Wednesday 13 March

Ahipara
The trip today was excellent. Our Maori bus driver/guide was funny and entertaining and also had a very good singing voice. He entertained us with Maori songs during the journey. We went up the spine road towards the very tip of North land, making several stops on the way. We went to a workshop where  45,000 year old Kauri trees preserved in a peat bog where being carved. The history here is intriguing and when I get home I want to try and find out more about it. In the early 19C migrant workers from Yugoslavia came to New Zealand to work extracting gum (resin) from the old Kauri trees. They had to dig down into the peat bog in order to do this, it must have been terrible work. In age before synthetics, the gum was in great demand for polishes and paints, at one time it was worth almost as much as gold. There is an area in the north where their descendants have settled and continue to live as farmers. They are called the Dalmations, it explains why I saw a sign in what I thought looked like Polish as we travelled here yesterday.
The scenery was a surprise, I expected the north to be more of a sand-spit but it was rolling countryside with cattle stations. The amazing thing is that the soil is almost pure sand, yet able to support grasses for pasture and trees and shrubs. The coastal scenery was beautiful, long sweeping arcs of beaches, on the eastern shores white, silica sand and on the western side golden ochre sand. We stopped at Cape Reinga, right at the northern most tip and watched as the Pacific Ocean collided with the Tasman sea, the waters swirling together in beautifully coloured and sandy sweeps and pools.
The trip ended with the return journey driving the length of 90 mile beach. We saw how human endeavour had planted hundreds of thousands of trees to form natural boundaries and create dunes to prevent the strong prevailing westerlies from blowing sand completely over the peninsular, and retaining it for agriculture. It is a continuing battle as these are being eroded and cut back.
I'm not sure about Jeremy Clarkson, evidently he was on TV this morning saying that he has finished filming here, but he likes it so he might stay on a while. As we left the beach this afternoon a few local Maoris were holding a demonstration, but their argument is with the local council for they way that the correct channels were not used to obtain permission, rather than with the BBC