Helensville

July 6, 2009

I woke up at 5:30 am today and after attempting to go back to sleep for a half an hour, I gave up and got up at 6 again. Grrr. Raven also got up at six and we took out our laptops and worked online for a while before getting up to get ready. We’re at this bed and breakfast place that is also a backpacker and it’s really an upgrade from our typical backpacker except … the showers were HORRIBLE. OMG. New Zealand is not known for its warm buildings but somehow I’ve been functioning pretty well … until this morning when I stepped into that shower. Sooooo cold. Raven was also not happy and after being in that darn shower, I was freezing.

Being a B&B/Backpacker, they provide a continental breakfast in the morning. We were not impressed. There was some yucky muffin in a basket with four pieces of what looked like Wonder Bread, some muesli full of preservatives and milk sitting out on the counter. We tried toasting the bread and then decided to forget it and made our own breakfast instead. I think I’d like to tell the owner not to bother with breakfast tomorrow as we’re planning on making omelets instead with a yummy whole grain bread. Mmm.

We spent part of our morning plotting out our day and we decided to go back to Karekare, which is next to Piha where we went yesterday so that we could see the Karekare Falls. We would then go to Fairy Falls, which was recommended in a parks brochure. We got the GPS ready and headed south towards Karekare. We again had to traverse the ridiculously windy and hilly roads west of Auckland and felt relieved that we wouldn’t have to drive down the treacherous road leading to Piha. We turned off towards Karekare on “Lone Kauri Road”. OMFG, that was one scary road. It made Piha Road look like an express way. There was really only enough room for one car and again we dealt with the turns and hills. I thought that the road had to be one way. It wasn’t and we had a car come from the other direction at least once. To top it all off, the GPS unit, which Raven has named Magda the Lying Bitch, told us in the middle of the road that we’d reached our destination. I don’t think so! We kept driving until we came across a trail head. We were hoping it’d lead to the Karekare Falls as the only description of the trail we had was the guide book saying that it was 100 meters passed the bridge. We kept driving and passing stretches of road that had wooden barriers to prevent us driving off the cliff and we kept wondering if we might have come across a bridge. No such luck. Finally, we realized that we were approaching some semblance of civilization and we actually crossed a bridge at the bottom of the hill. We parked the car and headed across the street to where we could actually see the falls from the cliff. Yay! I got my camera out, ready to take pictures of this little bridge when… I realized that I’d left the battery to my camera in the hostel. NOOOOOO! Being a picture taking fiend, this was devastating for me. Raven was willing to share her camera and I accepted her offer but it still drove me crazy. We decided to walk back to the car because I had brought a spare battery with me that had seemed damaged. I had shown it to Raven a couple of days prior and when I was handing it to her, it dropped between the seats and we didn’t bother to retrieve it. Well, we tried today and it was nowhere to be found. We moved the seats, crawled under the dashboard, we tried everything… no battery. *sigh* So no camera for me.

We decided to walk over to the beach at least even though this long adventure to Karekare was not panning out well. We started walking and the rain started to come down. We had read in the guide book that in order to access the beach we’d have to wade through ankle-deep water. We had our water shoes on so no big deal. However, when we got to the ‘ankle-deep’ water, it was up to our knees. Raven took a picture of me crossing this mini river and then crossed herself. The path was partially blocked by this river so we had to walk among the grasses to find our way to the beach. By this time, the rain was coming down so hard that Raven said, “I think hail just hit my eyeball”. Sure enough, the rain was so strong that it looked like hail and it was painful as it hit our faces. We braved on, getting drenched until we finally reached the hill leading to the water. We looked up and decided we’d had enough and headed back to the car. Did I mention that we were soaking wet? LOL. I did get some pictures with Raven’s camera, which I’ll download later.

OK, so Karekare was a bit of a disaster. We felt like we’d accomplished something though since we’d crossed a mini river in torrential rain. However, the prospect of driving to another trail head when this was such a disater didn’t sound fun. I wanted to buy a new battery for my camera and Raven needed a wool sweater, a power strip and a backpack so she suggested that we drive into Auckland instead. Yay! Shopping! So we did, not trusting Magda the Lying Bitch to guide us, so I did instead. I spent a few days in Auckland in 2004 so I had some idea of where I was and we tried to find a restaurant that I’d eaten at last time. I remembered the street name, which was crazy. The restaurant is now gone but we parked by it anyway and walked up Queen Street until we found a restaurant we liked. We settled on a Turkish restaurant and then headed out trying to find some of the stuff we wanted. We didn’t have much luck as we walked up the hill and realized that it wasn’t the best part of town. Even so, we continued to walk around and did find an army surplus store where we posed next to a mannequin dressed like Sasquatch. The sales associates asked us not to take any more pictures but I’m glad we took the ones that we did. After stopping in 6-7 stores looking for a battery, we were directed to an actual camera store. We saw a Kathmandu store (kind of a Kiwi Eddie Bauer) where Raven ran in to find a sweater and I ran across the street (look RIGHT) and found a battery for my camera. I quickly started taking pictures since I had to get this shutterbug deprivation out of my system, met up with Raven and we headed back towards Helensville.

We stopped at a grocery store in Helensville and got food for dinner, returned to our backpacker, cooked and now we’re sitting here in our room relaxing and typing online. It wasn’t the day that we’d planned but it was definitely memorable and a lot of fun!