Fairly early on in our plans for New Zealand I decided that I wanted to go to New Plymouth. People I spoke to back here looked at the map and told me that I was a lunatic. People on the internet pointed at the volcanic bits in the middle of the island or the huge expanse of the south island, and told me I was a lunatic. But I was determined – I wanted to go to New Plymouth.
When we got to Auckland we spoke to a couple of people about our plans. Some expressed pleasant surprise that we weren’t blasting from Auckland to Wellington to go do big town stuff. Others told us it was one of the best things we could do.
I’m glad we went.
From our brief stay, I have to say that New Plymouth is a weird little town. It’s wedged between Mount Egmont and the Tasman Sea, it has major routes through the centre that bring to mind an American strip, and it has a very British feeling town centre. It also has one of the most stunning botanic gardens I’ve ever seen.
Sparrow watching us eat, by GB
My knowledge of botanic gardens is somewhat limited, but I know that gardens should be close cropped lawns with specimen plants in perfect flowerbeds. They should be boring places that my grandparents would love and I hate. They should…
Spot the grass...
That’s the view from the tea shop where we ate cake for breakfast. You’ll notice the huge expanses of closely cropped grass. In fact, with the exception of the Brooklands Bowl, there’s virtually no grass in the place – it’s all lakes, trees and shady little glades. If it wasn’t for the steep sides to the valley, you could easily get lost in there…
By the way, over the Poets’ Bridge you can see Mount Egmont. It’s subtle, isn’t it? 2,5000m of volcano sitting there, apparently overdue to erupt. And it has a bit of a habit of doing so in an explosive way…
Poets' bridge at the top end of the main lake
The bridges here were funded by a park board member after he won a substantial sum on the horses in Auckland. Rather strangely, he went missing some 9 years later and his body was found floating under it…
If you go down to the woods today, by GB
Two thirds of the way down the park is the Brooklands bowl, where crews were setting up for a Cliff Richard concert. The bowl is a natural amphitheatre in the grounds of what was once the governor’s gardens…
Beside the stage looking out at the amphitheatre...
...and looking back down
The house itself was razed to the ground in 1861 during the First Taranaki War, leaving just this behind. From this photo we can deduce two things: if you must take a photo of a chimney in shadow on a bright day, be prepared for a crappy photo, and; if you are going to piss of the Maori, build your house out of chimneys…
It's a horrible photo. Sorry.
These things are called Rhododendrons in my world...
...even though I know that's something else completely
By this time we’d wasted a good few hours in the park and we needed to get moving, so we walked back to the car. On the way we discovered this guy…
Black shag
No matter what anyone else says, I’d still have posted a photo of him even if the Kiwis did call them Great Cormorants like the rest of the planet. It’s not that the Kiwis are wrong… it’s just that when the rest of the planet started calling cormorants and shags “cormorants”, they went the other way and called them all shags. I like your style, New Zealand…
Right by the exit to the park is a waterfall. It’s a wonderful thing that was designed some 100 years before it was actually built. Why? Well, because it’s above water level and you can turn it on…
Just after GB had confused me by turning it on...
Right, it’s gone lunchtime, we’ve got 280km to drive and one of us is wearing sunglasses… hit it!
View Day 4 – New Plymouth to Palmerston North in a larger map
Yeah… our next (brief) stop wasn’t even outside the city limits…
Hows that for a beautiful sea...?
And the next was 10 miles further down the road in Oakura…
Fluid dynamics in action, by GB
And then again 5 miles later…
The Mondeo (hereby retrospectively named 'Fanny') losing at Hide & Seek
One of the things that we haven’t touched on is the Americana that was in New Plymouth the night we were, quite simply because we had no idea what it was. On the open road, with the local rock radio station on, we quickly found out more. The Americana was a large group of American cars which were touring the north island for charity, putting on a bit of a show and generally doing good.
And they were heading east. We realised this when eager crowds of locals welcomed us to their town with an alarming number of American flags. We didn’t have the heart to tell them that we were British…
Our run from New Plymouth to Palmerston North was dull. Really dull. Nothing happened at all. I definitely didn’t get us there in record time, spend an hour in a long distance blast across the country with a big Holden, or accidentally (no, I mean this bit) break the speed limit by 50%. In my defence, the roads were better quality than any ‘A’ road in the UK, and I’d just overtaken a huge lorry that was throwing things at me. Yeah, you’re right… that’s no excuse. The big car did it and drove away…
Now.. Palmerston North. What a boring place…
Let me give you some exciting facts about Palmerston North… It’s the 11th largest town in NZ, with a population of 80k (Cambridge has a population of 113k). Half the population is under 25 years old. 10% of the workforce works for the education sector. It was renamed Palmerston North by the Post Office, who kept getting confused with Palmerston (pop 1,000) on the south island. Part of the local landfill is named “Mount Cleese” after John Cleese suggested the city would drive someone to suicide. Oh, and it has a fantastic library…
PNLibrary on its 80th anniversary - Palmerston North Library Flickr stream
There’s quite a few pictures in the library Flickr stream that are worth checking out. Oh how I’d love a library like this instead of the badly funded mess we have in Cambridge…
After generally nerding out in the library (and possibly terminally embarrassing a librarian by telling her how much we loved their library) we headed off for our next exciting restaurant adventure – except this time I won’t tell you anything about what we had to eat because the menu was all in Korean. The (Californian) plum wine was bloody nice though…
Tags: botanic gardens, holiday, mount egmont, new plymouth, new zealand, palmerston north
