Hamilton Gardens and Tauranga art gallery

We went to visit a friend of Ash’s in a town called Cambridge last weekend (they have one here too). Before lunch, we went over to the public gardens in Hamilton, which were well worth a visit and free to enter, which obviously gets a thumbs-up from me.

The first garden had some interesting inscriptions of Maori proverbs; there was one written on a large steel pipe which means “as man disappears from sight, the land remains”. Apparently the pipe will eventually rust away to nothing, which I thought was kind of cool.

There was also a traditional maori garden, which included this store house for keeping crops off the ground (I know that there weren’t any rodents in New Zealand before Europeans arrived, so I guess this was either introduced after that or was a way of stopping food getting damp?) All the little mounds you can see in the background are for sweet potatoes, which apparently need to be very well drained.

We had chosen a good time of year to visit the japanese garden, which had some nice autumn colours.

The next stop was Tauranga art gallery (also free!). It was pretty small, but they had an interesting exhibit of interactive art – some of it was a bit perfunctory, but the highlight was this three-dimensional light installation that you could walk through.

Kaiate Falls and Mount Maunganui

After getting into a normal sleep pattern and getting some of the boring stuff out of the way (like organising a bank account and a SIM card), we took a bit of time to go and enjoy the outdoors.

Our first stop was Kaiate falls, which is a little way out in the country from Tauranga. It's a short walk, about half an hour down the hill and half an hour back up. Very soon after we set off on the path, we got this view of town (that's Mount Maunganui in the distance, more on that later) -

And then right after that you get your first waterfall -

And then at the bottom you get the main event -

The next day, we took advantage of a gap in the weather to climb Mount Maunganui. At 761 feet, it's just about the right length for a casual walk and you get some pretty nice views from the top. We had climbed this the last time I was in New Zealand, but we forgot just how steep it is!

We made it to New Zealand

As some of you know, it's been a hectic couple of months while we got everything sorted out for our move. Now that we're here, we're taking the chance to have a week or two of down time before we move down to Wellington to look for jobs and a flat. In the meantime, we're staying with Ash's parents in Tauranga. (Resident cat pictured below).

The flight went smoothly; we had a one hour changeover in Hong Kong, which was a bit hectic because the airport is massive, so we had to rush around to find our second plane. However, taking two 12 hour flights was definitely preferable to how I got to NZ last time, with a 6 hour flight and an 18 hour one - avoid that if you can!

Although the flight was good, we have had some hardcore jetlag since we got here, with today being the first time we have woken up after 2:30 am.

Because it is coming up to winter, I was expecting to arrive in the cold, but it has been 20 degrees and sunny so far, so hopefully we should still get a few weeks of nice weather. Here's a photo from our very sleepy trip to the waterfront yesterday:

                                  

I'll be posting an update when we get up to something a bit more interesting, but I guess that's it for now!