February 2024
Hello everyone,
NEW ZEALAND 2024: Heading north
On 20 January, having left Banana Split well moored in the marina at Hervey Bay, on the edge of the Great Sandy Strait, I took the plane for Auckland, where Francette, who had arrived from Paris via Tahiti, joined me the next day, for a trip we had promised ourselves to take to one of our favourite regions: the north of New Zealand.
We spent two days on the pretty Atatu Peninsula, giving Francette a chance to recover from her long flight, and then headed north. After discovering an extraordinary museum devoted to everything the New Zealanders have been able to do with the country's legendary giant trees, the Kauri, we went back to pay our respects to the oldest of these trees, the "King of the Forests", or Tane Mahuta , over 50 m high and between 1250 and 2500 years old.
We then moved on to the splendid Hokianga Bay, where the first Polynesian navigator to reach Kiwi country landed a thousand years ago; his memory is honoured in a show entitled Manes, Footprints of Kupe (coincidentally, my eldest son is called Manea). A little further north still, the immense 90 mile beach, which people explore on foot, motorbike, 4X4, ...horseback.
The fantastic Bay of Islands, which we had visited several times on our catamaran, we simply touched upon, with lunch in New Zealand's oldest hotel, the Duke of Marlborough in Russell, and a night close to the oldest house still inhabited in the country.
Then it was back on a plane to Australia, with a big diversion to Western Australia before heading back to Banana Split, which we'll tell you all about next month; in the meantime, to tease you, here's a photo taken today in the spectacular Bay of Esperance.
©Antoine.tv 2016