THE NORTHERN TIP OF THE NORTH ISLAND AND SACRED GROUND

Since we are back at level 1, we’re able to play pickleball again at Brown’s Bay community athletic club.  So Alisa and I are doing that again on Tuesday nights.  Otherwise, in the evenings I worked a little on a power point presentation of our mission which I can show when we get home.  Part of it are some slides I got from the Area presidency showing some of the statistics in the Pacific area which gives a little more context to where we are serving and what we are dealing with.

This is the Labor Day holiday weekend, with tomorrow (Monday) being NZ’s Labor Day.  So Alisa and I decided to make one more trip north, this time all the way to the northern tip of the North Island, I’ve been wanting to see that countryside.  So we left a little early on Friday afternoon from work and drove to the tiny town of Waipapa, near Keri Keri.  We had arranged a farm BnB to stay at.  That was fun, we drove by a lot of citrus and avocado orchards and grape and kiwi fruit vineyards.  At our BnB they had hogs, sheep and a couple of gardens.  I picked and cooked myself some chard, and fed some to the animals who were my buddies.  This whole area reminded me of central California.

Saturday morning we got up early and drove to Kaitaia, one of the northernmost towns in NZ.  We met our 4 wheel drive bus and guide there and spent the day touring the peninsula.  We drove along 90 mile beach (similar to Oceano in California but longer), slid down the huge sand dunes there on boogie boards, stopped at the lighthouse on the northern tip of the North Island where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific join each other (the Tasman waters are green and the Pacific blue), stopped for a bbq at a park, stopped at a stand for fruit ice cream cones, and arrived back to Kaitaia in the early evening.  According to Maori legend, the spirits of the dead depart their bodies, pass along 90 mile beach, then at Cape Reinga (where the light house is located) depart from NZ and eventually travel to Hawaiki (Heaven). So Cape Reinga is considered sacred ground.  We stayed overnight at the Loredo motel there.  Sunday morning I decided to try driving our little 2 wheel drive Nissan on 90 mile beach, but I didn’t even make it 20 feet before I got it stuck in the sand.  I couldn’t push it out with Mom driving, so finally I asked a local fisherman to pull me out with his 4 wheel drive vehicle and rope.  We then did a bush walk, attended Sacrament meeting in Kaitaia that was only a couple of blocks from our motel, then packed up and headed back.  We stopped at the Kawiti glow worm caves, which were quite impressive to hike through.  We learned that 88% of the world’s glow worms are found in NZ, with the other 12% in Australia.

Back home again in our little apartment in Auckland, we’ll take most of tomorrow off for the holiday.  The YSA’s have scheduled a bush walk, so we’ll probably accompany them.  Next weekend Alisa and I continue on our farewell tour by flying down to the southern tip of the South Island!