Toku whaea

At the start of November my mum flew over for a couple of weeks. It was great to spend time catching up with her and to show her a few bits of New Zealand.


We started with a weekend of sight-seeing in Wellington. We took things pretty gently as my mum got over her jetlag. Luckily we had some nice sunny weather. We wandered through town, took the cable car up to the botanic gardens, visited Te Papa (the excellent national museum) and drove up to the Mount Victoria lookout.

Parliament (next to the more famous Beehive)

The Cable Car

Mum in the botanic gardens

Wellington Harbour from Mount Victoria

For the first few days of the next week, mum took a trip over to Picton, where I went back in June. While I was doing a few days in work, she got to do some wine tasting in Marlborough and see the Queen Charlotte Sounds.


We then had a long weekend road trip up the north island to the Taranaki region. On the drive up, we stopped off to stay with some family friends who live in Wanganui. Dora was originally from England, but has lived in New Zealand for most of her life and taught in a range of schools here. Fred had been a fighter pilot instructor during WW2 and gone on to be a flight instructor. They had some really interesting stories, a lovely home and a wealth of knowledge about New Zealand.



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We carried on from Wanganui to Taranaki, which is dominated by two things - Mount Taranaki and the dairy industry.


Mount Taranaki (also known as Mount Egmont) is a volcano that rises up out of the otherwise pretty flat land in the Western extension of the North Island. Except that it's often shrouded in cloud, it absolutely dominates the scenery of the area. Fortunately as we were driving towards Taranaki the mountain was visible as, by the time we arrived it was cloudy and stayed that way for the next few days. It's very strange when you know the mountain is right there not to be able to see anything of it.

We were staying in a small lodge part of the way up the side of the mountain. A short drive above us was a plateau with some striking views of the region spread out below.

The best times to see the Mountain are first thing in the morning and at night. From the back of our room you could look straight out (up) to the Mountain.

Mount Taranaki at night

As I mentioned earlier, the second thing that dominates the area is the dairy industry. Most of the land is given over to herds of dairy cows. There are hundreds of milk tankers on the roads, all heading between the farms and the Fonterra processing plant, which is the largest dairy plant in New Zealand. 


The slopes of the Mountain are all national park land and so we went out on several walks. The forest and bush is apparently 'cloud forest' because of the climate, which after a couple of days of rain made a lot of sense. It was incredibly lush and almost felt like an enchanted forest.

One of our walks took us to the impressive Dawson's Falls -

We also took a drive on the road that circles Taranaki, which includes a stretch of road called Surf Highway. Unfortunately there was no surf the day we were there, so the wetsuit stayed in the car.

Black sand beach

PS - as you can see I had a good time practising with the new camera body my mum brought out for me (a Nikon D7000 for those who are interested).