My friend’s mother had kindly offered to take me on a tour of the city of Whangarei. We first drove to the Whangarei Falls. This waterfall has a bigger drop than the Haruru Falls which is why I thought it was more interesting.
The more water falling, the better
We drove up Mount Parahaki that overlooks the city. There is a tall obelisk in memorial to the dead of World War Two on top of the hill. From here you can get a good view across the city.
Another cloudy morning. The Hatea river runs through the town and out into the natural Whangarei Harbour on the Pacific coast
We had a coffee break in a shopping mall in the town centre before moving on to the Clock Museum in the Town Basin. The museum had a really interesting array of hundreds of clocks. The collection was assembled by a resident of Whangarei who bequeathed it to form a public museum. The clocks range from old clockwork and pendulum timepieces right up to modern novelty items. A guide took us on a tour of the collection. She started up some of the more delicate clocks and showed us how they worked.
We were still in the museum at midday when the hundreds of clocks started chiming in unison. It’s a sound that has to be heard!
We had lunch in a restaurant on the quayside of the Town Basin. After that I had to head back to Auckland to meet up with my friends for our last night in New Zealand. As I drove down SH1 I heard on the traffic news that the road was closed because of an accident. Unfortunately the place names meant nothing to me! However, when I got to Kaiwaka, north of Wellsford, there was a diversion sending the traffic out to the coast at Mangawhai Heads and back to join SH1 at Te Hana. I tucked in behind a lorry who seemed to know where he was going and trailed behind him for the 20 mile division. The traffic going the other way was terrible but it wasn’t too bad southbound, it just added a bit of time to my journey.
I met my friends back at the Takapuna Motor Lodge where we had stayed before; we even got the same room. We went into the centre of Auckland and parked in the Skytower. As it was raining we didn’t bother going up the tower. Half an hour in the casino failed to impress us then we met some of Jason’s university friends at the foot of the skytower. We had dinner in a enjoyable but noisy Mexican restaurant before heading back to Takapuna for the night.