In just over 100years, logging, gum diggings and burning transformed the northern land from lush forest into farmland .With a final push to extract the last of the Kauri forest that swept through the north in the 1920s-30s, the beleaguered forests were reduced to the few patches surviving today. Of all Northland's surviving kauri forests, none is more famous than the Waipoua Forest—the home of the Lord of the Forest—Tane Mahuta, 1250 years old and still growing. Kauri are among the most ancient trees in the world, and hold the record as being the largest trees in volume.
We arrived before anyone else and had the peace of the forest to enjoy to ourselves. As we entered the forest to take the well trodden track we passed some examples of the Kauri that we believed to be pretty substantial in the girth department but these were nothing in comparison to what awaited us at the end of the track. We were greeted by a tree with a 16.41m girth and a truck volume of 208 cubic meters. Now this probably means nothing to you as you read this and not even the pictures do this tree justice as we were kept about 15 meters away from the tree by a boundary fence but in layman's terms this tree was massive. It was so big that you couldn't comprehend it being a tree. It looked like a huge wooden rock with small trees growing out of the top. After some quiet time and contemplation we headed back along the track for a bit more tree hugging before jumping back into Adolf the Van for a long and stinky drive back to Auckland.
Just one thing to note about our drive back. In all the time we had spent driving around the entire of NZ we had spotted many pieces of road kill but were proud that we had caused none of them. During Adolf's last trip down the road we were attacked not only once, but twice by kamikaze birds as they came out of the sun and scored a direct hit on the windscreen!!