A couple hours later, we arrived in Waipoua State Forest where the Kauri trees once forested the entire region. We stopped to dress warmer, and headed  out on our hikes. Brittany added one extra layer. Me? I added three more to the three layers I traveled in. Brittany kept warning me that we were at the warmest part of our trip. I kept telling her baby steps, baby steps. And as long as I could still feel blood going to my extremities, then I was fine. Learned the hard way that not feeling your extremities was worse than being cold. Car locked, umbrella in hand, and we were off.

 This state park was host to the largest remaining collection of Kauri trees in the nation. First stop, the Yakas Tree, named after an old native Kauri-gum digger. The tree boasted 12.29 meters in girth and 43.9 meters tall with a trunk volume of 134.2 meters cubed. Nestled in a dense forest, this giant of a tree made even me, speechless.

 The second set of trees we passed were named The Four Sisters because of the circular formation they made while growing. 

 

After a little more rain and some conversation with our first Ozzy friend who decided to hike with us, we came upon Te Matua Ngahere, named Father of the Forest. This tree was second largest at 16.41 meters in girth and 208.1 meters in cubic volume, but the oldest of all the trees at 2,000 -3,300 years old.

Last was Tane Mahuti, or Lord of the Forest, was the largest tree in New Zealand, 51.5 meters tall, 13.8 meters in girth, and 244.5 meters in cubic volume. Its age was estimated to be between 1,200 – 2,000 years old, seeding was believed to have been around the time of Christ.

We said good-bye to our Ozzy friend and headed up the road to Paihia and The Bay of Islands.

 

Up early and on our way to Russell Island, a short ferry ride across from Paihia. Russell was once named the Hellhole of the Pacific by Catholic priests and Marist missionaries due to debauchery. A bustling town, originally named by the Mauri as Kororareka, hosted pirates, sealers, whalers, traders, and  of course, brothels. Russell was once the capital of New Zealand, but was stripped of that honor after the Sacking of Kororareka burned the town to the ground. Never recovering from the loss, Russell now is host to 1,000 inhabitants who experience a lifestyle very different from its past.

Christ Church was a simple and quaint structure constructed in 1835. As New Zealand’s oldest church, Christ Church boasted Charles Darwin as one of its original donors.

A short walk down the waterfront landed us right in front of the mission. Pompallier Mission was New Zealand’s oldest industrial building erected by the first Catholic bishop of the South Pacific. The original land was sold to him by an ex-convict from Australia. Later, he realized he paid too much for the land and was unable to continue building in the traditional island ways. Pompallier employed a French technique he was familiar with – rammed earth. The big frames held the condensed earth, rock and shell pieces and a few beams glued together with water. 

After curing, the frames were removed and the pieces placed. As you can see in the windowsill, the walls were extremely thick. 

After construction was complete, the priest and Marist brothers set to the task of making and distributing books in the native Mauri language. A total of 40,000 books were published in this building. The printing process started with four cases of type. The composer would use tweezers to place the letters and spacers in a row and then transfered that row to the galley trays, repeating until an entire page was set. This was the end of the composition phase. 

During the imposition phase, the imposer would place the type set page inside a chase, lying them out in order and keeping them in place with wooden pieces and quonis, pronounced coins. The quonis wedges were the last pieces put in to stabilize the rows of words inside the chase; hence the development of the phrase – “Coin the Phrase”. Another saying developed when the chase was lowered down onto the printing press, referred to as “Cut to the Chase”. “First Impressions” came from the first finished pages of any type set. 

The printing press was sent over by the Catholic Church in France. Notice the base was made in the shape of a cross. 

The spines were hand stitched and then glued into the leather covers with melted down sheep hooves and horns.

 

 A bay leaf was placed on the finished pages because of its natural pesticide and preservation abilities. 

For twenty years, James Callaghan worked a leather tannery within the mission printery. The agreement allowed him to produce and sell all his products as long as he provided all the leather the mission needed to bind their books. The tanning process started with collecting hides of sheep, goat, and cattle. Currently, the main animals in New Zealand are sheep. Ironically, they were originally shipped from Australia in the 1800’s. The hides are placed in a large vat with a closed lid, soaking in urine. Yes, urine. In the 1800’s, the workers would go around and collect human urine each day to use in this process. Easy to collect with all the bars in town, as the bathrooms for such establishments were big barrels placed outside the business and used at will by customers and passer-bys. The hides are soaked a week in the urine to dissolve any remaining fat on the underside of the skins. The skins are then removed and shaved of all their wool or fur and any remaining fat and flesh. 

The hides were then dropped into a pit filled with a solution of water and mashed bark that preserves the hides. 

This process took up to a year for sheep and goat skins and fourteen plus months for cow hide. 

Once dried the finished product is very stiff and rough. These hides were then taken to be curried. The hides were subjected to stretching, stomping, scraping and pounding. A number of stippling and stretching instruments and techniques, alternated with water soaking, produced a more supple leather. 

The final stage for the leather involved a process called Skiving. The currier would place the leather on an angled plane and shave off the desired thickness and dimensions of the finished leather. This was the only job during this process that required skill and not just brute force. Because it was not as labor intensive, the other workers thought the currier who was skiving was really slacking off. Kiwis, Ozzys, and the English use a term, skiving off, to describe someone who is slacking off and not working hard, a slang term developed in these tanneries.

Winds had picked up, along with some rain, so we decided to grab some lunch. Fodor’s Intelligent Traveler  suggested we try Sally’s. So glad we did. The best clam chowder either of us has ever had in our life. Combine fresh clams, mussels, fish, and shrimp in a country known for its butter and cream, and you have just died and gone to Clam Chowder heaven. I have been dreaming about Sally’s Clam Chowder. 

 

After lunch, we made a quick trip to the backside of Russell and enjoyed some time on our own beach.

 Good - Bye Russell!

We have both safely arrived in Auckland, New Zealand. Brittany has been waiting at the exit of customs for international flights for a couple of hours, knowing, try as hard as I may, that I would not be able to figure out how to change my phone over to contact her. Once I found Brittany, I was supposed to procure some local currency. Two separate ATM’s and three tries later, we were still without local dollars.

We decided to move to our next itinerary item, a rental car. Yes, a car. The thought of my driving strikes fear in most people, including myself. My driving skills are challenged, to say the least. It gets better – add in the wrong side of the road, steering wheel reversed, winter conditions, and a stick shift. All this was playing through my mind as I settle into the rental office. I have a seat at the desk and wait for the kid to bring back the paper work to sign. He announced that he had good news for us as he strode back into the room. They had a car for us. Uh, yeah. We rented one from you. Tell me something I do not know? Well, my rental contract started a day later. I don’t know how I missed that, but our schedule was a day off upon arrival. He said no worries, all was well. This bit of good luck evens out the day late dollar short luck I had before I left. When I checked my passport upon packing, it was expired. Thank heavens for expediting services and exponential surcharges for that service. After that faux-pas, I knew I could manage a day early with my eyes closed. Don’t worry, just a figure of speech. My eyes were wide open. A little dilated possibly after my initial scan of how to get out of the parking lot unscathed. I expected us to be handed the keys and to be on our way rather quickly since we were the only ones in the office. Not so fast says my first Kiwi friend. We needed to go over all the rules, and extra rules Brittany believed he developed on the fly just for me. Could it have something to do with my delusional ramblings after twenty hours of traveling? Some would say yes, my husband would say no, that’s normal. I didn’t know. All that he suggested we purchase including car seats, I guess I will find out in the end if they were necessary. The only item I declined was the additional insurance, which he went over a number of times with me. Not sure why the extra enforcement was necessary. Could it have been the lack of sleep I mentioned, my fear of driving in a foreign country, or the cross-eyed look I gave him with twitching eyes because the stress and jet lag were catching up with me? I’m sure he has seen far worse, at least I hope so.

He asked us to meet him in the garage where he would pull our car out of the rain and go over final instructions. After one pass around the car, I noted that he was marking everything on his check paper, to the point my car looked like a wrap-around advertisement written in Chinese. On the second go-around, I joined in, even adding the debris splatters from the rain to be extra cautious. I noticed the only commonality between my car at home and this one was the color red, not a good start.

We were finally allowed to load the car up and begin. It was still dark out as I looked out the garage door with storm clouds covering the sky and bursting at the seams. I turned the car lights on, or so I thought. Twelve hours later when I needed them again, I realized that I had never turned them on in the first place. I revved the gas, let out the clutch and we hopped thru the parking lot full of cars into the pouring rain. I wanted to look thru my rearview mirror to see our Kiwi friend’s expressions, but I didn’t dare peel my eyes from the obstacles in front of me and I hadn’t found the rearview wipers anyway. In fact, I found the front wipers before anything else. I tried to put my blinker on as I exited left out of the garage only to turn my front wipers on a dry windshield right next to our Kiwi friend. Everything is opposite. I started thinking about all the fines and fees the lad extensively detailed to me as I reach with my right hand for the phantom stick shift that should have been where my door handle was. I was wondering if all the potential fees were something he just made up or decided the probability to make a little extra cash on the side was very high with me.

No car lights, still predawn dark, and in a down pour similar to raining cats and dogs, I managed to get us a 100 yards to the McDonald’s parking lot, pull into a parking spot, and breathe, since I held my breathe the minute we left the rental garage. We stopped at McDonalds to use the only free WIFI around in order to plan what we were going to do with this extra day.

I had a mind to just stay in the parking lot for two weeks and keep circling the drive-thru for meals, but I am trying to talk myself into sticking with the original travel plan. Brittany remains calm, as always. We come up with a game plan and 45 minutes later, sun breaking thru the clouds, we are on the road, going the right way, on the right/wrong side of the road. Brittany has been a huge help with driving as she has been in Tonga the past month and is used to the change.

New Zealand is a very rural county with agriculture being its top product. The total population of New Zealand is only 4.4 million people. ¾ of the population lives in the north island, which has 1/3 of the land mass and the remaining ¼ of the population live in the southern island, in the remaining 2/3 of the land mass. This is why all roads outside of the few major cities are two lane highways splitting shared bridges. On our four hour drive north on paved and unpaved highways (no beach driving since that was against the rules), as far as the eye can see, are rolling hills, mountains, and fields splashed with shades of green that can only be replicated in one’s mind due to their uniqueness. Photos do not do them justice. Hillsides and valleys dotted with sheep, cows, and goats framed our entire drive. A couple of sheep herds stood out in their coats of neon colors. Brittany said that farmers here paint their sheep to differentiate the herds from their neighbors. After 20 hours of traveling, I wasn’t sure if I was seeing pink sheep or pink elephants. Sleep deprived, I was just glad they were real for whatever reason.

A couple hours later we arrived in Waipoua State Forest where the Kauri trees once forested the entire region. We stop, dress warmer, and head out on our hikes. Brittany adds an extra layer. Me? I add three more to my already three layers I traveled in. Brittany keeps warning me we are at the warmest part of our trip. I keep telling her baby steps, baby steps. And as long as I can still feel blood going to my extremities, then I am fine. Learned the hard way that not feeling them is worse than being cold. Car locked, umbrella in hand, and we are off.