We have had a busy week or two, firstly at Laura's family bach on the northern beaches (which we wrote about in the previous blog) and now down to visit Peter and Trish Brown at Marton, near Wanganui, on the west coast about two-thirds of the way down North Island.

Denise's ex-colleague, Peter, has really landed himself a plum job at the Nga Tawa Diocesan Girls School, where he is the chaplain and RE teacher. It is a private secondary school, with 235 boarders and 25 day pupils. Rather than go into reams of description, you can get a flavour of the school from the Old Girls' newsletter at:

http://www.ngatawa.school.nz/uploads/JANET_NEWS/Old%20Girls%20Newsletter%2008.pdf

Particularly interesting were the obituaries of some of the old girls, they played key roles in the development of NZ.

On our travels we visited the glow-worm caves in the limestone region of Waitomo. Rather than go into the popular but over-used show caves, we took a trip in a minibus up into the hills to a more remote system.

We visited an interesting coastal town called Wanganui which was once important enough to be in with a shout of being named New Zealand's capital city, and, on our way back on Friday, we drove the Desert Road past the active volcanoes Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe.

We revisited the converted wooden church at Cambridge that we went to with Sue and Dave on our first trip down to Rotorua in 2003. It is still a visitors' centre and cafe but has had a superb new wooden floor put down on the mezzanine level. On leaving, we caught a glimpse of a Velocette heading up towards Hamilton but failed to catch up with it!

We stayed Saturday night at a very good hotel near the exhibition centre in Hamilton and on Sunday walked over to the Classic Motorcycle Show. It wasn't anywhere near as big as, say, the Stafford Show in the UK but there were a few nice bikes there (especially a very well-restored 1957 Triumph Thunderbird in gold) and an awful lot of very rusty 'jumble' in the back of trailers! Two hours was enough to see everything. On the way out across the car park I spotted the Velocette from Cambridge on the back of a pickup. We chatted with the owner, Mark, who had owned it for 30 years, and it turned out that he knew Barney, the father-in-law of Malcolm Hodgkinson who I visited way down in Invercargill on South Island. That's a bit like walking across a car park in Inverness and bumping into a bloke who knows a bloke you know down in Exeter. Only in New Zealand!

Today, Monday, we have had a 'domestic' day, with Denise doing some housework whilst I mowed the grass around Dave and Sue's place - and there was a lot of it! Their Toyota estate has also had a comprehensive clean, which it thoroughly deserved after taking us nearly 2000km through some fantastic sceney over some very dusty roads.

After that we went down to Long Bay for the obligatory afternoon swim and read on the beach, but it got decidedly chilly at about 4pm when the sun disappeared behind clouds. The thermometer in the car still read 23 degrees! The clocks have altered here, though, and we can no longer sit out on the deck to have our evening meal. Shame! Meanwhile, people back in the UK are reporting heady temperatures of 11 to 14 degrees, so we know the seasons are changing in their favour, at last.

We are planning a trip up to the Kauri Museum near Wellsford either Tuesday or Wednesday this week, depending on the weather (some rain predicted for tomorrow pm). Kauri is a type of hardwood podocarp pine, from huge, ancient, slow-growing native trees. Bog Kauri can be up to 50,000 years old and is very hard; the colours and gums in it are beautiful. It is made into fantastic furniture and artifacts, even kitchen worktops. Kauri was felled wholesale by New Zealand's burgeoning forestry industry,a period of time which has now reached almost mythical status in NZ history.

Our friends Anne and Martin get back to Auckland, from their camper-van trip to South Island, on Thursday and we will meet up with them and see what they want to do over the Easter weekend. It could be a busy time on the roads, as for Kiwis it is their last opportunity to go away for a long weekend break before winter sets in.

A trip to the Coromandel peninsula, and further south on the east coast to Opotiki to see Sue and Dave where they are busy working at a kiwi-fruit packing station, is penned-in for the following week and weekend. After that, it will be time to think about making the journey home to the other side of the world.

Best wishes to all,

Dave and Denise