Monday, April 12, 2010
-I learned my Grandmother got facebook. This is hilarious and awesome. Wrapped up in glory.
-Gas is $NZ 1.81 per litre. In American terms, we pay $US 4.88 a gallon. That is sick.
-Kiwi birds lay HUGE eggs, we learned and saw one at the Kiwi House and Museum, a very cute and worth it museum.
-Above museum had cows. Tim had to go and have a chat with them.
-Weather was perfect, sunny, slight breeze, warm!
-We saw crap loads of sheep and cows. I mean THOUSANDS. In one day.
-The town of Waipu was disappointing, not much to it
-We stopped in the parking lot of Sheep World, decided not to go in
-We got to Thames. In order to get there, you go through a very strange landscape. Its super flat and there isn’t really anything but field grass, and there is nothing for miles and miles. No houses, no signs, no fences, no signs of life. Just flat. And then you see the Mountains near Thames pop up. Its not gradual, hills then Mountains. Its flat, flat, flat, really high mountain.
-Thames was on the closer side of the mountain, and clearly was an industrial mining town. Small, kinda grungy, didn’t really have any frills or lace, just the places needed to live and work in the mining/industrial industry.
-We were the only ones on our mine tour. The guide was nice at first, and led us into the mines with his limp. He did a bit of talking first, and as soon as he could tell that we were actually interested and going to ask questions, he sprung into uber high gear and had a great enthusiasm about it. It was clear that he really liked doing this. I had felt bad about making a gimp man drag us through the mine right at closing, so that made me feel better.
-It was a small mine, but the second most rich on the island. He said that back in the heyday, it pulled 3million (I think) but some totally absurd about of money out in gold. We did the mine tour first, and it had these mannequins in it, and the first one we came to scared me, but then they were almost cute. 70s porn star look.
After the mine he brought us over to show us how the jaw crusher worked, the pounding sticks, and then how the mechanical sifter worked, and he turned it on. Which was really cool, I had seen the super old wooden ones somewhat work before, but never a mechanical, more productive one in full swing. -Next stop was Cathedral Cove: We hit the parking lot a little after 5, the sign said it was a 45 minute walk, and we pretended to ourselves that that meant 45 minutes there and back. Knowing full well that that wasn’t the case.
It was a LONG walk, made longer by the fact that the trails weren’t too even, with holes and roots and things. And they were constantly going up and down, super steep in both directions. Mom could never have done it. Straigh up and straight down at times. And it didn’t help that you were almost always surrounded by trees and brush, so you felt like you were constantly walking away from the water. Finally we could hear water, and then went down several sets of steep stairs, and bam, there you are. It was a lot bigger than I had expected, and a lot less commercialized. There were only a handful of people still down there (we passed by maybe 10 people on our way out) and the whole thing was just perfectly serene. No gift shop, no signs, no food stand. 100% nature except one small roped off section because of falling rocks. It was beautiful. 
-Tim took his shoes off and played in the water, of course getting more wet than he wanted We got back to the car just in time though, 5 minutes later, and we wouldn’t have been able to see our hands in front of our faces.
-Tim ended up using a water bottle to keep the brights propped on.
-Dinner was a fish and chips place, I had to scrape off some garlic aoli, beetroot, carrot, and onion off my burger. Who puts that stuff on a burger?
-We had a super hard time finding a hotel, but finally we settled on a sketchville place in Mount Maunganui. I nearly froze to death.
No comments:
Post a Comment