The Kauri Tree pt1
We all woke early today, as this was to be a full day, we were nearing the end of our trip still wanted to see many things yet.
The company we hired the car from would not allow the car to be driven on any beach, and as we did not have enough time to take a bus trip along “Ninety Mile Beach,” we had to be satisfied with just visiting the beach, and not travelling its length.
When we arrived at the beach, there was good evidence why the car rental company would not allow the car to be taken onto the sand! While it looked firm enough to support the car, the evidence showed that the tide could come and go quickly, as right in front of us, high and dry, was a stingray stranded out of the water, with two seabirds making the most of the situation having a breakfast of fresh stingray.
The beach itself consisted of fine grey sand, which was easy to walk on and very flat, I was tempted to try my luck and drive onto the sand, but then I remembered not only the stingray, but also two photos I saw in the Bus advertisement! The first was of a car stuck in the sand and the tide coming in, the second photo was a little later, it was the same car but it was now half buried in the sand and almost completely underwater! The comment on these photos was “Beware of the tide – it is safer to travel by bus on the beach as we know when to drive and when to leave the beach”
Now I knew why we were forbidden to take the car onto any beach. We stayed a while walking a short distance before returning to the car and progressing north to Houhora, a pretty spot, but unfortunately no café, so we slowly headed back south to the next planned stop, the “Ancient Kauri Kingdom” here we saw trees that were growing for about 1,000 years before they had fallen over in an area that became a swamp, but these trees are truly ancient, you see they fell over about 50,000 years ago and became buried in the swamp which has long since dried up.
One of these huge trees has been used as a stairway in the display centre, with the stairs being cut out inside the tree. This part of the tree had a “Girth” of 11.3m, A Diameter of 3.6m, a height of 5.1m and weighed 50,000kg (50 Tonne). It took more than 500 hours to carve and finish it.
We also saw many fine articles made from this timber, which is over 50,000 years old, I would have liked to buy some blocks of this wood to make something for myself, but I would have had problems bring it into Australia, at least we could have some coffee.
Our next stop of sorts was when we arrived at the Hokianga Ferry, a river crossing that was too long to economically build a bridge, so it used a boat onto which you drove your car or truck for the slow trip to “Hokianga Harbour” and to the town of “Rawene” from there it is a short drive to “Opononi” for lunch, and then to the harbour headland. It was here that we finally saw some clean sand on the WEST coast of New Zealand, there was that much sand here that it explained the absence of sand in all the other west coast beaches.
The rest of the afternoon was taken up driving to our last planned stop for the day, the “Kauri Museum,” unfortunately, by the time we arrived, there was not enough time to see the museum, so, we found some accommodation for the night to return first thing in the morning
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