On very last leg of our trip now. We carried on down the northwest coast as the westerly winds continued to howl in and we headed inlands towards the last remaining remnants of the giant Kauri forests that once covered the whole of Northland. These trees had taken hundreds/thousands of years to grow to absolutely colossal sizes by the time the first settlers arrived in the 1850s but by 1920 they haddestroyed virtually all the forests for the highly prized kauri...

One of the problems about countries which have a lot of space is urban sprawl. Everyone has their own house, no appartments, little thought about using space efficiently. Auckland is a perfect example. A quarter of the entire country's population lives here and it sprawls on & on & on. So after a fairly tedious drive through it all we eventually ended up out of suburbia and north of Auckland and in Warkworth - a very pleasant town twinned with the orig...

We still have so many things on our list of things to see & do and barely two weeks left. Next on our list was the Coromandel Penninsula, a reasonably short drive north from Rotorua. This area is only a couple of hours drive from Auckland so is where the Aucklanders flock to during the summer weekends. Now that summer's over & it was mid-week it was very quiet. We travelled up the east side, staying one night in Whangamata a nice seaside town where they...

Rotorua was our next destination, the bubbling & steaming volcanic heart of North Island. After a fairly comfortable drive up from Napier through Lake Taupo where we didn't linger as we'd been there 2 months previously we arrived in what is, along with Iceland, probably the most geothermally active area on the planet. What an incredible place. As you drive along the road, it's like anywhere else in NZ, native podocarp forests, mountains etc BUT there's stea...

Napier was our next port of call - after a long drive through the more or less empty east coast hinterland - there aren't even any roads to take you from the main road out to the coast so the south east coast of North Island is totally wild & we left it that way. We passed through a couple of tiny settlements Dannevirke & Norseland which were originally settled by scandinavians & where the locals hype this up as much as possible to earn some tourist...