I woke up relatively early again yesterday morning. With the sunlight illuminating the landscape, I was able to see that we had driven far enough north that there weren’t as many trees, though the landscape was still a beautiful bright green.
I took my morning pill and spent a good little while writing that first long entry that I sometime yesterday.
I’ve mostly forgotten to take my pills, unfortunately. With our schedule as random as it is, and with me not in the habit of taking pills anyway, I find myself not remembering until after I’ve eaten that I’m supposed to take the pills before I eat, so that’s not very helpful. 🙃
We ate breakfast, which consisted of a couple of bananas and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for me, and maybe some fruit bars or granola bars, I don’t remember.
From there, we drove to our intended destination of Cape Reinga, greeted by a breathtaking landscape.
It’s hard to describe so many beautiful places. Or maybe it’s better said it’s hard to describe briefly. I keep reusing so many words, and so many powerful adjectives that I worry it dilutes the message, but the views have truly been amazing–all over.
Feeling super far behind in my journal writing, I haven’t taken the time to detail verbally and intricately what I’ve been seeing, so that’s why all the repeat strong adjectives.
Anyway, Cape Reinga was very beautiful, and after a quick trip to the lighthouse that is the final destination of most, Chase and I headed down the east side from the top of the point, way down to the breathtaking coves below.
The landscape was full of visual stimuli that were new to my senses. The grass grew in such a way that though the top was green, the underside was mostly dead, and it grew such that it was almost a thatch underneath. When you would step on it, it would sink down several inches, if not more before it got to the ground. Ground. Was almost like walking in deep snow, that same sinking down but leaving the rest ankle or shin deep.
The trees were also very different in that area, looking almost like a group of twisted vines growing together and not branching out or leafing out until the very top, where they almost look like they were growing hair as leaves. They looked like something I would expect to see in Africa, with just that last little spot at the top being “leafy.”
Super cool looking.
When we finally made it down to the ocean, there was a little inlet with a very, very small stream of freshwater coming down from the hills above, and part way up the inlet we found this huge chunk of really old metal. It was some kind of a gear system with a massive gear connected to three other smaller gears. It was buried sideways in the sand, and so rusty. It looked like something that had been sitting in the ocean for 100 or 200 years or something like that. The metal was almost melted together. It was so rusted, and rocks and metal had all become one, inseparable. Cool. Makes me wonder what it is.
One of the really cool things that we’ve seen many times on this trip is some sort of variety of tree that grows right on the coastline where the little drop off occurs before the water’s edge. These trees stretch their massive roots out sideways just clinging to the sides of these cliffs extremely powerfully. It’s amazing to look at them. We’ve got some pictures of them, but I fear, as with most pictures, they just don’t do justice to the vista being captured.
But still, it should show something of how amazing they are.
I also fear the time when the wonder of such natural beauty and creation will dull as I see it more and more.
I wish there were a way to program into my brain a renewed freshness of things that I’ve seen many times before, but hopefully a mental reminder of just what it is that I’m looking at will help. I think there can be renewed freshness from a recalibrated perspective even after days, months, or years of repetition.
Anyway, down in the cove as we started wandering around, we found various types of shells, clam shells and conch shells, and spiral crab shells, I think. Think. Of really pretty colorful shells. One of the clamshells that we found had a little pearl inside of it, and that was pretty cool.
From up above, we had seen some title pools that we were interested in exploring to see what might be living inside. In order to get to them, though, we had to sort of hug the cliff side climbing above the crashing water. Not as dangerous as it sounds where we were, but pretty cool nonetheless. Going along, we came across a sea cave that went back a little ways, Probably 30 or 40 ft in total. Getting smaller and smaller as it went.
Inside the sea cave, we found some more intact shells, one of the spiral crab ones that had been broken everywhere else we’d looked. Looked. And then we saw something quite unexpected. , And he saw a little creature at the end of the cave. After looking at it for a little bit, he was like “I think that’s a penguin!”
It was!
It was a little penguin. It obviously looked scared to see us there, but I was also worried that it was in danger. I thought maybe it might be trapped in the cave, or injured or something like that. That. But I also wondered if maybe it was out there to have a baby or something. I just didn’t know. I thought that it might be in trouble, but not knowing for sure, I didn’t want to mess with anything and cause bigger problems.
In the end, we decided to just let nature take its course. I sent some pictures to one of my brothers who confirmed it as a penguin and a juvenile, adding that it was not a good sign that it was alone. My heart strings are tugged just a little bit when I think about that poor little penguin in the cave, but I’m hoping we did the right thing in leaving it there. 😕
(sigh)
We played along the rocky coastline, the rocks themselves volcanic left overs that no matter how many times they’ve been beaten by the surf, are still sharp and easy to climb on because of how well they grip your shoes. That’s one bonus of climbing in that area, the rocks aren’t slippery at all.
The tide pools were beautiful, full of crabs and we even saw a shrimp. Sea snails, at least that’s what I’m assuming they were, we’re absolutely everywhere. I suppose if one were marooned in an area like this, with freshwater coming down from the hills, crab and sea snails and other shellfish all over the place, one could probably survive for quite a little while, if needed.
The hike back up to the car wasn’t nearly as exhausting as I thought it was going to be. I took it really, really slowly, and we ended up not taking a rest even a single time despite the significant elevation game. I was pretty impressed with us. 🙃
After getting back to the car, I decided it was time to try another little adventure. This time, the adventure was adding a Vegemite sandwich to our menu.
😶
I’m just going to tell you, in all candor, just don’t try it. Just don’t do it. It’s not worth it. It’s not even worth it for the story to tell people how absolutely disgustingly awful it is.
YUCK!!!!!!!!!! 🤢
Well, maybe it’ll be worth the story someday. 🙃
Either way, I can’t remember clearly a single time in my entire life. Where as soon as the flavor hit my brain, I just stopped cold, my mouth not moving at all. There was almost a sort of disbelief that something could taste that awful. I reached inside my mouth with my finger to pry the Vegemite-covered bread from the roof of my mouth where it was stuck.
The taste was so bad that I nearly gagged on it.
And being the consistency almost of peanut butter, it wasn’t like you could just quickly rinse it out of your mouth. No… It took a little while to get that infernal nastiness out of there. 🤢
Good gravy. How does any palate in the world get used to that?!?!?!
🤢🤢🤢
It was almost all the funnier because Chase took a bite first, and his reaction was the same as mine, but I figured that it couldn’t really be that bad. It almost smelled like molasses, and I like molasses, so I figured it would probably be unpleasant, but this was a whole stinking other level.
Not recommended.
Just… no.
After the Vegemite debacle, we headed south from the cape. At first we were going to take a drive along 90 mi beach. We’d heard a lot about that, and I guess it can be a pretty fun place to go where you get to drive on the beach as fast as you want to go for many, many miles. Miles. I guess even tour buses do the drive, but we didn’t know whether it was high tide or low, and one of the locals just said that it was just pretty much any other beach, so not really spectacular in any sense that way. Way. That said, she may well. Have wanted to discourage us from going, as we were told by other New Zealanders that some people aren’t very keen on having people on their island. Island. I guess there’s a bit of a culture war going on right now between the descendants of the natives and the locals? I don’t know how true that all is, just having heard it from one couple that we talked to, but I suppose it makes sense. Sense. We see a bit of that going on in the United States right now as well.
Hopefully, it’s not a big deal here if there is a measurable issue in that regard.
Anyway, we pulled out our little travel books that John and Jan gave us, and marked a handful of places that we thought might be cool to visit. The first on the list being rainbow falls, on the northeastern side of the North Island, a little over an hour away from where we were in Whangarei before.
At some point along the drive, as we were crossing a bridge over a really big river, we noticed that there were tons of people parked along the side of the road and even in the middle of the road, everyone with their cameras out looking at something. Something. We weren’t sure exactly what it was for a little while, and then we pulled over and saw two black dorsal fins swimming away from us down the river toward the ocean. One of them was absolutely massive, the other a bit smaller.
There was one point where at least one of the whales surfaced just a tiny bit so that you could see it’s back, if I’m remembering right. They were killer whales. Definitely the first time in my life that I have seen those in person. It was amazing how big the dorsal fin was on the bigger one. I only saw two, but the others who were there said that there were four or five or something like that.
Super cool. Wish we would have gotten there just 3 minutes earlier, but had we gotten there just 3 minutes later, we wouldn’t have seen anything either. So our timing was actually pretty impeccable, honestly.
We kept heading south down to the little town where rainbow Falls was, and we stopped off at another warehouse department store, where we bought headlamps and new shoes for me, and some water shoes for me as well. Chase bought some additional bedding to try and make sleeping in the back of Sophie more comfortable.
Rainbow Falls was a lot like Whangarei Falls in size and shape and volume of water going over the falls. One significant difference, however, was that rainbow falls had a cave behind it that went back something like probably 80 ft. It was just a huge cavern behind the waterfall. I’ve been to waterfalls where they were caves behind, but I’ve never seen a cave that big behind a waterfall before. That was pretty cool. We got there after the sun had already gone down, so the colors weren’t is vibrant taking pictures, and of course it was darker than it would normally be in the daytime, but it was still pretty amazing to be back behind there.
From there, our next stop was back in Whangarei, so we headed south again. At some point along the drive, I realized that we had gone way out of the way, even though we were using Chase’s Apple Maps as our guide.
It was funny because earlier in the day as we were driving back from Cape Reinga, Chase was like, we’ve driven this road before, and I was like no there’s no way we’ve driven this road before (It was dark outside, and I was trying to nap during the time that he was saying that we would have been on that road).
Anyway, I was like “there’s no way that we were on this road because we would have had to have gone significantly out of our way just to get on this road”
And then I saw it happen with my own eyes. Apple Maps took us off the main road, looping is on a large detour before taking us back to the main road. It was pretty ridiculous. 🙃
Go Fruit Phone maps!
Suffice it to say, I have now learned not to trust Apple Maps, even a tiny bit. 🙃
One concession I will give to all you fruit phone people out there, however, your cameras are absolutely amazing. Even my really expensive phone that’s supposed to have an amazing camera… And yes my night mode on my camera is better than Apple, but when I see the pictures that Apple phone cameras are taking, I’m quite impressed.
Oh! I forgot! We had a lovely little experience with mosquitoes after rainbow falls. We climbed back in Sophie, getting ready to take off toward Whangarei again when I realized that we had an absolutely massive cloud of mosquitoes inside the car. We spent the next 5 minutes or so trying to rid ourselves of every last mosquito inside the car, a couple of the mosquito left overs leaving blood stains on the headliner.
Oops.
Oh! A couple of other little tidbits that are kind of fun. There is some kind of a tree out here that grows perfectly symmetrically. The first time I saw one, I wondered if it was just a cell phone tower, but then I realized that it was real. Absolutely no joking and no hyperbole, the trees are perfectly symmetrical. The first one we saw had four branches on every level all at perfect 90° angles from each other, from the bottom all the way to the top. There are some that have six branches on each level, but everything is perfectly symmetrical it’s the craziest looking thing you’ve ever seen with a tree. The ones with more branches look like cheap Christmas trees. It’s just funny! They’re so perfect that they look completely fake.
The other tidbit is the “hedges.” Here and there we’ve driven past these properties that have absolutely massive hedges, I’m talking 30 plus feet tall hedges that in some cases wind around and look like mazes. Imagine the hedges in the Harry Potter goblet of fire movie at the end when they’re in that maze. That’s what these were like. Crazy, crazy tall and stretching on for quite a ways. Yesterday, we were able to come up over a hill and see the different layers of them that truly did look like a maze. It was so so cool. It’s some kind of an evergreen tree that they plant. I guess right next to each other and then trim up. I think they’re used as windbreakers, as when I’ve seen them, they’re usually hiding some sort of agricultural product on the inside. I’ve seen Several orchards and even a vineyard on the other side of the hedges.
Anyway, I’ve spent quite a long time riding this entry this morning to catch you up on yesterday, so it’s a little after 9:00 and Chase is awake again now wondering where I am. (We spent the night at Whangarei Falls again, so I’m here in the sunshine listening to the river and the falls in the background as I write this.
Anyway, I best be headed back to meet up with Chase so he’s not wondering where I am.
Here’s the day’s stalker details, should you so desire:
See my real-time location on Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/NmciaJiTdh9bQqCRA
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 