Thursday 14 March

Kerikeri
It was a bit cloudy when we left Ahipara this morning, but soon cleared. We have decided that this few .last days will be slowly-slowly. What we haven't seen now will not be seen. We have ticked off practically everything on list of things we really wanted to do, and there is no way we are going rushing off for something else now. So we will make our way back to Auckland in a number of small hops.
We took the northerly route from Ahipara, back through Kaitaia and hugging the coast. It was beautiful, we stopped in Taipa for a coffee, at a cafe looking out over the bay, so quiet, so peaceful. We took a side road to investigate Taupo Bay, a popular summertime destination for Kiwis, it was just too quiet. It felt as if everyone had gone home for the winter. So we retraced our footsteps back to the main road. The road sides had been bordered with Mangrove Swamps for some way in places the water almost lapping onto the roads. In Taupo Bay there were signs giving information about Tsunami Evacuation procedures and pointing out an escape route. We have heard so much about how sparsely populated the South Island is and how rural, but these parts of the North Island seem more remote than anything we saw there. Amongst the rolling hills we came upon groups of grazing cattle, mostly cows bit some sheep, and the occasional homestead. There were signs with the names of various cattle stations on them, similar to signs we had seen yesterday so we thought that these ones were also government owed Stations with farm managers and some staff running them.
We turned inland into The Puketi Kauri Forest, to a DoC site. It was nice enough, but deserted and there were heavy clouds n the sky and occasional drizzly rain. We decided to head back to he coast and go to Kerikeri, which according to the RG has several things of interest.
We are pitched on a lovely Campsite on a terrace slightly raised above a stream. It's not busy and very quiet, maybe half a dozen other tents and small vans. All the big Motor Homes are on a higher terrace behind us, away from the stream on powered sites. We walled onto Kerikeri this afternoon, to the old settlement and had a very interesting trip to a mock-up of an original Maori fishing village and a garden of indigenous plants. 'Mock-up' might sound a bit naff, bit in fact it was excellently done, encorporating a lot of original items, a carved stone anchor and some old dug-out canoes retrieved from the mangrove swamps amongst others. It was also very informative, with detailed histories of the first missionaries who landed on the Bay of Islands and their relationships with the local Maori tribes. I didn't realise that the Bay of Islands was he first place that white people came fl settle and that those first people were missionaries, although I suppose I might have guessed! Tomorrow we are moving on a very short distance to the southern shores of the Bay of Islands, which also has remains of early missionaries.