We spent the morning of this last day in New Zealand touring the Waitomo Glowworm Cave. As I described in one of the photos, the insect larvae secrete a mucus to form strings that serve as a web to capture other small flying insects. To attract their prey, they give off a glow. There are thousands of them in this cave. After walking through part of the cave system and viewing the limestone formations, we boarded a boat to proceed on the underground portion of...

The forecast was for rain so we drove to Rotoroa in the morning. We toured the town and headed to the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal fields about 30 minutes south. It is 18 sq. km. of collapsed craters, cold and boiling pools of mud, colourful deposits and steaming ponds. We spent 1 1/2 hours trekking through the area. Luckily the rain held off and we had cloudy but dry weather for the walk. Pretty strong sulphur odour. On leaving Wai-O-Tapu we headed east along the Wa...

Continued our driving down the Coromandel Peninsula yesterday to the Bay of Plenty. The Coromandel peninsula is quite scenic and a great, but slow, drive. We arrived in the Bay of Plenty around 2pm and proceeded to get quite lost in Tauranga. We finally found the highway (after a pleasant wandering drive through the countryside) and proceeded to Maketu where we had booked 2 nights at a studio in a holiday park outside of the town. Today we shopped and toured...

Spent the morning at the Auckland Botanic Garden. A feature of the garden is both permanent and periodic sculptures displayed throughout the gardens. Some are quite interesting while others are a bit far out. the periodic ones are for sale with quite outrageous prices. We then headed south and east to the Coromandel Peninsula. Gorgeous scenery, but the highway twists and turns between the shore and the cliffs and hills that drop sharply into the bay. The re...

Finally a reasonably nice day. We spent the morning in the northwest part of the North island in the Waipoua Forest taking in some of the huge Kauri trees (see photos). These trees are not as high as many of our BC trees but have a huge girth and are ancient. One, Tane Mahuta, may be 2000 years old. Trekking to these trees allowed us to get some good exercise as well. The afternoon (and much of the morning) was spent driving through some scenic landscapes bu...