Waiomu Kauri Grove – Day 2

So today we are going to go on a hike. We go to Waiomu Kauri Grove.

Back to Dickson Holiday Park. Lovely holiday park might I just add. We need to get ready for the hike of the day which is the Waiomu Kauri Grove. There is a bit of a spraying thing that you need to spray your shoes and like wipe them so make sure that you don’t bring the disease into the kauri area because the kauri are suffering from something called Kauri Dieback which makes them die and they don’t come back, I think.

So the hike starts off just like a four by four track. We continue along the track which then becomes like single file and is actually like a proper hiking track like the sort of thing we can’t wait to do all over New Zealand. It’s here straight away in Thames and yeah the deeper we go into this forest the more like wild and interesting it gets so we got like steep walls on the side with moss growing on them which look cool and there’s like steep river gorges beside us. There’s lots of interesting little things like trickling water and all those noteworthy things. There is a lot of muddy parts and between the muddy parts there is a lot of bridges. From what I recall there is about three, four maybe five I can’t remember I mean I stopped counting at one point. But they are all gorgeous crossing above the river. You have like moss parts of rock. It’s just really really cool.

We decided to go have lunch somewhere by the river. There’s a bit of a river crossing as well which is a bit cool, eh. I like a bit of scrambling over things on a hike to make it a bit more interesting. We are going to go next to the river to have a good lunch.

Head back on the track and keep on hiking. We’ve been spending a lot of time doing all the little side tracks so it starts getting a little bit late. The sun goes down around 5ish? Something like that. So obviously you want to make sure that you are back in the campervan by that time.

We finally get to a set of steep stairs. This is the last slog we have to do until we reach the grand finale which is the Waiomu Kauri Tree. Kauri are among some of the oldest and largest trees in the world they are absolutely huge and once covered most of Northland and halfway down the North Island. When you see a kauri, it’s quite amazing. They are so large and when we finally saw the Waiomu Kauri itself we could only give it a hug. One way hikes are actually some of my favourites. Oh yeah, we can do this a lot faster and just like run down in a nice place.

The kauri grove track is meant to be about an hour but we ended up liking so much of this hike that we were filming everything on the way there and to do about 30 minutes even was taking us two hours.

Tomorrow we have a really big day because we are going to Butterfly and Orchid Garden and it’s going all about wildlife. Ready…

Such an arse…