Day 7: A Week Ago, I Was Complaining How Hot It Was

Haera Mai / Kia Ora ki Aotearoa. (Hello from New Zealand.)

Awoke at 6:20 a.m. this morning, and tried to fall back asleep until 7:00, when I decided adrenaline was going to win. Looked outside, and it appeared to be CLEAR again, although it wasn’t very light yet and I couldn’t be sure. I completed the morning routine, and opened the room drapes around 8:00 a.m. to SUNSHINE! Woo-hoo; a second day of sun – maybe there is something to be said for clean living!

I ate my breakfast, a mixed berry Danish roll that I had picked up last night at New World market. It was OK, but I won’t be sending away for any compared to my usual morning Harner’s treat. I finished packing, and went out to load the bike around 8:40 a.m.

It was raining.

I swapped the electric jacket liner for the rain gear, and set off south for Rotorua, a city with many active thermal features (geysers, hot vents, mud pools, etc.) at 9:00 – my earliest departure yet. I was about 25 km north of Auckland, so I wound up commuting through the city at the end of rush hour. Ah, congested, multi-lane freeways with the smell of diesel fumes in the air – I felt at home.

By 9:45, I was on the south side of the Auckland bridge. The rain had turned into a mist, and traffic began easing. (I had to pass up a nice picture of Auckland City as I neared the bridge. One of the problems with touring on a motorcycle is that if you’re riding along, and see a nice photo op, unless you’re at a point where you can pull to the side of the road, stop, get one glove off, snap the picture, then get the glove back on and rejoin traffic, you don’t get the photo. “Candid” photo ops are much more possible in a car.)

I’m also trying to balance riding a lot of fun, twisty roads (which are slower than the direct routes) with the desire to see certain sights (which require time you don’t have if you’re always riding the scenic routes). So I decided to bypass the scenery and beaches of the Coromandel area and peninsula (the beaches would be empty in the rain at 54 degrees F anyway), and headed straight for Rotorua on SH1. SH1 was comfortable and familiar – few curves, 100 kph (kilometers per hour, which is 62.5 mph for the English unit folks), and pretty direct.

When I hit Hamilton, a pretty good sized town about 120 km south of Auckland, I decided to see if it would be possible to send my tent and sleeping bag back home via UPS, FedEx, or their Kiwi equivalents. That’s right, folks, I’m to the point where if I’m going to get wet every day, I’m considering staying in a hostel, holiday park cabin, or inexpensive motel at night to get dried out. Wimp. I found a “Pak n’ Save”, where I found out it would be about $400 to have the excess sent home. Thanks, but no thanks – the gear stays with me.

I changed over to SH5 at Tirau (where it started raining again), and was at the iSite (tourism information center) in Rotorua 60 km later at 12:45. I booked a motel room so I’d have some place to drop my luggage, and a tour of Te Puia – a Maori cultural center and good viewing point for Pohutu Geyser, which can reach heights of 20 meters during eruptions.

As you enter Te Puia, there are many Maori carvings.

The Maori did not have a written language until white men introduced it in the late 1800’s. The carvings were the way their history and storied were passed on to future generations. The patterns in the carvings also are significant; a stair-step pattern signified three constellations next to each other, the only one that I can recall being Sirius, but the locations of the three constellations form a series of steps that the pattern recalls.

I saw Pohutu Geyser erupt from across the park. I think it’s shorter than Old Faithful, but that could also be the result of a jingoistic memory.

And the surrounding area is heavily mineralized from the geyser’s mineral (and sulphur) content:

And although I know it seems like there are a LOT of pictures of ferns on this blog, I learned today why the national fauna of New Zealand is the silverback fern. It’s because when you look at the back of the leaves (as seen at the bottom of the photo below), they’re silver:

And, finally, I was able to see a kiwi bird in a nocturnal exhibit at the park. The birds are endangered, quite rare, and quite skittish, so no photographs are allowed in the exhibit. The kiwi bird is about the size of a chicken but much more spherical in shape, with a pointy beak 4 or 5 inches long. In 1800, they estimate there were 12 million kiwi birds in New Zealand; today, there are about 70,000.

Miscellaneous notes: (1) Saw the Southern Cross (for the first time, as Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young would say) tonight. (2) The phases of the moon are backwards down here. At home, a waxing moon looks like a “D”, and a waning moon looks like a “C”, which I recall by the acronym “DOC” (the “O” in the middle is the full moon). In the southern hemisphere, the acronym would, indeed, be “COD”. (3) I still need to do the Coreolis effect experiment to see which way water swirls down a drain.

Tomorrow’s route depends a LOT on the weather. The cold front that overran the area today has dropped temps into the single digits (Celsius); it was 8 C (about 46 F) on my way back to the motel from Te Puia. So my route may be adapted to accommodate areas of frost or snow – but it will be southward (toward the cold; think southern hemisphere), toward Wellington and the Rimoutakas if possible. Stay warm.

Motorcycle mileage: 288 km for the day