This weekend was another whirlwind tour as I tried to fit in a bunch of sights and places before my time in New Zealand comes to an end. This time it started with a tour of Hawke's Bay including Napier, Gisbourne, and Lake Waikaremoana. It also included a drive all the way around the East Coast region.

It started on Saturday morning with a very long drive to get all the way from Auckland, which is on the northwest of the North Island, to the east of the North Island. What made it worse was that the route I had chosen to take ended up being closed because of heavy rainfall in previous days. So, I had to backtrack and wasted at least 2 hours on Saturday. Oh well.

Finally I got to Napier and walked a bit around the beach and the town before it got dark. Napier is a little sea-side town on the Pacific Ocean. It was supposed to be this real pretty art-deco type city. It turned out to be not that impressive at all. I think it is probably a lot more lively and interesting in the summer-time. It did have the very typical sea-side resort-feel, but I didn't find it that interesting at all.

The next day I was up extreamly early (saw the sunrise) in anticipation of a very long day. It ended up being massively long, but very cool, saw many sights. First it was to Lake Waikaremoana, which was a beautiful secluded lake in the middle of the mountains. It was very cool, feeling remote and untamed. There was also two waterfalls which were pretty cool being just off the little dirt road that wound it's way half way around the lake.

Next it was back to the east coast and the Pacific Ocean, after a few quick stops at various points, including waterfalls, and the town of Gisborne. The "East Coast" of the north island is basically a big penisula in the north east corner of the north island of New Zealand. It takes about 4-6 hours to drive all the way around it, thus making it very remote, and generally avoided by tourists.

The first stop on the east coast was Tolaga Bay, where they have the longest warf in the southern hemisphere. On a side note it's quite funny how in New Zealand a lot of things are quoted as being the longest, highest, biggest, etc. in the southern hemisphere or in Australasia, or in south pacific. They seem to think that it's a big deal, and I'm always thinking... um does that really mean anything at all?? Especially when you really only have 2 first world countries in the entire southern hemisphere... Oh well, on another side-note, New Zealand suffers from a serious infferiority complex (to Australia), so I say let them have their little claim to fames.

So, Tolaga warf is an old, now abandoned warf that was used for shipping in the 1930's. It's quite interesting to see these old structures from the past. In North America you of course don't see any of them because there are so many people, that they have to be torn down once they are no longer of any use. Not that this is a bad thing, as obviously it's required for economic growth. But it's just interesting to see old historical things like this in New Zealand. This is only possible because there are so few people (4 million in the entire country), and once something is no longer used it just stays where it was. There no need to clear it away and make way for something new. Something new is generally not required to be built in the same spot that the old structure was built. There is so much space in the country, they can always build it somewhere else. Old buildings, warfs, whole mining towns, pipelines, bridges, etc. are all just left standing where they were once built, even though they have ceased being used years ago for whatever reasons. It makes it very cool to hiking around the country and run into these historic sites.

After the warf, it was a long winding road all the way to the East Cape, which is the furthest eastern point in New Zealand. Very remote, having to take a half hour on a dirt road in order to get to the lighthouse at the very end of the road. By this time it was almost dark though, so I was not able to take the short climb up to the lighthouse, or I would have been stuck hiking in the dark, and that is something I don't want to be doing all alone in New Zealand, without a mobile phone!

So, after that it was back in the car (again!), and the long... very VERY long drive all the way back to Auckland. I think it was like 4-5 hours or something like that from East Cape all the way back. And this after a very long day of driving already. But I wanted to make sure that I did everything I wanted to on this trip, because I knew that I would probably not be able to make it all the way out to the east coast of the North Island again.