Big Trees

We had a change of plans: We like this place so much, that we wanted to stay another night and decided to use the Bali Hai Motel as our base to explore the surroundings of the northern area of the North Island of New Zealand.

We left all our stuff in the room, told Barbara we wanted to stay another night and drove off to the westcoast. I was driving today and we wanted to go all the the way across the island (NZ is not that wide at the top) to the west coast to check out the massive Kauri Trees.

The drive was easy with some slightly windy roads up and down through green countryside.

At Opononi we stopped for some breakfast (at early lunch time - some may call it brunch) where I first fell in love with Egg Benedict - despite the lack of enthusiasm for their job the staff of the cafe possessed.

From here it wasn't very far to get to the Waipoura Forest where we should find all the old and big Kauri trees, but first we stopped at a wonderful view point from where we could overlook the mouth of the fjord.

These trees are known for their very big and fat trunk which also indicates why they are measured by the size of the tree (by volume) rather the total height.

The biggest was Tane Mahuta (which means "lord of the forest" in Maori) with it's perimeter (girth) measuring more than 13 meters measures 244 cubic meters of wood in its trunk. This may not mean much to most of us but I will let the pictures talk.

Although these giants seem so massive, they are very fragile. Their roots lie just a few centimetres under the surface. This makes them very vulnerable to hikers feet, so that we walked on raised footpaths most of the time. Also these big trees are struggling with diseases that are carried into the forest by soil that stuck to the bottom of the hikers shoes, so that we had to wash our shoes before entering the forest.

Nonetheless, we enjoyed the walk through the forest, which led us past 4 more large Kauri trees a lot.

Especially my Mom enjoyed the hike and showed no signs of getting tired with her new hip.

Aside from the large trees the atmosphere in the forest had something of Jurassic Park, with all the ferns and strange plants grown and sounds coming from deep within the forest.

After this the 2 hours and 6 km we had enough of trees and even the viewpoint on the map could not tempt us anymore.

There was still a 100 km drive back to the motel ahead of us.

For dinner we decided to compensate a little for the massive spendings of yesterday and went to the supermarket to buy all the ingredients to make pasta.

Our Room had a little kitchen and all the necessary equipment to make a nice Bolognese, which we enjoyed on outside on the terrace. Unfortunately we had to move the plates inside soon, when it started raining.

After cleaning up we spent the rest of the evening by watching some of the pictures of the earlier stages of my trip (Dubai and Oman).