Tuesday - the return, DNA testing + chasing rainbows!

Hmm ... so back to Tuesday and leaving the Bay of Islands, which seems like an awful long time ago now with it being late Thursday night. Our first stop was Kawakawa Toilets designed by Fredirich Hundertwasser. I had seen them featured on TV when watching Billy Connolly's world tour of New Zealand and I remember thinking I must go there to see for myself this colourful and creative design. I'm pleased I did because it combines the local labour and talent e.g. students from schools created some of the tiles and the windows in the block were constructed using old bottles from the district. It even won the Creative New Zealand award in 2000 for being innovative, proud and very creative whilst embracing and enhancing the community - Urban and Landscape design.
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Next we went to Whangerei Falls, which made me so happy for a very silly reason and I'm not sure how well this will translate here in writing. I guess it all depends on your prounciation and if you've seen That Mitchell and Webb show .... to cut a long story short ... before I learnt how to say Whangerei properly (wh = f sound), I thought it sounded (at least on Friday) very similar to say numberwang - I guess you probably had to be there at the time (on a very long and otherwise boring car journey!) Nevertheless, the actual waterfall was spectacular - see picture - and the weather was sunny. Kirsten and I stayed for about an hour walking a trail in the sun around the area that followed the stream for sometime before we turned around and came back retracing our steps when we realised it wasn't going to loop back to the car park.



Back on the road we made slow progress in the rain because since Friday it seemed like a hundred road works had set up on highway 1. It took us forever to reach our next port of call Warkworth for our packed picnic lunch and purchasing of good quality meat from the local butchers - lamb, beef and chicken. Luckily the rain held off so we didn't have to eat in the car. We had the good fortune to pick up a map of Matakana - home of several vineyards - and chose to visit one or two for some tasting and hopefully a desert! Here is where we went ...


'Ascension is a family owned vineyard situated on a single steep, north-facing hillside at Matakana, an hour north of Auckland. Ascension was the first winery to pioneer Flora in Matakana. Recent critcally acclaimed vintages of this wine had been labelled Pinot Gris, grown from cuttings of a rare and forgotten clone sourced from two original “mother vines”. However, recent DNA testing in California revealed an amazing result. Our “pinot gris” vines were actually an exceptionally rare variety called “Flora”, almost indistinguishable to look at. The “mother” vines tuned out to be “rogue” vines creating “The Rogue”. You have in your hands an exceedingly rare wine that possesses a soft, oily texture and flavours of pear drops, lychees and spice. Simply superb with barbequed NZ salmon.'

I didn't get any desert in the end because Kirsten wanted to go and collect Gordon, but I did buy a bottle of the rogue wine - Bridget who is married to the owner talked a good talk about it (mentioning DNA sampling - very CSI) and it tasted very good. I also sampled a few other whites and reds, plus a tawny port and desert wine. Sadly there's a limit on how much you can bring back from NZ to UK or I'd have been tempted to buy more!

It continued to rain and shine on our journey back leading to a few sightings of rainbows, particularly in Auckland. I was chasing a picture of it and the sky tower from inside the car and this is the best I could manage after several attempts because it was a tricky task to do - windscreen wipers getting in the way etc. It may not be quite as bright as the DCSF Children's Plan rainbow, but it is real and I captured it. :-)

Finally we collected Gordon who seemed reasonably pleased to see us and we had the lamb for dinner that evening.