Clare writes:
With only days to go, we raced up to Northland (the pointy bit north of Auckland) to see the famous last remaining giant kauri forests. This will take the number of tree photos Sheila has taken to 9,356,472. I think I'm suffering from tree fatigue!!

We stayed in a very sweet hostel in Dargaville - it used to be a primary school and still has little coat hooks at knee level and giant murals - we even got to monopolise the telly for a change! Then today we have headed south back to Auckland to catch up with a few odds and ends. Gorgeous sunny day so we went up Mount Eden - one of the 40 or so extinct volcanoes the city is built on. We've decided we like Auckland after all during my pre-brithday dinner!

Sheila writes:
In the western part of Northland we went to see some of the last remants of native kauri forest which used to cover most of the North Island before over-zealous (ex British) settlers chopped them all down to make a quick buck on exported timber in the late 1800s - and through to the 1970s. The kauri is a really big tree girth-wise. It's not overly tall - but the biggest kauri in New Zealand (Tane Mahuta, with a girth of 13.3metres) is really impressive. The best bit of intact forest is at Trounson Reserve, with 450 hectares of really beautiful woodland, intact groundflora and a good bird population.

I was fascinated by examples of kauri gum we saw at a local craft shop. It's a resin which seeps from below the bark of mature kauri trees and is described as New Zealand's amber. All the examples we saw for sale were dug from bogs and mires where ancient kauri trees had fallen and decayed and the resin was preserved. In the 19th century the resin was extemely valuable (there was actually a kauri gum-rush (as well as a gold-rush))because it was discovered that it made the very best varnish in the world (used in the finish of famous violins for example).