Levin, North Island

Quite a bit of catching up to do, let's try and do it in order.

Saturday 26 January
We picked up the van. It's actually a largish estate car, a Toyota Estima, which has been adapted with the back seats taken out and incorporated into the boot. It's quite neat, we have storage underneath it and we make up the bed on top. The boot pulls out and a canvas canopy pulls over it with the back up to fasten onto the rear bumper. If it rains the extension has to be pulled forward to make a bed, which would be a tad tight. I think that if we get a lot of wet weather we will motel or B&B.
Our first stop was at a campsite only an hours drive south of Auckland where we experimented with the car and the set up, and assessed what we had and had not got. The big thing missing was a kettle!

Sunday 27 January
We continued south and stopped in Hamilton where we shopped at two larger chain stores, Countdown and The Warehouse. We bought a few essentials the van/car was missing, an LED light for sitting outside, the kettle of course, some better cooking equipment, and stocked up with groceries, things like pasta, tinned food, sauces mixes and plenty of bottled water for outback sites.
We detoured to visit the Waitoma Caves, a network of underground features in the limestone. The main thing of interest to us was the glowworms. We did a trip which involved an underground boat ride and looking up at the roofs of the caves was like looking up at the night sky, hundreds of glowworms were completing their life cycle underground.
Next we headed for a Department of Conservation site in the Pureora Forest, way, way off the beaten track. Our handbook said there was only a long-drop toilet and water from the stream. The plus was that we found a tap providing piped water (beautifully sweet) from a stream, the minus was that the long-drop was very smelly, have they not heard of V.I.P.s? The evening was magic, a fire we cooked on, silence apart from the forest noises......... and then...... the mosquitoes came. They invaded in batallions all night and we soon learnt that we had not made the canopy completely tight and mosquito proof.

Monday 28 January
We left the magic of the Forest, well worth the stop, even allowing for the mosquitoes, and continued southwards. We headed for the west coast and found a campsite, part of an NZ chain called Kiwi campgrounds, right on the beach, a beach of black volcanic sand. The campsite was maybe a bit regimented for our tastes, but immaculate and very comfortable. The facilities at these campsites are amazing, kitchens with ovens, microwaves, fridges, everything you could want. We have a small fridge and a gas stove in the car, but we will only need to use them on the outback sites, and most of those seem to offer the ability to cook on a fire or wood BBQ.
We drove down the Forgotten World Highway, 150 kms through rural NZ, winding and twisting through farmland and hillsides.

Tuesday 29 January
So here we are tonight in a place called Levin, about 100 kms north of Wellington. Tomorrow we take the ferry across to the South Island where we will probably spend February, returning to the eastern part of the North Island at the beginning of March, that is unless the sand flies get the better of us. Everyone we meet tells us horror stories about the sand flies on the South Island, they descend on you, cover you, eat you alive, unlike mosquitoes they operate 24/7 and cannot be escaped. How much insect repellent can I tolerate on my body? After several abortive attempts we finally found a very nice campsite. We dropped in on several by the coast on the way here and they were terrible. Static caravans, parked close to each other, with a few spaces left for tourers, like Hemsby (that's for Norfolk readers) but worse. We decided to head inland and found this site, which is very nice. We've showered, done some washing, bbq'd some NZ lamb and are drinking a bottle of nice NZ wine on a small quiet site.
So, thoughts on NZ so far. It's green, it's rural, it's friendly. Endless rolling hills with sheep cows and goats and not far away are usually mountains, some with snow-capped peaks, even this time of year. The topography is unlike anything we have seen before, folds of hillsides, we assume this is because it is a 'young' post-volcanic scenery as compared to ancient post-volcanic landscapes we are more familiar with, where time and glaciation has smoothed the edges. Point of interest: Both of us, without conferring, had assumed that the All-Blacks insignia was a feather (?from a Kiwi). Having seen it in abundance and having driven through miles and miles of fern bordered roads we now realise it is not a feather at all, but a fern. We need to ask a Kiwi very soon. Is it a fern? Is it a black fern? When do the ferns become black? Until we say that we are from England people don't don't seem to realise we are English. We would have thought that as soon as we open our mouths it is obvious we are English, but so many people ask us where we are from. Could we be mistaken for Americans, Canadians, South Africans. John was told he didn't sound English because he didn't have an accent.