Part 1 – Lower Hutt to Napier
Friday, March 16 – It’s time to leave our comfortable home exchange of the last two weeks and head for our next stop – Napier. We are members of a home-stay travel club (ATC). There are a lot of members listed in New Zealand and on a whim I looked up members between Wellington and Pauanui, the next stop on our agenda. Comparing member locations to the map, I found a couple of members in the town of Napier, on the east coast about ½ way to Pauanui – perfect! I emailed members Ruth and Don on Wednesday to see if they would have us for Friday night. I received an answer right away that they could accommodate us. Don gave me a link to his web site and it turns out that they are also in the B & B business with their separate studio apt. where we stayed as well as a bedroom inside their house. Don also is a photographer and he had some examples of his fine work on his web site. So, we headed their way on Friday morning. One of the few negatives we found about NZ is that there aren’t enough road signs telling you where you are or where you should turn. We had a map but still turned the wrong way not even out of town near Lower Hutt and ended up with a beautiful view of the bay up in the hills but we had to back track to get on the road we were supposed to be on. It’s about a 4 hour drive to Napier and we had no further problems – just beautiful scenery all the way. Our conversation in the car was – “wow, look at that!” - “amazing!” - “beautiful!” – “more sheep!” – “keep toe left!” The photographer in me wanted to stop every 5 miles to take pictures but, of course, we couldn’t do that or we never would have arrived at our destination.
Our neighbor in Lower Hutt, Grant, invited us to stop at one of their “Mr. Apple” orchards near Napier. He gave us the name of the manager and assured us he would give us a tour. We found the orchard – Te Papa – amidst beautiful rolling hills of vineyards and orchards. Ian was happy to drive us around the 300 acre orchard with six different varieties of apples. They were just finishing harvesting the Royal Galas and were starting a new variety called “Jazz”. We stopped to try it out – New Zealand is very proud of this new apple – look for it soon in your supermarkets. It was very tasty – lots of juice and zip. He gave us a half dozen to take along with us. The apple trees here are quite small and loaded with apples. They are grafting onto dwarf stock which makes for much easier harvesting. Check out my pictures in Web Albums to see the beautiful apples. The harvest will go on until about May with temporary workers from Samoa. They provide living facilities for the workers right at the orchard and they are able to earn quite a bit of money to take home with them back to Samoa. The NZ government has a good program to welcome these foreign guest workers.
We arrived in Napier around 2 p.m. and had a short welcome visit with our congenial hosts, Ruth and Don. Then we headed into town to look around and find something to eat. Napier is the “Art Deco” city of the world. There was a devastating earthquake close to the city in 1931. Nearly everything was destroyed and may lives were lost. The town was totally rebuilt in the style of the times with a group of professional architects. Somewhere in the 80’s, the buildings were spruced up and the city capitalized on its Art Deco theme. It’s now a lovely sea-side town with nice pedestrian shopping area, beach, gardens, restaurants and a very successful commercial port area. We walked through town and then had a nice meal at a seafood restaurant. When we returned to the house, Don and Ruth invited us in for tea and pleasant conversation. Both are retired schoolteachers. Don now works part time with a local travel agent – their specialty is arranging freighter cruises. They have been on a couple of cruises themselves and sounds like quite the adventure. As I said earlier, Don is also an accomplished photographer. They both like gardening and have lovely flowers and an extensive veggie garden in their back yard. (They sent a bag of tomatoes with us when we left).
Next morning, we went in the house for a nice breakfast including Ruth’s homemade lemon poppy seed muffins and homemade jams. We also met their B & B guests from England who were on their way to the south island where they were going to rent a camper-van for the rest of their trip. After breakfast we said good-bye to our new friends and were on our way again.
Don gave us direction on how to by-pass the city of Taupo which we had gone through on our way to Wellington so we followed those directions. I then looked at the directions to Pauanui that our Wellington hosts had given us and realized that we were on a different route. So, after some discussion and map-studying we decided to stay on the route Don had given us since it went right to the coast and would probably have very nice scenery but maybe a little longer. Well, it definitely took longer and the roads were very winding and up and down but spectacular. We easily found our way to Pauanui and settled into our next home. We had enough groceries with us to have a lamb chop dinner and turned in early.
The house in Pauanui is wonderful. It is new, modern with a wonderful simple open floor plan design and only a 2 min. walk to the beach. Sunday morning we went for a walk and then stocked up on a few items at the local supermarket. Pauanui is kind of a little peninsula of its own on the east side of the Coramandel Peninsula. It has nice parks, two nine-hole golf courses and is very quiet. The high season is past but the weather is still very nice. There are lots of nearby things to see and do. We’ll be making a stop at the Info office shortly. There’s no Internet connection in the house but I was told at the shopping center that I could take my laptop there and get a wireless connection anywhere there. We’ll see.
