Monday, March 30: A day for four seasons

Centabay Backpackers, 27 Selwyn Rd., Paihia 0200, tel.: +64 9 402 7466, twin as single (BBH, $35 + $3)

Awoke around 8:00 and had breakfast of some sort of cereal with yoghurt and raw milk, hot cross buns and coffee with Sara and Peter, packed my stuff together, and was ushered out to see and handle the geckos. Sara has a licence to keep them and I was shown all of the species and had them crawling all over me. A couple of shots. Then she was off to her voluntary work and I was left with Peter. Gave him a copy of the book, which I had to dedicate and sign, and he accepted it as payment for last night’s dinner, which was a reasonable deal. Then there was a never-ending conversation until both of us decided we’d had enough.

There had been a couple of showers during the night and another one that morning – over very quickly and then the sun came out. This was the weather pattern for the rest of the day. Drove down to Bayly’s Beach, but it looked like you had to park the car either on the beach itself, or higher up and walk down. Continued on the Kai Iwi Lakes which were impressively coloured and took a bracketed pan as well as a couple of shots of the water birds. Through the Wapoua Forest the road is very winding and there are a lot of kauri trees. Just over the last hill into Hokianga Harbour there was a spectacular view which I shot as a bracket, although with more time and today’s weather it would have been a good motive for a time lapse, as rain cells were sweeping over the landscape.

Stopped in Omapere for lunch – a boutique steak pie for all of $8 which I consumed on the car park. This was rather late so I decided to push on for Kaikohe for some petrol and then to Paihia, although there were some difficulties interpreting the map and I had to retrace my steps at one point. Anyway from there on it was straight into Paihia, had a parking spot and then a map and the place was just around the corner.

Will have to see about getting the water bottles refrozen, the batteries charged, and some place to print out my DOC tickets and get the password for Cape Brett, and finalising the moon shooting intervalometer. I think at Cape Brett I can eat bread if it doesn’t get too squashed in the rucksack. Enough time for other preparations tomorrow.

Dinner was the pan reheated fish’n’chips and apart from the erratic function of the knobs on the stove it turned out OK. Windows had decided that it would take 40 minutes to copy today’s photos and couldn’t be convinced that the job should be done faster. Eventually they were on the external disk and they were shown to two German women who thought the geckos were really cute.