Friday, June 16, 2006

12June06 Joan and Wayland

12June06 Monday

The news was forecasting bad storms today and during the night the storms did come in.  The winds were predicted to be anywhere from 30 up to 100 kms/hr depending on the area.  They announced on the morning news that the south island was getting 30 to 40cms of snow and many of the main roads were closed there.  On the north island Auckland was without power in most of the city.  We had some very strong winds that made driving the caravan hard to keep in a straight line on the highway and some rain at times that made visibility very low.  We stopped at a roadside park for a while to let the rain pass.  Eventually the sun came out some but was interspersed with rain showers and the wind gusts continued.

 

Today our plan was to travel from Matahohe on Hwy 12 over to the west coast and then up and around and if possible on over to Paihia.  We wanted to stop and see Tane Mahuta the 2000 year old kauri tree in the Waipoua Forest.  We started out and headed up to Dargaville which is one of the larger towns in that area.  The general area is the kumara capital of New Zealand and produces 80% of the kumara consumed in the country. 

 

We stopped by the Dargaville airport that we had stopped at last year just to see what was happening.  This was Monday and Saturday is the day of the flying club get-to-gathers and the weather was nasty so the place was abandoned.  The sheep that were there last were no wheres in sight.  Theclub is more than doubling the size of the building there and presumably it will be used as their training center.

 

Next we stopped in town at the Blah Blah Blah café and had lunch and then headed to the town museum.  The museum had a lot of local town history and artifacts.  They also have a lot of local maritime history.  They have the two masts of the Greenpeace boat that was bombed and sunk in the Auckland harbor in 1985.  They are mounted on the property close to the museum building and can be seen from quite a distance away.  One of the Greenpeace crew was killed in the episode.  It created a high level of friction between New Zealand and France.

 

From Dargaville we headed on up Hwy 12 to the Waipoua Forest protected reserve area.  There are quite a number of kauri trees remaining in the area and are now protected as are kauri trees everyone in New Zealand now.  The northland area was once the site of large forests of the kauri trees and which were harvested in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.  We came upon a car parked along the park road with the hood up and a couple working under the hood.  Maggie, Darryl, and their grown son Jaimie were trying to cool the engine down.  Apparently the engine had heated up on the way up the hills in the park.  We gave them some water from the KEA to fill the radiator with and then we were both going down the road a ways to the Tane Mahuta tree.  They went ahead but when we got to the tree stop their hood was up again.  At this point we offered to take them on the KEA to look for a repair shop and some way of getting their car towed there.  Jaimie stayed with the car and the rest of us went in the KEA on up the highway about 10 kms where we found a gas station with a mechanic.  Darryl went with the mechanic who took a tow rope in his pickup truck back to try to tow the car in.  I was a little concerned  with them towing the car with a rope up and down the hills without the engine running and no power steering or power brakes.  As it turned out Jaimie had put more water in the radiator and gotten the car to the downhill section and was able to get it into the station without towing it. 

 

Eventually the mechanic got the cooling system purged of air and the engine presumable running OK.  We followed them to the next town where there was a hotel and the car ran fine.  We said goodbye and went on about 5 km or so where there was a campervan park and we checked in there for the night.  It seemed a good solution since it was a dark and rainy night and would have been a really tough drive to Paihia.

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