February 7 to 15

Day 67 – Feb. 7 – Otaki to Levin

It wasn’t our best night, for the ground was hard on our butt and hip bones, but it beat the first night in the tent, where the wind nearly blew us into the next county. Flying over the campground was a U.S. flag with a difference: right in the middle of it was a picture of Elvis! That would’ve been a crime in the U.S., I’m sure

Seems like nobody here wears real shoes. I’ve seen mostly hiking boots in the mountains, and on the coastal towns people wear either flop shoes (they call ‘em jandals), sandals (with a strap around your heel), or they’re barefooted. Walking down the main street on the cement sidewalks, into restaurants and retail shops, in bare feet. Must have soles like iron. Podiatrists must have offices around every corner.

On the way to Levin, we went through the town of Foxton Beach. Off the highway, dominating the skyline, was a HUGE windmill. What in the world is THAT doing there, we thought? Drove down to investigate. Turns out some guy who’s about 90 now, born in Holland, wanted to bring a bit of Holland to NZ. So he got hold of a design for a windmill, found a carpenter who’d build it for him, got the townspeople fired up about the idea, raised a bunch of money, moved the town hall off the property he wanted for the windmill, and spent several years building it. It’s a remarkable masterpiece in wood, full of weird angles. It’s actually used to grind grain, and they turn out many bags of it every day. The old man responsible for its creation lives for the windmill, and he was there. Spry as a billy goat, he bounded up the steps of the windmill, all 3 stories of it, faster than either of us could ever do it, explaining all the way the history and workings of it. Wish we’d needed some flour, but we donated money instead.

A few miles away was a long, flat beach with most of the town there, engaged in some activity or other. No conventional cars are allowed (they get stuck in the sand), so there were the quad bikes pulling little trailers filled with their fishing and picnic gear; people fishing, kayaking, jogging, sunbathing, flying kites, clamming, driving jet skis around in ever-decreasing circles, boats pulling inner tubes or skiers, motorcycles racing over the dunes. Gulls were everywhere. They run out into the surf until it’s a few inches deep, pick up some sort of shell, then fly about 50 feet into the air and drop it. It doesn’t usually break, so they swoop down, pick it up, fly back up and drop it again. Plop, plop, plop, shells were falling all around us. We never saw a single gull ever eat anything, but they must occasionally be successful, else they’d give up this pursuit as a waste of time or starve to death.

After dinner we drove to Adrian and Maria’s house for a ‘glass of juice’. Adrian met us at the door and we talked outside for about 10 minutes. When we went in, Maria was glued to the tv watching the Sevens rugby game, and we hated to interrupt her, so engrossed she was. Her grandfather kicked the very first goal for NZ to win … what? The first Sevens or something big… in 1886 or some far-off year. So rugby is in her blood.

Spread out before us, our bellies already bloated from a delicious Thai dinner, was a huge plate filled with sliced strawberries, dried mangoes and apricots, some rice cakes, candied ginger, potato chips, and 4 HUGE glasses of OJ. Undaunted, we tore into the goodies, full bellies be damned.

Ignorant of the rules and strategy of rugby, and educated along the way by Adrian’s commentary, we really got into the game, learning the names of all the players, and starting to care about which team won. When the 20 minutes, the length of a game, counted down to zero, NZ had won the game. However, even though the clock had run out, something needed to happen to actually end the game – a penalty, running or kicking the ball out of bounds, or something. But instead, a NZ player, who shall go down in history for the goof of his career, passed it to one of his teammates. Unfortunately for this poor sod, England (the opponent) intercepted the ball and ran for a goal, to win the game. We sat there in screaming, fist-pounding, bouncing-off-the-couch incredulity at this unexpected turn of events, so sure – as was nearly every fan in the Wellington stands – that NZ had already won. I’m sure the post-game hijinks were a bit subdued in the pubs that night, and I feel sorry for any Brit fan that night, not to mention the guy who passed the ball.

Day 68 – Feb. 8 – Levin layover day

After breakfast in our room, we headed for the Doigs’ house again, where we met up with Bill and Joan Matson. Bill is the former deputy Secretary of Defense for NZ. I wonder what he did, since NZ doesn’t have much of a military. Guess he determined whether one of the American wars was worth sending NZ’s finest into. Bill, Adrian, Joe and I played 18 holes at the Levin course, while Joan and Maria stayed at home and yakked. They were sitting on the 18th green when we came up and they got to see me lose my tee ball, hit one into the bunker, knock it into the next bunker, and in general have the worst hole of the day. Oh, well. Bill invited us to come to Wakanae tomorrow and play with him, but turned out the club was having some sort of do and we wouldn’t be able to get on the course.

After golf the Doigs invited us over for ‘tea’. I had to ask what ‘tea’ meant – was it a cup of tea and a cookie, heavy hors d’oeuvres, or dinner? It’s a light dinner, Adrian told me. But dinner was anything but light, in terms of the number of items on the menu. She’d just about cleaned out her garden and served up several courses of homemade zucchini muffins, some small, light pancake-y things that you eat cold with butter and jam, beans, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, and a salad chucky full of fresh-as-can-be veggies. All that was followed by the sweetest, reddest, juiciest strawberries, topped off with ice cream. One of the best meals we’ve eaten on our whole trip.

The owners of the motel-o-the-day raise birds. They have an ‘aviary’ behind their 6 units that Graeme, the owner, built for his little brood. In it are some of the most colorful birds in the world. One species has a body sectioned off into different bright colors – purple, red, orange, yellow, blue-green. Looks like a picture of a cow that’s been drawn to show the different cuts of meat, with each one in a different color. There are also about a dozen tiny Japanese quail, fully grown about the size of a fist.

Yesterday they found a baby bird that the parents had abandoned, near death, shivering with cold, and took it in in the morning and fed it by hand, put it under a heat lamp to warm it up. By evening it was eating ravenously, hopping around, trying to fly, and obviously going to make it. The little thing’s parents had 3 other chicks that they were taking good care of, and I guess this was one that fell into Darwin’s list, wasn’t fit enough, or maybe it was one too many mouths to feed. It will now make it, thanks to June’s devoted mothering. We learned all this while we sat for a couple of hours talking with the very nice owners, June and Graeme Brown, rocking on their back patio. Graeme was a 3-4 handicap golfer until recent back troubles made him quit the game, so we had a lot of fun swapping golf stories.

Day 69 – Feb. 9 – Levin to Hawera

While we’re getting so much rain here that the rivers are flooding, Queensland in Australia is having some of the worst fires in history, due to the drought. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and hundreds of people have been burned to death. The fires travel so fast they didn’t have enough time to get in the car and drive out the driveway before they were engulfed in the racing flames. Cars are just exploding when the heat gets to them. Houses go up in flames before the fires get to them, so hot is the air being pushed along in the hurricane winds the fires generate. When we got to the town of Wanganui, we noticed that the sky was streaked with ash from the fires in Australia.

The history of NZ is rife with stories of the Maori wars. It seems that whenever Europeans, or any other advanced culture, goes into the area of a less-advanced population that has been established for some time, the more advanced people feel they have the right to take whatever they find in the ‘new land’. Food, animals, land, regardless of the original people’s claims to them. To wit, the early American colonists’ treatment of the native American people.

The same with the Maoris, who had discovered and populated NZ in the 1200’s, had created towns all over the place, established sacred places, and were firmly entrenched. But along came the Europeans, who saw huge kauri trees, which they promptly cut down nearly to the last tree and shipped the lumber all over the world, leaving behind barren hillsides open to erosion. They discovered gold in the interior and built roads and railroads to haul it out, leaving behind huge holes in the ground, ghost towns that are being re-claimed by nature, if they’re in a moist micro-climate, or are rotting in the dry deserts if in a hot, dry micro-clime.

Few remnants of the Maori wars are still visible, but as we traveled from Levin to Hawera, along the coast, we spied a tiny sign that read ‘Historic blockhouse’. We always slam on the brakes at every ‘hysterical marker’, as we call ‘em, so we headed off into a turnip field to see what in the world a blockhouse was. Over 100 years ago, the Maoris held sway over this very beautiful piece of coastline, until the Europeans decided it was a good place, too, and moved in. The Maoris didn’t like it, so they tried to run them out, and you know how that always goes: the guys with the guns always win.

Until the Europeans killed enough Maoris to make them realize they couldn’t win and so moved on down the coast, the Europeans built a number of ‘blockhouses’ to protect themselves. They were just rectangular buildings, 20 x 40 feet in this case, with thick walls filled with clay and straw and dirt floors. In the walls were little holes that the white guys could poke their rifles through to shoot at the ‘bleck bestids’. This blockhouse is one of very few that survive, and that’s because the locals banded together and re-built it, put pictures of the European families who huddled together in the blockhouse when the Maoris went on the rampage. It sits in the middle of a turnip field over which seemingly millions of little white butterflies bounced from turnip leaf to turnip leaf, never seeming to do anything except sit on it for a few seconds, before flitting off to the next leaf.

One of the larger towns is Wanganui (nui in Maori means big, so it’s a big Wanga, whatever a Wanga is). The river by the same name is one of only 2 navigable rivers in all of the North Island, and it hits the Tasman Sea at Wanganui. It looks like a snake on the map, and begins in the interior at the town of Taumaranui (a big taumara), where we’re headed in a couple of days. A one-lane road runs along the river for a number of miles, until it peters out, and we followed it for many miles until we got bored because everything started to look the same.

At the edge of town is a cemetery, and I think the entire Maori population of Wanganui was there to bury one of their own. The deceased must have been popular, a big shot, or rich, for the cemetery was standing-room only, and cars were parked helter-skelter all over the street for blocks. We were curious to know who was the center of attention, but we didn’t ask.

One of the original paddle-wheel steamboats that plied the river up to the gold fields has been restored and was sitting at the end of the wharf. Four of the men who work on it were sitting just inside the warehouse next to the pier, eating McDonald’s hamburgers off of a pallet. I asked what their jobs were and talked to my very first ever stoker, skipper of a paddlewheel steamer, and 2 deckhands.

Learned today that NZ raised its minimum wage to $12 an hour, and gas is $3.40 a gallon.

On the map Patea looked like it would be a lovely spot, right at the mouth of a river with a long beach on either side of its mouth. But when we got there, we found a dying, poverty-stricken, run-down, dirty, tiny town. The last few hundred yards along the river, before it dumps its load into the ocean, the sand is black, and there are steep bluffs that drop precipitously into the river. Perched on the top of the bluff, where the millionaires' homes in the US would be, is an abandoned ‘freezerworks’, which is another name for a ‘slaughterhouse’. It was a huge factory, built in 1894 and has been sitting there rotting and rusting and falling apart for the past 30 years. It started out with the capacity to kill and skin 10 sheep a day, but as they got smarter about how to kill en masse, the 800 people who worked there were able to run 600,000 unfortunate cattle, sheep, and pigs a year through there.

Today the entire area is fenced off with signs that say ‘Hazardous Area, Keep Out’, and an entire herd of cattle was inside the fence, calmly munching grass, until we walked up to take a picture of the incongruity of it all and they came over to see who we were. I wonder what could be hazardous around a slaughterhouse (did it get into the meat???), and I have to wonder if the air around that cluster of buildings, through which the cows wander, still reverberates with the screams of the millions of animals that died there. I don’t think I’d want to eat the meat of the Patea cows.

The slaughterhouse was the low point of Patea, an already sad spot on this otherwise lovely island.

Patea does have a golf course, however. It’s fenced, as many are, but this fence is to keep the sheep (i.e., fairway mowers) in. All over the fairways roamed bleating, pooping sheep, with more fences around the greens to keep their cloven hooves from poking holes in them. Joe grabbed his wedge, hopped the fence, and posed for a photo op with the sheep in the background. As we were recording this comical scene, in the rain, a tiny car with a surfboard taking up most of the car's interior pulled up, a guy with matted hair and surfing pants hopped out, and snapped away, too. ‘Never see sights like this in Alaska,’ he said. He was from Homer, Alaska, hunting for the perfect wave in this hemisphere, since it’s winter up there now.

By the time we pulled into Hawera, we had spent most of the day on one-lane, curvy, hilly, gravel roads, hardly ever seeing another car. We don’t make many miles in a day, but we’re having the kinds of adventures that most tourists, who stick to the tourist spots, don’t have. We love it! And at the end of the day we found a 4+ star motel with a great room and had a delicious Indian dinner.

Day 70 – Feb. 10 – Hawera to Taumaranui

It POURED today. First rain we’ve seen in a month. We spent the entire day, 8 hours, driving in it. The whole purpose of coming this way, around the Egmont peninsula, is to see a perfect volcano. It’s supposedly like Kilamanjaro, perfectly symmetrical, with snow on the top (although I hear Kilamanjaro’s snow is gone now). But the clouds were right on the ground all day, dumping rain, and we never saw a sign of the mountain. The road around the peninsula hugs the coastline the whole way, so we saw the surf crashing on the rocks for hours. And guess who we saw at one of the surfing beaches, trying to find the perfect wave - you're right - Homer, Alaska!

We’re headed for a tiny town that has a golf course that somebody called ‘a gem’. The road was one of the most torturous yet, curving continuously, up and down, sometimes gravel, sometimes ‘sealed’, as they call their pavement. The rain had loosened the soil, so rocks had fallen down on the road in a lot of places, often on curves, so we had to be careful to dodge them, as well as oncoming cars on the very narrow road. The road had washed completely away in places, but long enough in the past that the road crews had been out to put up barricades.

This is one deserted road from Hawera to Taumaranui. We rarely saw another car, and a house was even more scarce. This is called "The Forgotten Highway", and for good reason. Nobody comes here. It really is the ‘wop-wops’, as Kiwis call the ‘sticks’. But it is lovely country, beautiful hills, pretty rivers, trees hanging over the road making a canopy overhead. Sheep and cattle as always grazing on the hillsides.

Families here who’ve lived on the land for generations have their own cemeteries, and the headstones dot the landscape near the family homesteads.

After about 6 hours of winding around these hills, in pouring rain the entire time, I started feeling the effects, so Joe had to drive really slowly for the rest of the way so I didn’t toss my cookies. By the time we finally pulled into Taumaranui, I was REALLY ready to get out of that car! After the pain of getting here, this golf course better be worth the agony of getting here!

We grabbed the first motel we saw in Taumaranui, for our guide book said there were only a couple of places to stay and this one had a vacancy. Next door were 2 British couples riding their Harleys through the countryside, so we chewed the fat with them for an hour or so. Then we toured the town on foot (by now the rain had finally stopped), which took about 15 minutes. For dinner Joe found some Chinese take-away, and brought it back to the room (looked to me as if it had been sitting under the heat lamp since 1989), and I fixed myself a PB&J, with some dill pickles and a plum - yum! Washed this gourmet delight down with L&P lemonade, whose label says "World famous in New Zealand, since a long time ago".

Day 71 – Feb. 11 –Taumaranui to Waitomo Glowworm Caves

Kiwis seem to have an aversion to multi-syllable words. They shorten them to one or two syllables, like avo, cauli, brocci, veges (what we call veggies), mossy (mosquito). I bring this up because we had mossies in our room last night, and have the welts to prove it.

Well, it was raining again when we got up, so we expected that we might have driven all this way for naught. Drove out to the course anyway, just to see it, see if we could play if it did quit raining, and, besides, we didn’t have any other plans. Found out there was a tournament going on and we wouldn’t be able to tee off for 3 hours. That was fine with us, we’d hang around, since we’d come so far. I chipped and putted, putted and chipped, Joe read his book, and we killed 3 hours. By the time we teed off, by ourselves yet again, it had quit raining.

The course was as good as our friend had said. By NZ standards, that is. (I shot 76, 3 over par, from the men’s tees, Joe had 96.) It had a good layout, but, like almost every course we’ve played, with a few exceptions, it, too, is maintained by a crew of two, and members volunteer their time and equipment to keep it in the shape it is in. People come in and cook in the kitchen, or bring stuff from home to feed the golfers. Where is the Health Department???

After golf, it was on to the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, a place we missed on the way south through the middle of the North Island. Listened to more of ‘The Bone Garden’ book on tape. It’s getting really interesting now, and we can’t wait to find out more. Interestingly, since arriving I've read "Bone People", "The Bone Collector", and now we’re listening to another bony book. What’s the deal I have going with bones???

Several centuries ago, some Maori youngsters were floating down a river on some flax stems and it disappeared into the mouth of a huge cave. Inside were thousands of tiny dots of light on the ceilings. From then on, it was part of the Maori legends, and only Maori ventured into the cave. Then, in the 1850’s an enterprising Maori told his secret to a European and the ‘pakeha’ (Maori word for European) convinced the Maori to go into business with him showing it to other pakeha for money. Ever since tourists have been coming here by the boatload.

Now there is an old hotel perched up on the hill above the cave entrance, with a great view of the hilly farmland surrounding it. We checked in and were given a room with French doors that opened onto our own private terrace that had steps down to the parking lot. After dinner we sat out there and enjoyed the sunset, leaving the doors open so the breeze could cool the room. Today was a really hot, humid day, unusual for us. Little did we know that things besides breezes wafted into our room, and by the time we came in for the night, we were surrounded by literally hundreds of huge flying creatures. They were like huge mossies, and were all over the ceiling, walls, floor, bed, table, chairs, suitcases - anywhere there was a surface in any orientation – horizontal, vertical, whatever. We spent the next hour swatting them with anything we could grab – newspaper, magazines, towels. They piled up on the floor and Joe got down on his hands and knees, flicking them with a credit card onto towels so he could toss them into the toilet. Of course, we didn’t get ‘em all, so we spent the night slapping away, the next day scratching.

Day 72 – Feb. 12 – Waitomo Caves to Morrinsville

Hopped onto the 10 am tour of the cave, and spent the next hour oohing and aahing over beautiful stalactites and stalagmites and the thousands of tiny larva on the ceilings of the cave that emit light to help them feed on insects. Reminded me of the song Mother used to sing to us as children: "Glow, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer, …" Until now I never knew what a glowworm was. What kind of marketing ploy has American mothers in the 1940’s singing about NZ moth larva to their children???

Then we were off to Hamilton, to a course known as St. Andrews of NZ, for a round of golf in the humidest weather we’ve encountered yet. Felt like we were wading through tepid water. Just as we finished, the bottom dropped out of the black skies that had been threatening us all day, and treated us to a torrential downpour of Biblical proportions. We just pulled into a motel and holed up for the night.

Day 73 – Feb. 13 – Morrinsville to Waihi

We’re now on our way to the east coast of the North Island, cutting diagonally across the center of the island as we make our way back to Auckland, intersecting the route we took on the way south. Stopped off at the tiny town of Te Aroha for lunch, and were prevented from parking in the space we’d chosen by somebody waving us off, saying, "We’re filming a movie and we need to keep this space free." Well, here’s our chance to see some movie stars, we thought, so we parked across the street and walked back to where a small crowd was milling around, outside the butcher shop.

Found out that a German film company was filming some segments of a movie that will be shown on German television in a few months. About an American woman and a Kiwi who fall in love, entitled "Longing for New Zealand". When I asked one of the Kiwi women who was working in some official capacity who the stars of the movie were, she had to run back to her truck, grab a piece of paper, and look up their names. Susan Anbeh and Christian Poggenkamp (if my memory serves me, which isn’t very often these days). They did the same take over and over, though I don’t know what they didn’t like about each one. They all looked the same to me, but that’s why I’m not a director.

Further down the road was a little roadside park beside a river, and we got out to stretch our legs. As we were admiring the river, we noticed a footbridge across it and decided to go see what was over there. That led to some derelict concrete foundations of something that had once been huge, but now was in ruins. A sign explained that over 100 years ago they discovered gold in this area and they built many enormous buildings to separate the gold from the rock in which it was embedded. They spoke of using cyanide or some such poisonous chemical used in the smelting process. I had to wonder how much of that stuff is still lying around, in the rocks, the soil, the water, and plants. There were pictures of the area during the smelter’s heyday, and there wasn’t a tree or bush to be seen, just tin roofs for acres, and rocks, and the stream, lovely today but filled then with the discharge of this most polluting of all processes. Trails led up, up, up to where the many levels of the buildings had once stood, and where now sat only rusting metal rods, cement platforms, huge, cement-lined holes in the ground, rotting iron pipes 3 feet in diameter, and all manner of debris left behind when the factory was abandoned 60 years ago. From 30 feet in the air, you’d never know it hadn’t always been covered with the thick layer of vegetation that hides most of what remains.

Tunnels with narrow-gauge rails honeycomb the area, and we walked down some of the rails, one foot on each, until we came to one of the tunnels. Following it, we came to a curve, and beyond it was total darkness. In the US there would be a gate there to keep people out, or a sign warning them not to go further without a light, or something that indicated that it was safe to go further or not recommended to do so. But we had no idea whether to go further and, if we did, what we’d find, how long it would be pitch-black, whether we’d hit a wall of rock or what. We started down it, feeling our way along with our hands on one side of the tunnel wall and one foot on one of the rails. It was blacker than the insides of a whale's belly. But it got really spooky after a few minutes and we turned around. Fortunately for us, some people came along right then who had a flashlight with them, and we followed them the 50 or so yards (which doesn’t sound like much until you do it in total darkness as we did) to the far side.

The substantial town of Waihi is lined with roadside stands selling fresh corn, watermelon, blueberries, avocadoes, apricots, and tomatoes. Joe and I are both suckers for fresh corn, so we stopped and bought some ears, then enough fresh veggies to make a REAL salad (they don’t have big green salads here), got some salad dressing, butter for the corn, and steaks at the grocery store, found a motel with a BBQ outside, and cooked the first home-made meal of our trip. It was DELICIOUS!!

Before checking in we played their golf course, a good track with huge greens. We’re averaging playing golf about once every 3 days, a good way to break up constant sight-seeing.

Day 74 – Feb. 14 – Waihi layover day

Learned that Tiger Woods’ son, Charlie, was born today or yesterday.

Had the most wunnerful breakfast of watermelon, apricots, and blueberries on yogurt. Drove down to the beach and happened upon a surf boat competition. About a dozen boats, about 10 feet long, with pontoons and outboard motors, like Zodiacs, stand about waist-deep in the water, being held by somebody. A driver and an assistant for each boat stand at the edge of the surf, ready to run. When they shoot the starter’s pistol, each pair runs to his boat, hops in – one in the front and one in the back -, starts the engine, and heads straight out into the waves. The nose of the boat rises up the crest of the 4-foot waves, and, if they’re lucky, they go down the other side. At one point, they’re nearly vertical. Some boats get past vertical, since the wind is blowing on-shore, and they end up flipping over. They race around a big rectangle, marked by buoys, and, turning and sliding around the buoy nearest land, come nearly onto the beach. After 4 laps, they head straight for shore at full speed. When the boat runs onto the sand, and the prop flips out of the water, the guy in front of the boat flies out of the boat and runs full-tilt to the finish line. First one there wins, of course. A t-shirt or something.

Ate the remnants of last night’s dinner in the form of fajitas, corn on the cob, another salad. Yummmmm! Then made a tour of Waihi town. Nobody was on the streets except 4 Maoris, who stood on the sidewalk outside a bar. As we got up to them, one of them looked at me, smiled big, and said, "You’re safe, we’re Maoris." "I never thought we weren’t safe," I replied with a smile to match his.

On a hill defining the skyline of this town sits a huge cement ‘pumphouse’, no longer in operation. Over a century ago gold was discovered here and many mines were dug into the hill. At some point it was decided that it would be more profitable to just scrape the top off the mountain to get at the gold, so they started digging. Soon they encountered ground water that filled the hole, so they built an enormous pumphouse to siphon the water out of the hole. It’s still standing there, gutted for anything of value and full of holes, a monumental concrete testimony to man’s love of the glittery stuff. What used to be called ‘Martha’s Hill’ had to be renamed ‘Martha’s Mine’ (I think a better name would be 'Martha's Hole'). When we got to the top of the hill, we peered down into the bowels of the earth, a monstrous, gaping, iron-colored hole about a quarter-mile deep, with the world’s biggest earth-moving equipment looking like toys at the bottom of it.

Walking back into town in the near-dark, we were nearly bowled over by a guy staggering down the sidewalk in our direction. "Good evening," Joe said to him. He got about 30 feet past us, turned around, and said, "What kind of evening did you say? GOOD evening?" I was expecting him to haul off and slug Joe, but he came back to us and entertained us with a very friendly, surprisingly coherent conversation. Kevin MacPherson had worked the mine as an iron worker, and now lived in ‘the bush’ where he traps possums for their fur. A real ‘mountain man’, if he lived in the US West.

Day 75 – Feb. 15 – Waihi to Whangamata

Cicadas are everywhere on both islands. They live in the trees, and make noises like crickets by rubbing their back legs together. So everywhere we go, there is a loud buzzing sound that never seems to stop. Reminds me of life as a child in Florida before all the crickets were killed off by DDT or some such.

We’re officially on the Coromandel Peninsula now, the last bit of New Zealand we will see before heading back to Auckland and beginning the trip home. We began the leg by playing driving all of 30 miles to the town of Whangamata (rhymes with fondle-my-tie). It was a lovely day and we headed right for the golf course. They were having a tournament, so there were actually a lot of cars in the parking lot. They put us with a couple named Frank and Rosalie O’Neil, who live in town. He is 9 months older than I am, and she is about my age, too. He grew up in Scotland and went hitchhiking around the world in 1964. When he got to NZ, he stopped and never went home. Married a NZ gal and went into the insurance and investment business. He eventually bought the top of a mountain at the edge of town, developed it with lovely homes, picked the best site for himself, with a stupendous view of the bay and beach and islands, and says they’ll remove him feet first from his home.

After we played golf, we followed them back to their home, and sat on their patio with that million-dollar view behind them, drinking orange juice and yakking. They were meeting people for dinner and we left to head north – so we thought. But we hadn’t figured out what our next step was, and when we looked at the map, we realized our best plan was to spend the night here. We got a room in a motel, that had 2 bedrooms, a huge kitchen, living room and monstrous bath, all for $65US. Even had a full-sized refrigerator, the first we’ve ever seen in NZ motels.

Asked the motel owner for a recommendation on places to eat, and he said the best place in town is Oceana’s. "I’ll bet anything Frank and Rosalie are going there, too," I said, but we decided that we shouldn’t really let the possibility stop us from having a good meal. Our options were pizza and Chinese take-away. Sure enough, 15 minutes after we sat down, in they came!! Sat at the next table with 3 friends, and we bantered back and forth a few times during the evening, then we said our final good-byes and headed back to our home-for-a-night.