New Zealand Trip Report, Day 1: Auckland, Waitakere Ranges National Park; Day 2: Hamilton Gardens

Feb 18, 2017, Saturday:

As stated in the previous intro post, I had arrived at midnight Feb 17^th/in the early hours of Feb 18^th and needed to get picked up by out hotel shuttle. We had decided to stay near the airport as our plan was to head out to Rotorua early  morning the next day. We wanted a day's rest before hitting the roads on a long trip... for our safety as well as that of others on the road! Jet lagged/tired drivers are unsafe on the roads! 

AUCKLAND AIRPORT HOTEL:

The hotel Oakwood Manor had given a tollfree number and I had planned to use the courtesy phones at the airport i-site. The airport website states that the i-site at international terminal is open 24/7. In reality it was closed when I arrived at midnight, opening hours are from 6 am. The 3 phones there did not work... a couple of young girls came by and at my request, tried he phones, it did not work for them either. I requested them to call the number for me on their phone saying it's a free number. They obliged and I was able to call the hotel. A taste of friendly Kiwis right there … which would continue in our trip.

There were several travelers waiting at that gate 11 for pickups and mine came too. After check in, I slept off. Son landed at 6am, after passport control, had the same issue with the free phones at the i-site. The i-site was open when he came in and the kind lady dialled the hotel number for him on the official phone. He bought some yogurt-fruit parfait stuff at the airport restaurant upstairs for our breakfast and reached the hotel by 7 am. We slept for another 3 hours and woke up when our alarm went off.

Car rental pickup:

Our Apex car rental airport pickup was near the airport, we needed to pickup the car any time after 11am so that we can have an early start to Rotorua the next day. The rental opens at 7.30am and we did not want to wait till then and had decided to get the car on Feb 18^th itself on the day we landed.

We rang them up and confirmed we can pickup the car a little early too, that is by 10am. We decided we'll pickup the car, buy some provisions, and then park the car and go into the city by public transport. We lined up some nice city sights ...Get the Airbus from airport to Auckland city (Downtown Ferry Terminal), see Auckland Domain and Museum, Skytower, Parnell rose gardens, Albert gardens etc, even take a ferry to Devonport. We analysed the day passes from the transport site...www.maxx.co.nz/

After our car pickup, we went to the Countdown supermarket nearby and stocked up for our days in North Island. Drove back to the hotel, had a meal and assembled a picnic meal for our day out. We were feeling quite fresh and energetic and decided we'll drive to the Waitakere ranges national park, which is a short and easy drive from our hotel. We had already seen it on the google maps/virtually driven down it and were confident. We started off on our NZ adventure and reached the Arataki visitor center on the scenic drive road!

http://regionalparks.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/waitakereranges

Waitakere Ranges Regional Park:

The Waitakere Ranges Regional Park has 16,000 hectares of native rainforest and coastline, 250km of walking and tramping tracks providing access to beaches, breathtaking views, and spectacular rocky outcrops, black sand beaches, waterfalls and giant kauri trees.

We had zeroed in on Fairy Falls and Kitekite for our visit. We wanted to talk to the Park Rangers at The Arataki Visitor Centre to confirm latest track and weather conditions and the directions.

Arataki Visitor Center:

The visitor center in itself is lovely with awesome views on short boardwalks!

The center has beautiful interiors and lots of infotainment activities for kids...the views through the large glass windows are to die for...

The lovely lady gave us a map, and we got convinced to try Kitekite and Piha beach first! The weather was glorious! (Apologies, this is going to be the catchphrase throughout this report for all days!!)

DIRECTIONS:  turn right into Scenic Drive. Continue for 200m then take Piha Road at the junction. Stay on Piha Road and it ends at Piha Beach.

http://www.piha.co.nz/map-of-piha-and-coast/

Piha Beach:

The Piha beach is lovely, the drive reminded us of the winding mountain roads around Capetown, South Africa and we joked the rock we were seeing is the Lionhead as in Capetown. Imagine our surprise, when its real name turned out to be Lion rock!!

Excellent drive and we had our picnic meal in scenic surroundings (and pretty aggressive gulls and geese/ducks!). We walked around for the best views. It looked an easy walk up the Lion Rock, we unfortunately did not have time for that,

This is a Paradise shell duck...we called it proud peacock as it kept aloof and away from a group of other ducks

We went on the Tasman lookout , then set off for the Glenesk road and reached the trail head to Kitekite falls.

We had read a TA review of people losing their entire luggage from the locked car boot at the parking lot with their car window smashed in... they had said there are some negative elements lurking in bushes and they had made the mistake of opening the boot showing their stuff was inside. The visitor center lady also told us not to leave valuables in the car. We did not have any to leave but were a little apprehensive as the evening was drawing to a close and there were just a few cars there. Initially at planning stage, I was glad it was a Saturday when we planned to visit as that means locals around! We did not see many though as it was almost 5 and local families may have returned!

The Kitekite Falls are one of the most famous waterfalls in the Waitakere Ranges with six drops into a large lake-like pool at the bottom. The falls are reached by walking tracks at the end of Glen Esk Road.

The usual route is to take the Kitekite Track by the large kauri stump which takes you up the true left side the Kitekite Stream (right hand side if you are walking upstream, left if you are coming down!). The track takes you through rainforest that has recovered from milling until you reach a junction with the Knutzen Track (named after Hans Peter Knutzen, Manager at the Piha Mill from 1912 to 1921). It is best to continue on the Knutzen Track which is well-formed with an easy grade and takes you to the base of the falls with a spectacular view of the falls on the way.

http://www.newzealand.com/in/destinations/

We had a lovely hike and great views.

We only went up to the lower part! We returned along the same path and it was heartening to find some people entering the track as we were hiking back … always good to do hikes earlier and in the middle of the day, but with our schedule we could manage only these later timings!! Good to know there were Late Latifs like us and we are not the only foolhardy ones hiking late into the evening!

We decided to skip Fairy falls regretfully as it was getting late. We enjoyed several nice lookouts on the drive, got a little lost trying to get out of the park, finally found our way back to the city, hit the airport road and returned to our hotel.

Our hotel had advertised ours as a studio apartment and it had a cupboard with sink, coffee maker but no hotplate/microwave. They let me use their kitchen and I made some rice in the microwave for the next day, transferred to my vessel and we slept off after a GREAT day, our first of many to come in Beautiful NZ!

DAY 2, Feb 19, 2017, Sunday:

We filled gas in our car and started off to Rotorua by 7am. It was raining heavily and we got resigned to the fact this was going to be the constant tenor of our NZ vacation!

this is the google map of our drive that day

https://goo.gl/maps/gY2qgX88cNowwYSv7

Our first stop was the beautiful Hamilton gardens.
http://hamiltongardens.co.nz/visit/hamilton-gardens-map/

We got out armed with umbrella and ponchos and gaped in awe at the lovely niches.

It really needs a full day to assimilate and enjoy how well the various themes have been executed... we had only a few hours!

I'll let pictures speak...

Paradise Collection:

Egyptian and Mesopotamian garden origin is acknowledged here...

Note the Use of water/rock element in oriental gardens...

Japanese Garden of Contemplation:

This is the Japanese Garden of contemplation...These dry landscape (karesansui )gardens are often called ‘Zen gardens’ because the most renowned examples are found in Zen temple complexes in Japan. Their underlying design uses Zen Buddhist concepts of ‘the void’, ‘movement without movement’,

 With tightly bound compositions of gravel, rocks, and only the minimum of vegetation, they evoke vast landscapes of mountains, oceans, and forests

Chinese Scholar's Garden:

This is the Chinese Scholar's Garden a bit of  a traditional Chinese garden from the Sung Dynasty, 10th - 12th century.

It represents a world of imagination, fantasy and surprise...

View of the Ting Pavilion...

 This is the seasonally flowering Wisteria Bridge, across the Island of Whispering Birds, past the hidden philosopher, and through a lush grove to finally reach the Ting Pavilion and its views of the Waikato River....

The Ting Pavilion...

Modernist Garden:

Here's the Modernist Garden...loose, flexible, minimal, spontaneous...

Indian Char Bagh:

The Indian Char Bagh( 'four part') gardens ...the original Paradise Garden...are not just places to walk through.  They are poetic, secret pleasure gardens with sensuous perfumes of flowers in a living Persian Carpet

A small hunting palace near Agra, called Lal Mahal, has inspired the Hamilton Garden's Char Bagh garden.
  .

They have geometric layouts with strong symmetry. Water features are subtle and designed to bubble and trickle rather than splash, in order to preserve water.  

 Italian Renaissance Gardens:

Art and science are strongly linked and a study of proportion and the human figure create a framework for a classical order of perspective, proportion, symmetry, and geometric forms.

Note the creeper of the trellis twining around the pillar...

There are antique sculptures like the copy from the original 5th century Capitoline wolf with Romulus and Remus. The two babies, Romulus and Remus, were thrown into the Tiber River, which carried them to Platine where they were suckled by a she-wolf and then raised by a shepherd...

English Flower garden...

These are the Paradise collection.

Productive Collection:

Next come the Productive collection... Te Parapara, traditional Maori garden...

It includes Sustainable backyard, kitchen garden and herb garden

Fantasy Gardens:

Tudor Gardens..it was like being in Hampton Gardens, Britain again... note the intertwining strands in the green hedges

These are the Chinoiserie gardens...

Chinoiserie’ is the style that reinvented Chinese and Japanese art but often produced work that was quite original. It was fashionable in Western Europe throughout the eighteenth century, reaching the height of popularity between 1750 and 1765.

The Chinoiserie Pavilion in the Perfume Garden is very closely modelled on the ‘Chinese House’ at the Stowe Landscape Gardens, United Kingdom, which was built in 1738.

Tropical Garden here...amazing how they have all these tropical plants in a subtropical climate...we have a video I'll put up soon.

AAHH... Alice having her Tea Party...and we are a soggy mess...

Regretably we had no time for the cultivar collection which I'm sure is fabulous as well. we needed to be at Waitoma Glowworm caves by 2.30, so we took off

WAITOMA GLOWWORM CAVES:

I had been in two minds about the caves, but we had a nice time. We had no line at the ticket counter and got a discount with coupons. With half an hour wait we were on our tour

The tour was great with a sizeable collection of worms that made the place magical...These glowworms aren’t actually worms. They are the larvae of a special kind of fly known as a fungus gnat whose tail glows with a blue-green light provided by an organ equivalent to a human kidney.

The glow is a reaction between chemicals given off by the glowworm and oxygen, otherwise known as bioluminescence. Glowworms can control how light its tail is by changing the amount of oxygen reaching its light organ

Glowworms glow to attract insects, which get caught in the glowworms sticky lines. When a female reaches adulthood it uses the light to attract a mate. The glow also protects them from getting eaten by predators and is used for burning waste.

OK, facts aside, it was a surreal experience seeing hundreds of glow while floating silently through an underground river...

Marakopa falls:

We looked at the time and decided we had time for the diversion to Marakopa falls. We took the wiggly Te Anga road up and did not stop at the Bridge. We went straight to the Falls and it was so worth it.

Mangapohue Natural Bridge:

On the way back we stopped at the Mangapohue Natural Bridge. We walked along the limestone gorge with its rushing stream on a walkway. The sides of the gorge are steep and covered with a lush green cover. We went up along the top an area where we saw old fossils in the rocks. The 17 m natural bridge is all that’s left of an ancient cave system after the cave has collapsed. Over the years stalactites have grown on the underside. Another of Nature's awesome Surprises.  

 We saw the much touted quirky shoe fence and took our mandatory pic...

Then made our way back to the caves and then onward to Rotorua. We reached Rotorua YHA as daylight was fading.

A packed and varied experience day!! We were now ready for the thermal wonders and Maori culture in Rotorua...
http://adventuretrav.blogspot.com/2017/03/new-zealand-trip-report-days-34-rotorua.html