Colossal Kauri Trees

January 8^th, 2020

Continuing north from Port Roberts the road took me along the west coast, or close to it.  I took a slight detour off of the main road and stopped at the Trounson Kauri Forest Walk.  Kauri trees are these massive evergreen trees that used to be present fairly worldwide in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods but now are only found in the southern hemisphere.

Hmm...maybe I won't go down this road...

When I visited the 1000 year old tree near Wellington, the family that I met there had mentioned that in the Northland I would experience these “boot washing stations” before many hikes.  It was similar to going through a metal detector at an airport but with brushes for the soles of your feet that were activated by pulling a lever forward, similar to a shoe washing machine you find at a curling rink.  Some disinfectant spray also shot up to finish the job.

A nice bird greeted me as I arrived.

The foot washing station.

With my soles cleansed, I began the short half hour hike.  A lot of it was on boardwalk and there were a multitude of signs instructing you to stay on the trail otherwise you were jeopardizing the life of these giants.  You see the reason for these precautions was due to a deadly fungus whose species name is agathidicida which means “kauri killer” and the symptoms that the tree endures is known as kauri dieback.  This deadly fungus can be spread by humans walking around so I see why they take this seriously.  Some of these kauri trees are over 1000 years old and it would be said to see them go.

It's a bit hard to get the scale in these pics...but let me reassure you, they were big!

One that is dying off...

I liked the twist in the trunk.

The hike was great and I got back on the road for another hour or so until I reached the mouth of the Mangamuka River.  Across the inlet was a huge sand dune which looked like a promising place to play around with a paraglider but there was no easy way to get there.  I enjoyed the view then continued another 9 kilometres up the inlet to my camp spot for the night.  It was a piece of private land, kind of an interesting bit of relatively flat grassy field up on a promontory.  There was one fair sized encampment of a few tents, a tarp shelter and some vehicles at one end of the property.  A half dozen kids were running around, shouting and having fun playing some kind of game.  I decided to park Betty 2.0 at the furthest flat spot I could find from them for some peace.

Well within 10 minutes some of the Maori kids came running over to my van.  They were playing some kind of tag game and my vehicle happened to be a “home base”.  I didn’t mind.  We started chatting and they were quite interested to learn that I was from Canada and that I’d been travelling in this van all over their country.  I was a bit shocked that a few of the older kids really had no idea where Canada was.  I mentioned Vancouver and no lightbulbs went off.  One boy who returned after the others had left boldly asked me if I had any Canadian money that he could have.  First, I showed him a $20 Canadian bill and compared it to the New Zealand one, they are very similar:  same colour, almost an identical picture of the Queen, both are plastic and have the see through band on one side.  Then I remembered that I had just found a toonie a few days before in my bag (a 2 dollar coin), so I showed it to him and explained the origin.  At first, we had the 1 dollar coin with the loon bird on it so it was name the “loonie” and it was only natural that the subsequent $2 coin be a “toonie”.  So I gave him the coin and he was super happy although five minutes later when the rest of the tribe came back, he could hardly remember the name of the coin and the story behind it.  Oh well…