Big Trees, HoleDiggers Inc., and the Underwhere?/Photo Album 11

It took a few days to recover from kayaking in Paihia and bus-touring Cape Reinga, it's true. By Friday we'd made our way to camp at the Kauri National Forest on the western side of the Northland, where we made dinner at a real stove and chatted with a travelling Canadian couple. Saturday we spent in the awe-inspiring presence of enormous, ancient kauri trees, most between 1,000-2,000 years old. The most impressive of these was Tane Mahuta, "God of the Forest," who in Maori legend split apart Father Sky and Mother Earth from their embrace, thereby birthing all living creatures. The energy from this great tree was positively magnetic; we sat and felt its buzz until the sun set, then drove to the dumpiest town we'd been in, in all of New Zealand: Dargaville. What a pit. It did have one really cool and seemingly misplaced cafe/bar, called Blah,Blah,Blah; for a Saturday night it was the only place in town showing signs of life. We enjoyed our dessert and vowed never to return. Sunday saw us in the Kauri Museum, a rather expensive but comprehensive exhibit on the history of kauri logging in NZ. It was a neat display, full of old photos, kauri gum specimens (amber), and incomprehensibly huge planks from kauri trees--many of which had been preserved in marshland for up to 50,000 years!--but both of us suffer from a great sadness when recounted tales of enormous, aged trees being cut down with wild abandon. At least there is now more recognition of their spiritual and aesthetic value in forests, rather than in furniture. We continued on to our next wwoofing destination, home of Robert and Marijke in the Otomatea Eco-Village on the Kaipere Harbor. Kenneth, ironically, spent most of the week digging again.... this time to level an area next to the house they are building out of ferrocement (called Timbercrete), which on Friday we filled with concrete. We also dug a garden path, and Michele set freehand mosaics in the wet cement. A good learning experience, and we both enjoyed Robert and Marijke. They have an in-home movie theater, so Kenneth got a good movie fix from the week. (Of course that didn't stop us from watching another the first chance we got in Auckland, but what else do you do when it's dark at 5:30 and you live in a van??) After bidding farewell to Otomatea, we headed south to Auckland to try and sell our beloved van. (Ironically we ended up driving back up to Otomatea on Thursday to sell it to a wwoofer staying with another family in the village!) While in Auckland we wandered the city streets, got the van's squeaky belt fixed, wandered the city gardens, barely rescued the van from being towed (whew!), paid our parking ticket, and checked out some bookstores. We had considered taking a ferry out to one of Auckland's nearby islands, uninhabited except for a tremendous population of native birds, but that early morning stuff is really not Kenneth's forte... we later surmised that his underwear just did not want us to take that ferry, because it was nowhere to be found and the mad search for it made us late. So we dawdled the day away instead, content to have found free parking where we could write postcards and organize to leave the van. A sad farewell to a trusty companion!