Kays driving day

So having discovered that Martyns aversion to me driving the campervan was more to do with his concern that he wouldn't be able to map read than to do with my driving I was able to allay his fears... there are only three roads out of where we stayed last night and they all go south so he couldnt really get it wrong! He didn't seem very pleased to be told this but I did get the van keys woo hoo.

Things were a bit complicated by some of the roads still being blocked from cyclone wilma but we figured we could just turn around if we had to.

So off we headed south to Wairere boulders where we were quizzed by a slightly odd Swiss owner of the property about the route we had taken and which roads were open. She then proceeded to tell us in lots of detail about the boulders and how they were formed etc. You see these rocks were made of basalt but what is extra special is they were fluted. Fluting is when acid rain makes vertical channels by running through rock. usually it only happens in limestone or sandstone. These boulders are supposedly the only fluted basalt rocks in the world. Don't know about that bit they were cool and nice to walk around.

Every so often on our little walk around the boulders there was a little muddy bit and the odd bit of driftwood and then we got to a bridge we needed to cross. Don't worry - all was fine but it was our first real view of how bad cyclone wilma was in terms of how much rain actually fell as we were driving along the other day. This bridge was about 4metres above the current river level and it was covered in debris and bits of the fence surrounding it were demolished.

We pondered how glad we were that we got to a campsite when we did and stayed put (well apart from our bus fun) yesterday for a bit and then wandered on wondering if we would make it to our next sort of planned sleep spot.

Next stop Waipoua forest and the giant Kauri trees, in particular Tane Mahuta the largest Kauri tree left standing in NZ in terms of height (he is known as God of the forest) and also to the Father of the forest (whose Maori name I forget) who has the widest girth - does my bum look big in this? Well yes Mr Tree quite frankly it does- and also the 4 sisters which is actually four trees sort of joined together at the roots.

After Waipoua we went off to Trounson forest to pitch up for the night. We picked it because it had a night walk you could book but it was full. Having seen the number of little people manically swinging torches at about 7pm we were quite glad we didn't get on the tour as we don't think we would have seen anything anyway.

So we set off for our own little night walk along the banks of the river only to be reminded that river = freshwater = Mosquitos darn it.

I also discovered flip flops are not that great for nightwalking in (well unless the nightwalk is actually a quick trip to the toilet) as a managed to slide down a slope for one big step and the rest of the way down I was on my bum. What did Martyn say "oh, I was just about to tell you to be careful" - thanks for that darling :)

At this point I decided I had had enough of trying to be a gung ho outdoorsy type (I can hear my mother now wondering why I ever bothered trying to be that in the first place!) and headed back to the campervan to seal myself in under the duvet and listen to the frogs :-)