New Plymouth

On July 2 we had a few days free without any guests, so we took a car ride over to New Plymouth on the west coast. Its particular scenic attraction is Mount Taranaki. As with many place names, general usage has shifted back to the Maori name from the British Mt. Egmont. Taranaki is a nearly perfect volcanic cone mountain rising to 8200 feet. It was a stand-in for Mt. Fuji in the movie “The Last Samurai”. The area is also one of the prime farming areas of the North Island, and had some of the bloodiest history from the Maori land wars in the nineteenth century. The weather was very mixed over the three days, so we never got a really clear view of the mountain, but we have lots of photos anyway.

On the drive the first day, we made one stop on the coast at the town of Patea to see the beach at the river’s mouth: black sand, fishermen, dunes and cliff, and a faint view of the South Island. Then we went up the east side of Mt. Taranaki through the towns of Stratford and Inglewood, but it was already starting to get dark, so we did not try any of the mountain visitor centers or ski fields on that side.

Much of Friday it felt like we were chasing the sun, or at least breaks in the cloud cover. So we headed up the coast first thing, but that turned out not to be terribly interesting, so we headed back to the mountain, where the view was clearing up some. We went through some nice forest to the North Egmont Visitors’ Center where we got some views. Then we headed back to town and a picnic lunch in Brooklands Park. They have a 2000 year old Puriri tree which is mostly impressive for all the hollows in the trunk and lots of epiphytes in the branches. There was also a nice small zoo with a walk through aviary and a troop of capuchin monkeys, among other things. We visited the old stone church of St. Mary and walked along the coast walkway. That part of New Plymouth, anyway, did not seem to have any beach. The town was the home of Len Lye, a famous NZ “kinetic” sculptor. That is, his sculptures move; I don’t know how hyper he may have been personally. So there is this really tall pole with an orange ball on the top on the water front. It actually looks like it would sway a lot, but its movement was pretty subtle even though there was a decent wind. It was fun to have a back drop of the waxing moon. We spent most of the afternoon in the Puke Arike Museum, which had good natural history and settler and Maori history. (You pronounce Puke with two syllables.) Dinner in a pleasant and reasonably fancy Indian restaurant was mostly notable because it was set up with two long tables against one wall. As we sat nearby, groups of 2 to 4 attractive young women kept arriving, until both tables were full to about 40. It kind of reminded us of sitting on the porch at Range Lights at sunset, watching an endless stream of seagulls flying past; you wonder where they all come from and if it will ever end. We did eventually ask the girls: they were having a farewell party for a French exchange student to their school.

The next day we headed home again, this time driving along the coast road, called the Surf Highway, on the west side of the mountain, which again was mostly hidden by clouds. We drove up and over a shoulder of the mountain to be back in the forest, and then back to the coast. We took a side road to the Cape Egmont lighthouse. (Actually, there were two a couple of miles apart.) We stopped in the pleasant little town of Hawera for lunch, and walked around the small city of Wanganui later in the afternoon. There is a Quaker settlement there, on the site of a defunct Quaker school, which we expect we will visit later. They do seminars about once a month, sort of the NZ version of Pendle Hill.
Although the weather was kind of typical maritime winter weather, we enjoyed the break and the chance to drive around a different part of the country.