NZ – Picton to Tauranga

The boat ride back, and up to Masterton

The Cook straight is calm again

There’s another interesting thing that happens in a river and we’re off through the forest 25 miles north of Masterton to see it.

Its starts here

No-one’s around. I ask a lady about the eels that live in the rivers here. She asks me if I’d like to feed them and goes off for a few minutes and comes back with some fishing waders, a bucket and a kitchen spoon. In the bucket are kitchen scraps, some raw chicken bits and on top, dead mice.

I can’t imagine how this is going to work, but we head off through the forest and she tells me a story. Later on that

If the seals playing in the river down south were the bright side of life, this may be the dark side. They’re in this river somewhere

There they are. Dark eels, really big. Up to 6 feet long. Their fat bodies move against the current effortlessly.

These eels are not to be messed with. She says that one of Captain Cook’s journals graphically describe a sailor getting attacked by these eels. They latched onto him and went into a frenzy, ripping chunks off him until he was bones. People have been very careful since, she says.

She says they can’t smell me through the waders so in I wade and start doling out a spoonful each as they gather around me. The dog shaped mouths are lined with bright white teeth that look like the shiny tips of scalpel blades against a bright red background.

They can age the eels accurately because of bony rings in the head and the oldest found so far was 160 years old. They cross the ocean 6000 miles to breed in Tonga and the larvae drift back this way with the current. The young grow to a certain size in the river estuaries befire going upstream. The photo below is from video she took

To Napier, Deco capital of NZ

There are tons of sheep on this section

Fast twisties

Sheep everywhere

And if you stop, they all stare at you. Every one

A typical and beautiful Kiwi farmhouse

I’m told all these river are stuffed with trout. They’re heavy in biomass, but I guess because it’s winter not a lot of bugs in the air

Into Napier, which is proud of its aesthetic. The town was levelled by a massive earthquake in 1931 and rebuilt when Deco was going off in Europe. They have festivals celebrating it, all the towns brochures emphasize it, everywhere you look its Deco. Deco-ish.

One of the pretty avenues through the center of town

Typical fascade

Some nice interiors

Details in the street, modern

Inland to Taupo

Largely like this

Then on to Rotorua

A good time to mention that nearly all the country road bridges are single lane. Very nice

We took a route that was 50/50 dirt since it hadn’t rained in a day or two

Through Hobbit-land. Not dissimilar to the green hills east of Medellin

The lakefront. Very cold

This day first goes backwards to hot springs. But I parked in the parking lot beside the road and decided not to leave Lucinda alone for the hour walk, and bailed

Dense forests here

Back to Tauranga to get the suspension re-built after nearly two years. I was in this shop back at the beginning getting new tires. They had 4 HP2 posters on the walls and all raced. Rhys on the right here races superbikes. Ray, on the left also races, but I can’t remember what. I’ve pre-ordered a new Garmin wiring harness for the GPS (which being Garmin) has failed somewhere and I’ve been running on batteries for a while. It turns out the pins in the mount have worn down. But the courier has lost it, so I head off for a few days.