Taranaki

All photos are my own.

Another week gone by!  As our move date draws ever closer, I thought we should have a look at my adoptive region of Taranaki.  It's pretty scenic.  Good coffee.  High rainfall.

It is also Lonely Planet's #2 region to visit in 2017!  HINT HINT, friends and family.

Taranaki takes its name from its biggest attraction, the mountain, known as Mount Egmont or Mount Taranaki.  According to Wikipedia it is "an active but quiescent stratovolcano".  I don't know what that means, but hopefully it's not anything Pompeii-like.  

The mountain stands 2519m high and you can hike up and down it in a day.  Because of its resemblance to Mt Fuji it provided the backdrop for the movie The Last Samurai.  Everyone you meet in Taranaki will tell you this fact.

You can see the mountain from almost everywhere in Taranaki (including our place!).  It occasionally looms up unexpectedly behind a hill or between two buildings, but I would suggest that it's obscured by cloud conservatively about 80% of the time.  

In winter there are ski fields on the eastern slope of the mountain.  So this is one of the truly unique things about Taranaki: you can go for a surf in the ocean and then ski the mountain, all within one day (or within an hour if you're really motivated).

This is my wallpaper on my computer at the moment.
I made B drive me around so I could take many photos and test the strength of our marital bond.

View towards New Plymouth (distant left) from halfway up the mountain in summer

New Plymouth is the major city of Taranaki with I think about 75,000 people.  So again my friend Wikipedia tells me it's a similar size to Bunbury in WA.  It's nice.  The main shopping centre is called Centre City.  There's a path that follows the coastline called the coastal walkway.  A farmers' market called the Seaside Market is held the first Sunday of every month.  There are lots of really beautiful weatherboard houses, which enchant me no end since I come from SA where everything is built of brick and stone.

Another of my favourite attractions in New Plymouth is Pukekura Park.  

Now let me just open the Wikipedia page for this one...

Pukekura Park is a Garden of National Significance.  Each year they hold a Festival of Lights from December to February, which is when we have usually been visiting, and it really shows off the park.  It's incredibly beautiful.  There are easy walking trails all over the place, a tea house, and a lake with row boats you can hire!  I had one of the best ice creams of my life in Pukekura Park when we visited last year.

Taranaki, like most of New Zealand, is more resemblant of England than Australia.  I dunno, I had always kind of thought that NZ would be similar to Oz since they're so close to each other.  On my first visit, in 2012, I was totally bowled over by how green and lush it all is.  I mean, it is volcanic as we have already learned so everything loves to grow.

Speaking of the volcanic-ness (my english just gets better and better), the sand on the beaches of Taranaki is black.  BLACK-black.  It's WEIRD.  And gets really hot.  It definitely adds a new and interesting dimension to the beach snaps.

The photo below is taken from Oakura beach, looking back up the coast towards New Plymouth.  The little eminences you can see are the Sugar Loaf Islands with Paritutu Rock to the right (the hill with the chimney coming out of it).  You can climb Paritutu Rock but it's deceptively dangerous and a few people have actually died falling from it which is a little sobering.  People have died on Mount Taranaki too now that I think of it.

These next few photos aren't actually from Taranaki but from Mokau, a little beach town about an hour north of New Plymouth in a region called Waitomo.  B's dad has a holiday house there (called a "bach" in NZ! - I think a whole other post on NZ colloquialisms awaits).  In case you couldn't tell from these photos, it too is incredibly beautiful.

Pretty great, right?