Feb-April 2011 New Zealand Week 2 part 2

Hamilton Gardens
Maori war canoe
Maori warrior
Their women are scary too!


We left Auckland and a taxi dropped us off at the depot of United, an RV rental company. I thought back to those days in PA a few months earlier when I was running between Ford and other service centers trying to get work done on my RV. I could not wait until we had a rental RV and RV maintenance would be someone else’s problem. That day had come. Our rental RV was here.
There is always a period of adjustment when you try to figure out how everything works in a new RV. After we loaded the refrigerator with food for the week, we noticed that the refrigerator was not working properly. We determine the problem was with the coach battery which was not charging. After we spend a good part of the first week running to service centers in three different cities, we got the battery charger replaced and the connection with the engine battery reconnected.
In spite of these problems we managed to keep busy touring the Coromandel Peninsula. On the west coast, we walked though the Water Works Museum where water powered each exhibit. Next we took a train ride up a mountain on a track that one man laid over the course of 26 years. It was quite a remarkable achievement. On the east coast we wanted to hike to Cathedral Cove, but a recent cyclone has destroyed the staircase, so we did a scenic hike to the Shakespeare Cliffs instead. After an enjoyable hike to Wentworth Falls, we visited an active pit open gold mine. We entered several abandoned gold mine tunnels in the Waitawhete Gorge; we found no gold, but the glow worms were in residence.
In Hamilton, we spent several hours touring the majestic gardens. The 500 foot Wairere Falls should not be missed on the way to Rotorua. Rotorua is a tourist town surrounded by geothermal activity. There is a geyser there that erupts the same time every day. I was curious how this could be possible. I found out that the ranger dumps a surfactant down into the geyser, which changes the water tension and causes the geyser to explode. I can’t imagine a ranger in Yellowstone NP ever doing that. Later we went to a Maori hangi (feast) where we were fed pork, chicken and lot of other foods that were cooked in an underground pit. Their performance was both educational and entertaining.