2006/05 NZ trip - Piha - Kitekite Falls |
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Friday May 12th
The morning started wet, but that gave us time to unpack and juggle stuff around until we could move about the camper. We’d packed to comply with the airline’s 50 pound limit, so we had a lot of sorting to do.
Piha is a town of funny little houses, mainly summer cabins. Nobody’s turned them into summer mansions yet. Their gardens contain an amazing mixture of plants, some native, some English, South African, and South American. Gigantic poinsettias are very common. The forest behind the town is also strange, dominated now by ferns and palms, but containing the stumps of 
giant kauri trees that were logged out of these hills in a previous century. Green is the dominant colour, and even the rocks are covered by dark green moss with flashes of light green lichen.
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Kitekite Falls (3.01) |  |
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We hiked up the Glen Esk River, and then up the steep mountainside to Kitekite Falls. The forest is similar to Tasmania’s and we kept expecting to see pademelons bouncing along through the undergrowth, but none of Australia’s marsupials got to NZ until recently when some idiot brought possums to the islands, and now they have millions of them.
Kitekite Falls are beautiful, a series of cascades spilling down the green mountainside. We climbed down to the pool below the falls and enjoyed the view until heavy rain set in again. It stayed with us for our long walk back to the camper.
We waited in the camper until the rain eased up and then went back to the beach to hike the Tasman Lookout trail up and along the cliff tops to the Gap. Piha Beach is a popular surfing spot, and there were great crashing breakers coming in. This time, instead of sand, we were blasted by sea foam, circular blobs of it bowled along by the wind. The trail begins with steep steps up the cliff. We could see how Lion Rock got its name, with nose and eyes looking out to sea, and its haunches protecting the town. The plants up on the clifftop were an odd mixture of what looked like Pampas grass, 
English gorse, and some fleshy head-high succulents, topped by even higher seed-bearing stems, similar to the century plants we’d seen in Texas. We later found out that this is called “flax”, even though it is different from European flax. It was a very important plant for the Maoris, providing them with food and clothing. The trail took us to overlooks of great rocks and crashing waves, very rugged country. In the summertime, this headland is home for colonies of breeding penguins,
but they spend all the winter months at sea, so there were none to be seen. We rejoiced in two minutes of blazing sunshine and peeks at blue sky before we got dumped on by an hour of heavy rain.
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Piha (9.21) |  |
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Saturday May 13th
We had a glorious sunrise from behind the hill, but the rain came along again soon. We took a quick look at the other end of the beach, miles of sand and booming surf, and crashing waves as far as we could see. From Piha we headed inland and north through pretty green rolling hills. At a distance, it looked like the illustrations in the Rupert Bear books, more English than England, or perhaps just the England of decades ago. A closer look though revealed that most of the plants and trees are different, with ferns and palms alongside the imported pines and oaks.
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