We set off early on Sat morning with high hopes as the weather was amazing and took the drive down passing through Paeroa on the way - home to Nz's national soft drink! We soon discovered that like the Aussies the Kiwis like their 'big' things and were amused to find a giant 23 foot L&P bottle in the town, which was obviously screaming out to be photographed!
Why?!
The sign says it all!
They may have had a giant bottle in town but there was absolutely no where decent to get breakfast (where are the Tesco Express chocolate croissants when you need them!) so we made our visit short and carried on to our next destination. (It should be said at this point that it did make us reminisce about our last road trip in Nz where we had to stop every two hours to feed certain hungry kiwi boys - you know who you are!!)
Our next destination was Karangahake Gorge which apart from being beautiful is known for its gold mining. Some interesting facts for you - in their heyday (1883 - 1933) the Karangahake mines were among the largest of their type in Nz and produced 4,000,000 oz of gold bullion. Today you can still walk along the tramways and through the tunnels, some of which are over 1km long with some of the vertical shafts going down over 700m!
It might not look it but the bridges were very wobbly - Kz definitely felt it was screaming out for a 'risk' sign!!
The closest we got to gold mining!
Walking through the tunnels in the hillside - very dark!! I wouldn't recommend it without a torch!
Kz and I decided to go for the Windows Walk, which is basically the walk through various ones of the tunnels - however, the 'we don't recommend you do this without a torch' sign is obviously there for a reason because after the first few tunnels that you can walk through quite easily, the tunnels then get longer and pitch dark and good sense (for once!) kicked in! Next time....
We left the gorge and carried on to Tauranga and met up with Bjorn and Kelly. Unfortunately about 10 mins after we left the gorge the rain kicked in and literally was monsoon like for the rest of the weekend! It put an end to our ideas of going out on the boat or to the beach so instead we went on the hunt for more 'big' things!! And look what we found - a giant kiwi fruit!!
The jury is still out on whether this beats the Big Pineapple!!
Seriously - Kz and I were saying that we don't have anything like this in England because we actually have proper big things of historical interest rather than having to make them up!!
Sunday morning meant that we woke to more of the same weather wise so after the meeting we decided to spend the remainder of the afternoon in the pub, having got slightly addicted to Monopoly deal - for those of you that haven't tried it I recommend it - its all the best bits of Monopoly without the boring bits and still has the ability to bring out all your worst mercenary characteristics!!
We then completed our evening by a visit to the natural hot pools, which were a lovely way to relax after our hard day, before heading home to see Andy Murray lose the tennis - shame!
So we had a great weekend in Tauranga - Monday was a bank holiday but due to the awful weather we let Bjorn and Kelly go out on the min and we headed back to Auckland, with the excuse of being able to head down there again sometime soon to see it in the nice weather!
The final photo is for Sharon - we saw this and how could we not think of you!!
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