(photograph © Kiwidutch)
The road from Napier to Rotorua isn’t so very long in distance of kilometers… meaning that if you were a bird flying in a straight line this journey would probably be a fairly quick trip.
However, for us there are rather a lot of hills to be negotiated and even with the wonderful anti-motion sickness bracelets to help us there will be limits to how fast we can negotiate all of these hills.
The map below shows the red line of Provincial State Highway 5 weaving it’s way from Napier in the bottom right corner of the photo, leading in the direction of Lake Taupo in the top left of the photograph.
The crinkles of the red line on the page will reassure you that this is no multi-laned motorway… it’s definitely the scenic route.
Listening to the radio in the car, we have news this morning that the top half of the North Island is about to be hit by the tail end of a large cyclone that’s been wrecking havoc over the Tasman in Australia and so the immediate forecast is rain,rain and then cats and dogs worth of rain.
Since we can’t control the weather we will just have to make the best of it.
We have been rather lucky so far as the North Island has had a less than perfect summer so far as the weather forecasts have been concerned but Family Kiwidutch have been fortunate to have found a few pockets of sunshine as we head northwards… today it seems that our luck will run out and any time soon we can expect to run into the wet stuff.
I’m surprised and more than a little shocked to see how logging takes place in this part of the North Island these days… entire hilltops are being denuded, I would have thought that selective logging would have been better for the environment, less erosion etc but this seems to be the fashion these days and whilst we did see other hillside areas full of small replanted trees, it didn’t lessen the sadness of the ugliness of some of the scared hills we saw.
Mostly the scenery consists of hills, hills and a few many more hills: The Kiwidutch kids take advantage of Nintendo DS in the back to keep them occupied and Himself enjoys driving on roads that by European standards are empty and which present a more enjoyable challenge than the wide multi-laned truck-filled autobahn /snelwegs he’s used to at home.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
Certainly it is a very beautiful country!
Comment by Giiid — April 12, 2012 @ 5:19 pm |
All countries are beautiful, you just have to look harder to find the beauty in some of them LOL.
What New Zealand lacks in castles etc it makes up for by the bucket-load in stunning panoramic vistas of amazing Nature.
Sadly it doesn’t appeal to all tourists…. Years ago a Dutch cousin of mine visited the South Island… they travelled a road in Otago where they didn’t pass another car for almost an hour. He said he was really nervous the whole way because he was very scared that the car would break down and they would be ” left all alone in the wilderness” (Yes, he’s a born and bred Dutch city boy LOL) He didn’t realise that on these roads if you come across someone broken down ANYONE would automatically stop to help out.
It’s the Kiwi Way to stop and offer assistance. They probably would have also put them up for the night LOL. He said he feels safer on a multi-laned motorway with a little emergency telephone on a pole every few kms… (I don’t get this at ALL! … takes all sorts doesn’t it?)
Comment by kiwidutch — April 16, 2012 @ 6:28 pm |