Russell

After lunch we drove to Opua and got the car ferry over to Russell. It was quite busy at the harbour. All the cafes and restaurants were full and there were people on the beach.

Beach road

Russell harbour

We had a wander around Russell and then drove through town to Long Beach – which is mostly just a beach – not really a surprise!

There were many more people at this beach and lots of people, and some dogs, in the sea. We walked the whole length of the beach as the sand was mostly very soft. 

The beach was full of shells and what we thought were pebbles we were walking on, were lots of broken shells.

The water was so clear and there were fish swimming really close to shore. There were lots of sailing ships a bit further out to sea.

Dog walking

We've just got back from the SPCA kennels where we walked 6 dogs. The kennels are about 10 minutes up the state highway from us on a road called Lemon Grove. The kennels are as nice as kennels can be. Most of the dogs are not in kennels but tethered on long ropes so they can wander around and sleep under the trees in the shade. There are about 20 dogs in total - there was a litter of 7 very young puppies named after the seven dwarfs.

First, we walked Mac and Marley, two 12 week old labrador cross puppies. Neither of them could walk in a straight line and were very playful! Very sweet though.

Next out was Samson (a staffie-like older puppy) and Pepper (a black labrador). We walked with two of the other regular dog walkers who showed us the route for the bigger dogs. The walk is through the lemon orchards which is very pleasant - the trees were full of fruit.

Our last two were Ned and Salt (sister of Pepper). We don't know what breed Ned is - he's about a year old and was very well behaved. Salt is about six months old and very energetic!

Ned

Salt

Gum Trees and Sunsets

Nice sunset last night, so took a picture from our deck, through the Blue Gum trees:

Tougher to take pictures, but even more impressive are the stars once the sun has really set. No light pollution out here makes for some amazing views. A bit odd to see Orion's sword above his belt (oo-er), though.

Off to walk some dogs this morning for the local SPCA kennels. Fingers crossed we don't find ourselves smuggling any puppies past our landlords on the way back!

Whangarei

Last night the couple we’re renting from (Julie and Graham) invited us to dinner. We had a very nice evening. They are both really interesting people and had lots of stories about how their families arrived in New Zealand. They both know a lot about NZ history so it was all very interesting. We had a nice meal and just a bit too much to drink! Nothing drastic but more than we’re both used to at the moment. Wag, their Irish Setter, fell asleep on James’ feet under the table and was most upset when we moved.

This morning, after opening my birthday cards (thank you to everyone that sent me one – even Mark and F’s card arrived on time!) we left the house about 10am and drove to Whangarei – the nearest big city - which is about 90km away.

Just outside the city is a big store called Harvey Norman. We went there to see how much furniture, beds, washing machines and TVs cost. There aren’t many places in Kerikeri to buy those sorts of things and they seem quite expensive to us so we thought we’d see what a bigger store might have. Now we know the prices of things we wished we’d brought more furniture with us. Although, our stuff is still sitting in England somewhere as far as we know.

We went to the town basin where there is a harbour full of yachts. There are some really nice cafes around the harbour but they mostly serve fish, which neither of us eat, so we headed up to the city and wandered around the shops for a while.

We found a place called Dickens Inn for lunch – mainly because it had at least something we could both eat – it can be a bit of a struggle sometimes!

Then a leisurely drive home.

Tour of the coast

After an early lunch we went for a tour of the coast north of Kerikeri. 

Our first stop was Cable Bay (1 on the map). The beach wasn’t really very sandy but the sea was perfectly blue.

We then drove back to Mangonui (2 on the map) and stopped for a drink. Lots of fishing trips go from Mangonui and it has a famous fish and chip shop apparently.

We carried on and got onto the tourist drive. We stopped at Wainui Bay (3 on the map) and went for a short walk along the beach.

Next was Matauri Bay (4 on the map) which was the best beach by far. Really soft sand and warm water. There were more people on this beach. Lots of people in the sea, some surfing.

Further down the beach there were a few caravans which looked like they’d been there a while. We guessed they were where families came for the weekend. We had a paddle here and walked the length of the beach before driving back home.

Open homes and Puketi Forest

Another Saturday morning of open homes! We visited three this morning:-

Open home 1

This was in a lovely setting with a big pond and a waterfall. Lots of land with it too.

Open home 2

This house had amazing views over the water and had really big rooms.

Open home 3

The third one was very unique with an indoor water feature and wavy walkway.

All were very nice. Still nothing that perfectly suits us but lots of interesting houses to consider.

In the afternoon we drove to Puketi  Forest and went along the nature trail.

There were huge kauri trees – native to NZ and growing up to 50 metres tall with a girth of 16 metres (read here if you want to know more about them ). There were also lots of varieties of palm and a few Ponga (these are silver fern – the national symbol).

Kauri tree

James being hilarious

A bigger kauri tree with James for scale

Palm

Ponga (silver fern)

We joined the gym

We joined the gym! There is only one in the area so we didn’t have to choose one. This is it Community Fitness We went for the first time this morning at 7am – the coolest time of day. It was a bit different to the gym we used to go to. There are no lockers to leave your valuables in – everyone just leaves them on the benches in the changing rooms. The equipment is a bit dated but the air con is good and it’s half the price of the gym we were using at home.

We will be picking our new car up tomorrow. We’ve had to wait for money to arrive from our UK bank account – it can take a couple of days – but that’s here now so we can get a banker’s draft tomorrow and collect the car. We currently have a new fiesta which the garage have kindly loaned us until we pick up the Escape.

Yesterday we got NZ driving licences, the excess on the insurance is cheaper if we have them.  It was just a case of filling out a form, having our eyesight checked, having a photo taken and paying. James managed to pass the eye test without his glasses – the man said it was easier if he could and when he couldn’t quite read a line he magnified it for him! Slightly worrying, but we got the licences!

Car and more channels...

It’s not even lunchtime and, without even leaving the house, we have bought a car! The nice man from the local garage brought the car to our house for us to look at.  James took it out for a quick test drive and then did some hard negotiating before agreeing a price!

So, we are now the proud owners of this car. We don’t actually have the car as it needs to prepared for sale but the garage are going to loan us a car until it’s ready as our rental car has to be returned today.

And while all that was going on the Sky TV man turned up and has put a dish on the roof. We now have Sky TV! What a relief to have the Discovery channels back J

Farmers' market and Rainbow Falls

Today we went to the farmers’ market again. We needed to stock up on vegetarian cheese and fresh vegetables. The cheese man has really nice “volcanic” cheese which says “can be used as haloumi” – it’s really nice baked and added to a salad.

It’s a local cheese maker www.mahoecheese.co.nz and they only use vegetarian rennet J

We also went to see the man from the Fat Pig vineyard. He is currently looking after the vines on the property we are interested in. He has a stall on the market every week and was very busy. He did have time to have a quick chat with us and tell us briefly how things work but said he’d be happy to chat for longer and that we could visit him if we wanted to do that. We bought a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from him just to be polite!

Art and craft market

Farmers' market

After lunch we thought we’d go for a walk. Rainbow Falls is just a five minute drive from our house so we headed there (the first photo explains why it's named Rainbow Falls).

There were lots of people in the water at the falls. We walked down the Kerikeri river  track for about an hour to the town basin and then walked back. It was very tropical with lots cicadas clicking and lots of different bird song. It was also very humid – like walking in a greenhouse. We were very grateful for a cold drink when we got home!

Rainbow Falls

Along the river track

Some other falls

Cars and houses...

Today we went looking for cars and houses again! That’s all we seem to do in our spare time.  We went to an open home this morning view open home

It was a lovely setting with a lake and lots of land but the house needed quite a bit of care – mostly cosmetic but we weren’t sure.

This afternoon we went out with an agent that we’d been out with the first week – he had three new properties to show us. The most interesting was this one - view house 2

It also had a lake and had some amazing rooms inside. It was mostly made of huge timbers with some really interesting spaces.

We then went to re-view the one we’d liked most the first time view house 3   We still really liked it and it’s our favourite so far.

At 5pm we went to look at a car we’d found on TradeMe (similar to eBay). It was a 1998 Subaru Legacy. After our failure to buy a car in Auckland we decided it might be worth buying a cheap run-around until we know what we really want.

The Legacy was $4500. It seemed OK but we’re both a bit sceptical of buying privately when we don’t really know anything about cars or the area! So, we still haven’t bought anything!

There is a very cheap ($1400) car in a garage near where we live which we are going to look at in the morning. We might just buy that if it’s not awful – just to have something when the rental car goes back on Tuesday.

So, another unsuccessful day of car and house hunting! On the way home we took these photos of the sweet goats that live in the field at the end of our road J

Today we had to drive to Auckland to open an NZ bank account with HSBC. At the moment we have NZ bank accounts but we have to pay every time we want to transfer money.

Opening NZ HSBC accounts makes transfers free. We want to transfer as little money as possible while the exchange rate is so low.

So we set off about 8am this morning . This is James driving J He drove on the way there and I drove back.

James driving

We saw a funny sign on the way up to Kerikeri on the first day that we arrived in NZ. We saw it again today on the way back so took a photo. Last cheese for miles?! It didn’t persuade us to stop and buy any though as we had plenty of cheese at home (although not Red Leicester! J).

Last cheese

We got to Auckland about 11.30pm.

While we were in Auckland we thought we might as well look in a few garages. There is not much choice in Kerikeri (only 2 cars that we’re interested in).

We went to the Subaru main dealer and looked at some Subaru Outbacks.  We found one with lots of extras that we were very interested in.

We had to go to the bank at 2pm so said we’d drop back at the garage on the way home. The bank was dull – mostly filling out forms...

The man in the bank told us, in a round-about way, that Subaru’s are for “chavs”! But we think he meant Imprezas (we hope).

On the way home we stopped in at the garage to buy the Outback. It was a bit of a long-winded negotiation but the short story is that they were totally unwilling to give ANY discount.

We decided we’d walk away as this seemed a bit odd when the car market isn’t exactly thriving! We both kinda regretted it as we need a car by Tuesday but were both a bit surprised that they were so unwilling to negotiate.

We thought we might have another look in Kerikeri and if not we can always buy the Outback – they were willing to deliver it so we wouldn’t have to go back to Auckland.

So, not a very good day for car buying but at least we now have access to money!

Moving pictures...

Here's a video of the drive up Ironbark Road to our rental home!

First weekend

On Friday we went to look at cars. The first car we saw was a Ford Territory in a local garage. It was very nice but also very expensive! We took it for a test drive and we both really liked it. The next car we saw was a Honda CRV Sport, also at a local garage. It was also very nice but older than the Territory.

On Saturday we drove to Whangerai to look at cars. We didn’t really find anything and we really want to buy locally but we are very confused about what sort of car we want. We don’t really know where we might live or what we might need from a car. Also, it was SO hot that we couldn’t actually look for very long. The burn time is about 6 minutes and that’s for locals!

Today (Sunday) we went to view a couple of houses that had an open home days.

House 1

House 2

Neither were suitable for us but we thought we’d look as they were open home.

The first one had a vineyard and the second grew olives and lychees. Apparently the first in NZ! Neither of us are particularly green fingered so they’d probably all die within a week!

We then visited the local farmer’s market which was great as we found vegetarian cheese!

It was like a proper old fashioned market with local produce and art – very nice.

We’ve found that weekends are not for shopping in Kerikeri. Nothing is open for long at weekends. Most people seem to have better things to do than work or shop which is actually quite nice.  As you drive along there are lots of boats being towed so we think everyone goes to the coast at weekends.

Tomorrow we need to start working. We’ve both been preparing and are hopefully ready. It still feels like we are on holiday so working will be strange.

Getting away from it all...

We've had quite a frustrating time trying to set up a broadband connection over the last couple of days - only to be told that there were no more connections available in the area! Luckily the nice people we are renting from are willing to upgrade their connection to wireless which will give us connectivity from the guest house. That was a huge relief, we would have had to move otherwise and there aren't many furnished rental properties available.

We then found out that our mobile phones are locked to the UK network so cannot be used here! All we wanted was a connection of some sort to the real world! In the end we managed to buy an NZ phone for $59 (bargain!) which at least gives us a contact number here.

After all that, we decided to have the afternoon off from trying to get things set up and went for a drive up to Whangaroa harbour.  The weather is SO hot at the moment we thought being by the water might be cooler - it wasn't but the views more than made up for it :)

View from the top

The harbour

The beach

First real day

First proper day in Kerikeri today. We arrived yesterday just after lunch, straight from the airport, probably looking and certainly feeling like zombies.

We went straight to see Bill, one of the Estate Agents we'd kept in touch with since our last visit. He took us out to see a rental property that we'd been discussing online. We liked it, so we've "moved in"! It's a "proper" house with two floors, three bedrooms, etc. It's an upside-down house with a big, open-plan, kitchen, living, dining room upstairs surrounded by sliding glass doors that open onto a big deck area with views over the countryside and a very nearby river/waterfall! There are even two dogs living here! :)

Living Room and Deck

Kitchen

Deck

View from Deck (inc. Waterfall!)

View from Deck

All sounds pretty idyllic and, if there wasn't so much stuff for us to be sorting out, we'd probably be just relaxing and soaking up the rays! We can hear the waterfall, hundreds of Cicadas in the trees and the (exotic sounding) call of unfamiliar birds (Pukekos, maybe?). In any case, it's great to already have somewhere to call home and not to have to worry about moving from motel to motel.

It was up around 30 degrees yesterday - another big shock to our systems following the sub-zero temperatures we left you with! More of the same today and "getting better" by the end of the week. It's very humid at the moment because a big tropical cyclone blew through the area over the weekend and dropped 10 inches of rain in a matter of hours.

Top of our list of priorities is sorting out a telephone line (with broadband) so we can stay in touch properly. We have to visit Kerikeri public library and use the free Wi-Fi to send e-Mails and update the blog at the moment!

Flights and Rental Cars

We checked-in early for our flight from Heathrow and were told we could have exit-aisle seats for both flights, together. Sure enough, on the first flight to LA, we had plenty of room to stretch out legs and it was a very easy flight. However, we were a bit disappointed on the second flight to find we were "just" in a normal row. The flight went by pretty quickly, though and so we arrived in Auckland and picked up our rental car:

Our Rental Car