Most of my travels in the last eight or nine years have been confined to the South Island and that’s not just because I live in Ōamaru. There have been other factors as well, chiefly that most of my travels have had an edge of adventure because my vehicle was a much used, abused but loved Nissan Pathfinder with a fitted foam mattress in the back, and I went off-road to find lonely and beautiful camping spots. And it’s easier to do that in the South Island than it is in the North. Simple really – similar land mass but four million live north of Cook Strait, about one million I can call neighbours here in the south.
But the arrival, a smidgen over a year ago, of a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter campervan changed that. The Nissan four-wheel drive remains on the fleet, but comfort has taken precedence over adventure. Many of our destinations have become more civilised, and we even discovered that parking up with neighbours is not exactly the end of the world.
So, mid-October we decided to venture beyond the Fringe of Empire, cross Cook Strait and explore the North Island.
I actually kept something approximating a daily diary, but after six weeks it became the size of War and Peace, so back to memory and impressions – besides which, my hand writing is so bad, five minutes after having written something I can’t easily decipher it.
Again, we were planless – some would say clueless. I had a speaking engagement at an event in (relatively) nearby Waimate on the Saturday night and we were booked on one of the ‘good ships’ Interislander on Tuesday morning. That was that. No idea where we were going (except north), no idea for how long, and no return ferry booking.
Basically, we went north as far as Kaikohe travelling on the western side of the North Island, via Taranaki and New Plymouth and south via the eastern side, including East Cape.
We were going to spend some time in Auckland on the return south, but we got onto the Northern Motorway about 10.30am, traffic was light and without dropping below 95kph we suddenly found ourselves at
