After our day of sailing we spent the night in a nearby campground and were visited frequently by a mama duck and her toddling brood of baby ducklings. This was all well and good until they woke us up early in the morning by tapping on our glass cabin door. They are well-trained ducks, apparently and we only aided this habit by feeding them some of our leftover stale toast. I felt bad for the mother duck though; yesterday she had had nine babies and today she showed up with only eight. The other campers also sympathetic to the little family reckoned that a stoat, eel or a possum had gotten a hold of one of the little ones. Seems it had been a rough night for the duck family.

Since we had driven up the east coast of Northland we wanted to see what the west coast held and headed off across the bit of mountains that separated the two. Along the way we passed Hokianga Harbor which offered stunning views of the ocean and surrounding beaches.

The main draw of the west coast of Northland is the Kauri Forest, home of the largest tree in New Zealand called "Tane Mahuta" and considered to be very special by the Maori people. We hiked out to see the famous tree and were totally surprised by how big and fat it was. The rest of the drive through the Kauri Forest was cool as well since we got to see many other giant trees along the way.

We stopped for lunch at some lakes that were totally out of the way and enjoyed a park completely void of people but with awesome scenery. Although there were signs warning us to be cautious of Kiwi birds everywhere we didn't see any; Kiwi birds are notoriously timid and normally only come out at night. We're crossing our fingers that we get to see one before our time in New Zealand is up.

 

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