New Zealand’s Special K

Kauri & Kiwi. The Kauri are easy to find, hard to do justice in a photograph. An evergreen native and unique to New Zealand with perfectly straight knot-free trunks. Prized by ship-builders for masts and spars, and by everyone else for just about everything else. In addition, the
dried sap, kauri gum, was a principal ingredient for varnish up until polyurethanes were invented. When full size they are the third heaviest living thing on the planet, after the Blue Whale and California Redwoods.



Approximately 45,000 years ago some natural disaster decimated the kauri forests, knocking
them all down in the same direction. Tsuami, cyclone, meteor, earthquake, volcano, we don’t
know. Many of the logs fell into, and became entombed in, peat bogs. And there they sat. Now,
one by one, those preserved logs, typically 2 to 6 meters diameter, are being found. Beautiful
golden wood, you’ll see a bowl made from preserved kauri wood, inlaid with shells Margie
found along the beaches, next time you visit us.

Meanwhile, there are some living kauris that have survived the loggers. The largest is 16.4
meters around and 29.9 meters tall. Nowhere near as tall as the giant sequoias, but due to their
proportions they seem more massive. And impossible to properly photograph.

In addition to wandering around hugging trees, we play in waterfalls at every opportunity.

And, finally, here are a few pictures of Moby. At 7.7 meters long and 3.3 tall it’s the largest campervan available for rent here. Supposedly big enough for 6, we’ve managed to make it feel
crowded with only 2. Phil’s had a lot of fun wheeling it around single lane gravel mountain roads, dodging triple logging trucks and learning that 2 cm is plenty of clearance on each side.


Oh, the other “K”, Kiwi. Elusive, nocturnal, and even harder to photograph. We went on
midnight rambles in Trousen Park and Waipoua Forest to no avail. Finally at Aroha Island we
found one. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say it found us. We had just started along
the trail a few hours after dark, when it jumped out from the bush on the left side, ran under
Phil’s upraised left foot, and scampered away on the right. We saw it long enough to positively
identify it as a juvenile kiwi, but not long enough to get the camera focused. If it had stayed
where it was on the left we never would have seen it.