Taranaki

Mt Taranaki in the rain above.

On Friday night my cold/virus thing deteriorated and my tonsils felt like they were going to suffocate me. The virtues and anti-bacterial properties of manuka honey (from bees which cultivate the manuka tree flowers) have been something we've taken an interest in over here so I took a spon full. Almost instantly the pain went (due to the honey coating the infection) but by the morning it was all but gone, another spoon full and within an hour or two it was pretty much done away with. So the manuka honey seems to work pretty well.

Anyway suitably cured we headed to the town centre of New Plymouth. We had a look around the Puke Akiri museum, basically a cut down version of the big New Zealand Museum in Wellington and equally as interesting. We then took a drive along the foot of mount taranaki and back.

Next morning we went to see the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The Lonely Planet says that even if you're not interested in contemporary art you should still go. Well I'm not interested in contemporary art but I went along anyway. Suffice to say I'm still not interested in contemporary art. I can only assume that the artists works have so much about the wrongs of humanity because they feel so much guilt at ripping off everyone by producing so much rubbish.

There was actually one piece which simply consisted of some grey acrylic on a frame. It was entitled 'grey acrylic' and to be honest it was very thought provoking, thoughts like, was this guy just the first one to have the balls to exibit something so obviously useless and un-interesting.

Waste of time!

Next we headed to our lodgings for Sunday night. The Camphouse lies 1000m up on the east side of Mt Taranaki. It was just on the bottom of the cloud line and we were in cold greyness but could see the sun blessed fields stretching out below the mountain.

The Camphouse was built in 1855 and actually bares bullet holes from the Maori-European battles which took place in the area.

After a good nights sleep we woke to see all the cloud had cleared and we could see all the way to the central volcanoes 150km away, one of which we climbed 2 months ago. What a view.

Jamie had also developed a cold overnight too and this continued. Either it's the same as mine but alot worse or it's a totally different virus and alot worse or he's just a big wooss. I'm going for the latter. He spent most of the next two days in bed at our farmstay hostel in Hawera, South Taranaki. Wheatly Downs is run by the same guy who owned the other two places we stayed in in Taranaki. Nice guy, absolutely loaded but still working on his dairy farm.

Today we travelled the 140km Forgotten World Highway between Hawera and Taumaranui and on to National Park which is right on the foot of the central volcanoes we could see from the camphouse. The snow is beginning to coat the mountain tops, the trees are turning more and more and t-shirts outside are no longer an option. It's the NZ equivalent of November now.

We're just going to spend the next few days trying to recover from whatever that virus was and see if we are capable of doing to caving by the weekend or not.