's driving of the trip today, but we feel like getting home in good time to get the van cleaned up and restock the fridge before it's back to work on Monday.  We stop for lunch in Wellsford, which is a fairly average middle sized town about an hour north of Auckland but with a very good Moroccan café on the high street run by a genuine Moroccan.  We are intrigued as to how he ended up here and it turns out that he was an acrobat who performed in shows all around Europe and married a Kiwi girl he met in Portugal.  She returned to New Zealand which he thought was somewhere near Scotland so he was rather astounded at the price of the ticket quoted by a travel agent when he was flying out to join her.  'I'm not going to Australia' he said to the agent, thinking of the furthest away place he could possibly imagine.  Errr, actually, it's that and a bit more.... Still, he seems to have made a successful transition to New Zealand, even if it's not where he expected and we can highly recommend the Tangiers Café if you're ever passing through Wellsford!

And what of Doris?  Well she handled the trip with ne'er a complaint and is primed and ready for the next trip.  Feel free to pop over and borrow her!