FLASHBACK: Traveling South Through North Island

In Kiwi-land, I was surprised, by two things. First there was the abundance of sheep, EVERYWHERE. As we drove south in the northern peninsula, we kept seeing sheep after sheep, with little ones, fluffy ones, large ones, and even ones next to cows. I really grew to like the sheep & the call "sheepies" was shouted more than once. Here is a very realistic portrait of what we saw as we sped through the countryside.

The second thing that surprised me was the lack of kiwis (the fruit). Instead, I kept seeing rows & rows of what appeared to be grapes, but instead of growing vertically as seen in the US & Canada, they were grown horizontally. Strange, I thought, New Zealander's have figured out how to grow grapes horizontally, and then we came across...

A

GIANT

KIWI!!!

The world's largest, I'll suggest. It was appropriately just near the entrance of a place called Kiwiland and there were thousands of the unripe buggers. Cam & I ducked our heads under the canopy and snapped this shot.

They weren't grapes at all, they were the fruit I'd been searching for on our trip. Turned out, the season for kiwis wasn't in New Zealand during our trip, it was in Italy and while visiting Kiwiland we tried an Italian sample. It was tasty, but I wished we could have tried the "real thing" from the "real country."

I had never heard of a golden kiwi until our trip to Kiwiland and if only we could try one, but not grown in Italy, only New Zealand and we were in the wrong growing season.

And who would visit the north Island only not to see Rotorua? You may be thinking to yourself, "ahhh, hot springs" but what you probably didn't realize was how smelly the place was. After pulling along side the road & peering through a fence, we went to a hot spring park called Craters of the Moon that had a short trail in & around a bunch of active hot springs. It was pretty mesmerizing to watch the steam rise through the air, especially as the sun was setting. We only had 30 min or so to do the walk, and we were quite distracted by the bubbling mud, but we made it out in time before they locked the gate.

Next up for flashbacks: Karangahake Gorge (and more industry).