Week 5 - 20th & 21st Oct

Wed. 21st
Spent most of the day at the Auckland Botanical gardens.

These gardens are a fifteen minute walk from our backpackers lodge.

This garden is huge. It began in 1972 and opened in 1982. It covers 156 acres, which includes many acres of native forests.

We enjoyed walking through the different sections: Edibles, Native plants, threatened Native plants, NX plants, shrubs, palms, Kauri Grove, Roses, Camellias, Magnolias, Spring Blossom Valley, African plants, Rock garden, Herbs, and Salvias.

Alan and I spent over three hours exploring this beautiful garden.

We enjoyed seeing the interesting sculptures throughout the garden.









Planted between the highway and the gardens are groupings of native trees. They had many Kauri trees, but our favourite is the Norfolk Pine.


Tues. 20th
Our travels are taking us down the west coast of the north island. By tonight we will be in Auckland. This weekend is their labour day holiday, so we plan on staying in Auckland as accommodation will be harder to find.

The Kauri Museum was our main stop today. The history of Kauri wood is shown through historical photographs. Beautiful specimens of the wood were throughout the museum. The trees are truly enormous. There were extensive examples of Kauri gum in different colours, shapes and sizes. The search for this gum was equivalent to the gold rush Canada had.

Hiked into Piroa falls. The drive was quite scary, loose gravel, a lane and a bit wide and up, down and all around the mountains. The hike in was beautiful, a little rainforest with this water fall.

We are seeing more sheep lately. I realized we haven't taken many pictures of sheep!