Ruakaka - the last morning

 The Island View Lodge has this wonderful indoor heated swimming pool where we had a great chance to unwind last night - the view was better this morning.

 Then Tom was up at 6:00 AM looking to get the perfect shot of the sun coming up over the Pacific ocean.  Usually our sunrise pictures are over the Atlantic!

In the lavender pre-dawn, you could see the Hen and Chicken islands just off the coast.  

Then the fiery red ball of a sun rose, it was farther south. 

We had a two hour drive winding through small coastal towns back to the airport, mostly over two lane roads.  But when you reach Auckland, there is an 8 lane bridge over the bay to enter the city of Auckland with its 1.4 million people and its Space Needle tower.  With the tower, it resembles Seattle!...  A beautiful city over the bay. 

We were happy to find this Carl's Jr (a Hardee's with its bright yellow star) near the airport where we stopped to grab lunch (drinks with ice!) and head home. 

Paihia, Russell and the Kauri Forest

This morning we caught the 9:30 water ferry from Paihia to Russell, a sleepy little village across the Bay of Islands. 

Russell was the first capital of New Zealand (then called New South Wales by the English settlers).  We visited Christ Church there.  The building was built in 1836 and is the oldest church in New Zealand still in use. It has musket ball holes in the facade dating back to struggles between the Maori and the English Navy who fired on the church from the bay while the Maori were plundering the town. 


There is a little museum there showing the history of the area including a whale boat from the first Europeans who came for seals and whale blubber. This boat would have been dispatched from a larger ship when a whale was spotted. Many of these boats were destroyed in the battle with the whale.  Whales are now protected in
New Zealand.  

Captain Cook sailed from Tahiti following the transit of Venus looking for a possible southern continent and first sighted New Zealand in October of 1769.  The museum had a 1/5 size reproduction of Captain Cook's ship the Endeavor from this exploration.  

There was a row of Pohutukawa trees lining the

waterfront in Russell.  They were planted by school children from the Russell school in 1930 to beautify the town.  I thought they looked like the live oak trees from Emerald Isle. 


Back in Paihia, we drove by the Treaty Grounds where the original treaty was signed between the English and the Maori. In the museum this treaty was said to claim

the land for the Queen with the name of New South Wales including any other land they might discover.  However other places this treaty was referred to,  it was said to establish a partnership for peace between the Maori and English. In current time, there is a lot of honor preservation done for the Maori culture and their language is still spoken. 

One of the reasons for coming to the North Land was to see

the giant Kauri tree, said to be the oldest living thing in the southern hemisphere.  So in the afternoon we drove west across the north land. We drove along the Hokianga Harbour to Omapere, where you can see the massive sand dunes overlooking the Tasman sea.  There was a light house/ radar station there which was originally established by an English sea captain who fell in love with a local Maori woman.  They set up the station and it was kept by their family for 80 years. The Maori religion recognizes deity in the sea and the forest.  There a monument here about the sea coming back and saving a stranded whale while two tribes argued about who it belonged to.

Then we turned south to the Waipoua Forest.  This is tribal Maori land, but it was open to the public.  They have built raised foot paths into the forest so that the tourist do not step on the fragile roots of the Kauri near the surface. 

Here we saw the huge named Kauri tree, Tane Mahuta (Lord of the Forest). This tree is so large that I had the first sense that it must have been built by Disney, but it is actually a living tree, proposed to be 2000 years old.  This tree is 45 feet in circumference!  We are a good bit away from it, so our pictures do not do it justice. 

Continuing south we came to a fascinating

store and artist workshop.  They have created an industry around the Kauri woodworking.  While the living Kauri trees are protected, they are using heavy equipment to pull old kauri trees out of local swamps.  The theory is that

these trees where all killed by a major flood, with a claim to be 45,000 years old. These  logs are the same size and density of the current Kauri and the roof of the building was supported by one.  We walked through an area where you could buy one of these huge slabs for using in your own construction.  They are making beautiful furniture, clocks, bowls, etc  from them.  This beautiful table was $4500.

We drove back to the east coast tonight to stay in Ruakaka where we have a room a the Island View Lodge for our last night in New Zealand. Our room over looks the Bream Bay and the Hen and Chick Islands.

 It also overlooks pasture and black cows; such a beautiful place. 

Joyce recommended the Outboard restaurant where we had fresh pan fried fish (some kind of white fish not familiar to us) and a tea pot for two. After dinner we had a swim in their indoor, heated pool and then went outside to see the Milky Way in the dark sky.

http://www.islandviewruakaka.co.nz/location-ruakaka.html

Leaving the South, What about the North?

We left the South Island this morning.  We had breakfast overlooking red and purple
rhododendron bushes and a horse in his stylish coat in the paddock.  And headed out
to the airport in Christchurch.

I do not know much about cricket, but Christchurch is excited to be the site for the cricket World Cup in 2015 - see the exhibit at the airport.

We grabbed a 2014 Rave 4 at the Auckland airport and dashed north.  We had reservations at Paihia at the Bay of Islands tonight and it was a LONG drive.  We did not get the GPS with this car, so we were navigating from the maps that we had.  It was a drastic change from the South Island.  Auckland has 1.4 million people, 32% of the New Zealand population.  We went from one lane bridges to 8

lanes on the Harbor Bridge in Auckland.

As we left Auckland, we were back in rural

rolling pastures and dairy farms.  We saw herds of cows in line on a path towards the milking barns. The cows knew when it was time to go for milking and were on their way.


There was a lot of traffic headed north including double trailer milk trucks, farm fuel trucks, huge horse trailers and school buses. In Whangarei we passed the huge Fonterra dairy processing plant where all the trucks were heading.

In all this heavy traffic, we were surprised to see triple trailer trucks. These were trucks loaded with timber. 

Headed north on highway#1, we saw Bream Head rising out of the Pacific Ocean, a dramatic sight.





Finally four hours after leaving the airport, we drove into Paihia, a small seacoast town where the original treaty of Waitangi  was signed in 1840 between the English and the Maori.  They have wide swing of tides here, and the pier for local activity boats had floating docks that looked like they could rise significantly as the tide came in. 

Tekapo and Mount John Observatory

We had breakfast in the common room at our B&B in Tekapo with this marvelous view of the
lake. 

We visited some nice Hot Pools above the lake. These pools are ingeniously heated by heat transfer from maintaining an ice rink in the complex. Three pools, each one a little hotter than the one before. 

Stephen, our host suggested that me might enjoy the views from the top of Mount John just above Lake Tekapo. We could also see the Observatory there.  Driving up the road were beautiful views of Lake Tekapo with its turquoise water.  Since the lake is fed by glacier melt, the water has "rock flour" or silt suspended in it.  This gives the water the light green reflective qualities.

The University of Canterbury, in partnership with many international organizations, hosts a number of VLTs, very large telescopes on site for research in astrophysics. The observatory is with in the dark sky reserve.  The Aoraki Mackenzie area is a gold-rated dark sky reserve, in recognition of the quality of the almost light-pollution-free skies of the Mackenzie Basin.
The dark sky reserve includes Aoraki Mt Cook National Park and the villages of Lake Tekapo, Twizel and Mt Cook.  Local residents have been restricted in how they use outdoor lighting for the past 50 years to help achieve this.

Mount John observatory offers tours so we had a young physics lady take us on the tour.  She was full of intriguing facts about astrophysics.  One of the telescopes here is managed by internet access and is used by a group in Boston who can control where it focuses in the sky.  That group is looking at variations in the stars, like super novas, etc.  Another of the telescopes is being used by a group studying and looking for asteroids.  

The Milky Way photo

Our guide took us inside the MOA telescope.  MOA stands for Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics, but was also named Moa to honor a large, heavy New Zealand bird that is now extinct.  It is the largest telescope in New Zealand (1.8 meter- about 6 feet reflecting mirror) and because it is in the Southern Hemisphere, it has the best vantage point on the center of the universe, the Milky Way.  The MOA project is dedicated to studying, not stars, but planets; and finding other solar systems with orbiting planets.  And they are being successful; having found over 200 such planets.  This project is done jointly between the University of Canterbury and the University of Nagoya, Japan. 

They are using the principal Einstein's principal of space density bending with gravity.  Someone has printed a copy of Einstein's theory from his 1912 notebook and posted it on the wall.  Amazing to think of the theory proposed initially as an idea in handwriting being proven true by all this enormous technology.

In May 2011 they discovered a rogue planet the size of Neptune (our largest planet) roaming through the universe without association with a star. It is considered a planet because of its size and dense atmosphere.  She also told us that one of the "stars" in Orion's dagger is actually a nebulae, a cloud that is a nursery for new stars. 

She also brought out a solar telescope and aimed it for us to take a look. They use it to see solar flares and spots on our sun, but I just saw red.

We had yummy soup and sandwiches sitting outside with an amazing view and then headed on to Christchurch.   

Sunday in Dunedin and on to Takepo

While exploring Dunedin Yesterday, we had spotted the Knox Presbyterian Church on George Street not far from our B&B. It is actually the first church we have seen in New Zealand with an sign inviting others to worship with them at a given time.

 So on Sunday morning we joined them for the 10:00 worship service.  Rev Dr Kerry Enright is the new pastor there and was an interesting fellow.  He was a retired lawyer who was called to the ministry.  The congregation was very friendly to us, and we enjoyed hearing their vision for the future.  He was aware of the need to live out your Christianity with action, and has ideas for a youth ministry and more outreach.  He encouraged the congregation to think about where the church should be in 3 years.  He was very encouraging and uplifting.  We did not recognize many of the hymns, but the lyrics were meaningful.  They did not have hymn books which made singing a little more challenging.
http://knoxchurch.net/index.html

There was "tea" after church, but we headed out on the next leg of our journey towards Lake Tekapo.

We stopped at Moeraki Boulders to see the unique rock boulders on the sandy beach.  It
looked like a giant had left his bocci ball set strung along the beach.  We were delighted that we were blessed with not only a sunny day, but the beginning of some warm weather. 

 A cute little girl helped us out with this picture of Tom and me checking out this ball.  It is obviously a bowl that is washed out every day by high tide and was full of water and had kelp growing in it. 

 These rounded balls are hollow and have strange infrastructure with in them.  Some of them are 7 feet in diameter.  It is a popular spot with lots of families walking on the sand or eating lunch in the restaurant hung over the beach.

They seemed to have been formed as balls of brown calcite with both concentric and radial cracks of yellow calcite. 

  Our view from the little cafe and gift shop overlooking the beach.  We got a table as soon as the huge tour bus left the site. 

We are staying in Tekapo Heights tonight, a beautiful new B&B above the lake. We have a big room full of light and also with a heated bathroom and a shower that does not leak! 

We took a drive into town to see the little village and saw the Church of the Good Shepherd overlooking the lake and the Southern Alps. We think this is a view of Mount Cook over Lake Takepo. Mount Aoraki / Mount Cook is the highest mountain in New Zealand. Latest measurements give  its height of 12,300 feet.

The only restaurant open on a Sunday night was the McKenzie grill.   Lucky us, they had table topped cooking of a granite stone heated to 730 F degrees.  So I am grilling chicken, beef and shrimp for dinner - serendipity!