The first stop this day was the Kauri Museum. This turned out to be a top-notch museum experience. It is not just about Kauri but about New Zealand settler life in the 1880-1920 period. Large, full of interesting exhibits, very nicely presented.
Yesterday we mentioned Kauri "gum" (fossilized resin that is still valued for musical instrument finishes). One room of this museum displays the "gum" collections amassed by several different collectors. There were hundreds of pieces. Here are a few of the larger ones.
Here is a sample Kauri log on an cart that would have been pulled along rails by oxen:
And here are outlines of historical Kauri girths. The smallest represents Tane Mahuta, the living tree we showed yesterday. The second-largest is the largest officially-measured tree.
A nice feature of this really enjoyable museum was the dozen or more dioramas of settler life around the turn of the century. What made them especially lively was that the mannequins had all been modeled after real people, descendants of settlers, whose names were listed on the exhibit. The highly individual faces made the dioramas much more lifelike.
Southbound and Down
We are done with the north country now; time to return to the central North Island.
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So we transited down past Auckland. It had been cloudy and drizzly all night and rained lightly all the way.
We ended up in a campground just a few Km from the Britz office where we started out seven days ago. Nearby was a shopping mall where we found several small items we'd been wanting to buy, and got groceries for the next few days.
Purty FLowers
With a little time on our hands and a brief clearing in the weather, we decided to drop in on the Auckland Botanical Garden which was also nearby. This is a young garden, only opened in the 1970s, and free to the public. We spend a couple of hours wandering around shooting pics of amazing flowers, then had tea and called it a day.
Here are a bunch of pics of springtime stuff in Auckland. Tomorrow: on to Lake Taupo!
Telopea var. "Starburst" (Proteacea)
Baby mallards.
Humonguous aloe.
King Protea
Backlit magnolia
The Kowhai ("co-fie"), native spring harbinger.
Kowhai blossoms.
Early rose.
Hello, what are you doing here?
1 comment:
Do you suppose the legendarily-sized tree ever existed? The "space needle" in Auckland looks interesting, can you go to the top for panoramas? In the sunshine, Auckland looks like a real city, even if it is upside down from us. The flowers pix make us want to head for the mountains—but alas!, they are dry and brown now.
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