After a comfortable night’s sleep in a bed, we headed south, around Lake Taupo to Turangi. The drive was not a pleasant one because it was a very narrow and winding road including several 35kph corners, and there were many logging trucks ahead of us, slowing things down. Nonetheless, after more than an hour, we managed to get to our turn-off and the trucks all continued to go straight ahead (yay!).

Heading for the village of Whakapapa, we stopped on the way to have a look at some rapids and a waterfall, with Trav managing to play on the rocks and cross the stream several times without falling in.

Due to the delay in the morning on the drive around the lake, we were unable to go on one of the 8-hour hikes through the mountains surrounding the village. That’s our excuse, and we’re sticking with it. No possible chance that we were not up to the challenge of an 8-hour hike, no sirree…*grin* We decided to take in the Taranaki Falls, which were a 2.5 hour hike, and set off on our jaunt.

The terrain was quite steep in parts, and we crossed the same stream on a number of occasions. The vegetation pattern was also quite odd in that we saw mostly metre-high grassy plants, but when there was a stream or other water source, tall beech trees were growing for about 20 metres either side of the bank. At that distance from the water, the beech trees immediately stopped, and the grassy vegetation was all that could survive. Throughout the hike, we could see showers approaching us the whole time, and thought we were going to get quite wet, but they veered away and missed us in the end, which was fortunate. Or unfortunate, since we’d carried coats around unnecessarily, and they were heavy.

After the hike, we continued southward to Wellington, via some very steep and winding hills, which was great fun in the rain. After all, what more do you want than wet, slippery roads, several 35kph curves and sheer cliffs at the road’s edge?

The roads were beginning to get rather dull in their monotony for corners, so it was a bit of a relief to come around a corner and nearly clean up a lot of sheep. Some farmers were moving sheep down the road, and we estimated there were about 700-800 of them, bouncing frantically on the bitumen, trying to keep up with their friends. As the moving carpet of sheep began to thin out toward the last of the animals, we noticed one of them must have fallen over, and then been stomped on by several dozen of it’s colleagues. Lying in the middle of the road, it was temporarily stunned, and kicking it’s legs in a desperate attempt to stand up, but it was too groggy to work out which way was up. It all looked very funny - kind of like a cartoon where Fred Flintstone gets trampled by a mad rush of teenagers chasing their idol or something.

After that, we continued down the same sort of winding road for about another 30kms, and came around a corner to find two pigs strolling peacefully down the side of the road. They were walking on the correct side of the road to be aware of oncoming traffic, so there must be a good traffic rules program for pigs over in NZ. Since there was nobody following us, we pulled up on the side of the road and jumped out to have a look. As soon as they saw the car pull up, they ran over to our side of the road and began to look at us, as much as we were looking at them. We were quite surprised to find they were not afraid of us in the slightest, walking up to within a few feet of the car and snuffling about, seeing if we would offer them a ride, or at the very least, some food. After they worked out we were not going to be their saviours, they lost a little interest, and crossed back to the safer side of the road, and continued on their way.

We pulled into Wellington about 8:30pm and set up camp (hurrah for daylight savings!) in the local caravan park, before heading down the street to get some dinner from the supermarket. The supermarket we chose was one called “Pak N Save”, but the Kiwi accent means it is often pronounced “puckensuv”. Again, we noticed the even distribution of alcohol throughout the supermarket, and the many bins of food where you could just buy one cupful of flour, sugar, cereal, nuts, raisins, etc. It is a system we’d like to see introduced in Australia, because there are many times when you only want to buy a little bit of something for a recipe.

It was at this supermarket where we found our SPOTD. Loading the groceries into the car, we were astonished to see a young guy on a bicycle race through the car park toward an abandoned shopping trolley, grab it by the handle and continue out the car park and down the road with it. Why anyone would want to steal a shopping trolley at 10pm mid-week is beyond us, and more baffling is the choice of getaway vehicle. For sheer idiocy, this fellow won the award with less than two hours remaining in the day.

Onward to the South Island tomorrow…

Categories: NZ 1999, Travel