North by Northeast (The 100th One)

I came up with the title on a jog around Quidi Vidi Lake, and started writing this thing when I was home for Labour Day weekend in 2011, right before I flew to Europe for three months. I'm not sure what I figured this blog would be at the time, but I don't think I planned to have 100 different stories to tell, from worrying about getting stranded in the Spanish desert to jumping out of a plane overlooking the Southern Alps. It's been pretty deadly though – here's to the next hundred insights, bad decisions, and the moments that make a life.

I had a relaxing week back in Tauranga – something like a long exhale of a breath you didn't realize you'd been holding. That's what happens when you're jostled around for six months. When you think of the bleak mid-winter, Tauranga isn't what immediately comes to mind – sunny weather everyday (2,400 sunshine hours a year is pretty impressive), hot enough to wear shorts and eat mandarins fresh from the tree. 

Being the start of the two-week school holidays, the house was a revolving door of grandchildren at Stewart and Jane's, which meant that there was a steady contingent to join in on bike rides around the harbour and squishing your toes in the mud on the flats when the tide gets low.

We also hiked to the top of Mt. Maunganui one afternoon, the bulb of headland at the tip of the harbour, looking out over the Bay of Plenty and the long strip of land that is Matakana Island. I took the same circular ascent when I was here in January, but it's hard to get sick of a view like that.

When you're running out of time, though, it's hard to stay in one place, and before I knew it I was en route to the hub of New Zealand, Auckland. Paeroa, I thought, as we slowed down to pass through an unassuming little town. I know that name – but I've definitely never been here before. Have I? Once we got into town, it became incredibly obvious why I knew this place – if the banners weren't a dead giveaway, the massive L&P bottle serves as a reminder to everyone driving through that when the water from this town gets mixed with lemon flavouring and carbonated, the result is world famous in New Zealand.

My return visit to Auckland was even more fleeting than the first time – just over 12 hours later, I was waiting beneath the Sky Tower on a dull morning, before the city properly woke up. Waiting for a northbound bus to take me to Whan—

Woah, woah, WOAH. Taking a bus? What's the story here, you carefree hitchhiking sellout?

I decided to take a bus for a couple of reasons. First, I was just outside the CBD of Auckland, with the city limits stretching a long way outside of the core. I'd be walking a long time before I'd be able to find a decent spot to thumb down a car, nevermind that I've heard Auckland traffic is the hardest to get a ride from in the country. Add to that the fact that traffic in Northland is scarce ingeneral and that I'm dealing with time constraints, and that the paranoid part of me just knows that if something's going to go wrong, it's going to be this close to the end – well, it was an easy decision to watch the skyscrapers turn to coastline through the InterCity bus window.

If you've been an avid subscriber to “Ryan's New Zealand Place Pronunciations,” you'll know that Whangarei, the biggest city north of Auckland, is not pronounced “wan-gar-ay.” It's “fahn-gar-ay” – a lot of these Maori names used to seem really odd to me, but after watching national weather reports for the last few months, I'm getting better.

Anyway, my stop was just north of Whangarei, in the suburb of Kamo. That's where another friend-of-a-friend, Sonia, calls home, and she invited me to come and spend a few nights exploring this neck of the woods. I don't ever need to be asked twice.

We went out around the town on Friday when I arrived, out to the town basin and marina, a neat little strip of shops and cafes that was pretty busy this afternoon. Just before wining and dining, we drove out alongside the Hatea River and further out to the coast, stopping for hokey pokey ice cream alongside a strip of sand and ocean. There are more than a few of them out this way, in the winterless north.

Sun, beaches, and the feeling that if you pull over and start walking on the sand, you might well be the only person in the entire world. It's a pretty special place up here, and when you consider that the respective latitude in the Northern Hemisphere crosses Africa, you can be guaranteed that it's going to be decent weather, whatever time of the year it might be. Especially if you're from a place like Newfoundland.

So, I had some wide open spaces that I was eager to start exploring – and wouldn't you know it, I ended up behind the wheel of a car once again. The generosity I've encountered in all these pockets of New Zealand has not gone unnoticed – I'm going to have a lot of Christmas cards to send out this year. Up the highway I went, to the Tutukaka Coast, where I was happily cruising along, passing through Matapouri, and just had to stop.

The strip of sand, the rugged rocks along the edges, the clear blue waters – you could spend a full afternoon in any one of these beautiful little nooks and not get bored.

Tropical tranquility – how did I end up waiting so long to get to Northland? Better late than never, I guess. Off with the shoes, they don't belong here.

I drove a bit further (barefoot) and stopped again – drove on, stopped again. Ate an apple, drove on. Had to pee, so I pulled into Kawakawa. I don't know if you've ever seen public toilets advertised on the highway, but then again you've probably never seen toilets like the ones designed by Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. With ceramic, mosaic-like walls and recycled glass bottles, they're worth drinking a lot of water just so you can have a non-weird reason to spend some time looking around.

It was around midday when I pulled into Paihai, a town built on one side of the road and the Bay of Islands opening out on the other. No, not the Bay of Islands that's cut into the west coast of Newfoundland – although the same Captain Cook named both. He must have been running out of ideas by this point – at any rate, here's another beautiful area, feeling like a tight-lipped secret given the lack of people here.

I found a cozy hostel off the main drag, the Mousetrap, with a homey feeling something like the Blue Moon Lodge, a long ways away in Havelock. One guy from Quebec just told me how he came here two weeks ago, and is looking forward to starting WWOOFing, because he's heard good things about it. You have no idea of the great times you've got ahead of you, buddy – or how fast it's going to shoot past you. Believe me.

I took a late afternoon stroll along the beach, stopping every so often to watch the waves wash along the shore, littered with shells of every different shade. The boat pulls out early tomorrow morning, skipping across the harbour to Russell – once the capital of New Zealand (until 1844), and before that the so-called “Hellhole of the Pacific” because of its history as a debauched frontier town for drunken whalers. From there, I've got a few more kilometres to drive along Highway 1. The road that started at Stirling Point in Bluff goes up through Dunedin, Christchurch, Kaikoura, Blenheim, Wellington, Taupo, Rotorua, Auckland, Whangarei – and stops when the Pacific meets the Tasman at Cape Reinga, a tentative UNESCO World Heritage Site at the edge of the world. You can't go a hell of a lot further than this without getting satched.

And, with that, I will have done it. I conquered New Zealand. 

As the sun sets over the Bay of Islands, it's getting ready to rise on another Bay of Islands on the other side of the globe. The trip back to that corner of the world starts in ten days from now – maybe, just maybe, I've saved the best for last.

Cheers,
rb