East Cape is the easternmost point of the North Island.The East Cape Lighthouse was put up on Otiki Hill in 1922 – it was fully automated in 1985 and is controlled from the maritime headquarters in Wellington now. Getting there is an adventure by itself — I’ll blog about the drive around the cape another…
We were driving down the road a few weeks ago and got behind a semi with a sign for a fund raising event for a local school. Not your ordinary fundraiser though – a pig hunt. That’s certainly not a sign you see often where I come from!
Anzac Day is 25 April in New Zealand – it commemorates Kiwis killed in war and honors the NZ military. The date is chosen because it is the anniversary of Anzac (New Zealand and Australian) soldiers landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915 during World War I. Almost three thousand New Zealanders died in the…
Just about any tour of the North Island will take you to Rotorua. I didn’t quite get the hype when I first moved here but now I’m sold and I take all my visitors there if time permits. And if you go to Rotorua, it’s totally worth the time to visit Whakarewarewa Thermal Village. The…
My blog had its 1,000th visitor today and now has over 5,500 views! It’s been fun to do and I hope it has been useful and interesting. And I hope I can keep it up for another 286 days. New Zealand had a vote earlier this year about whether to change the country’s flag. I’ll…
I stumbled across a short film last week about an inspiring Chinese couple who immigrated to New Zealand in the 1950’s. Mr. Gock, being a bit of an inventor and experimenter, found amazing ways to give back to their new country. I love the film not just for the story and the Gocks themselves, but…
A castle in New Zealand seems a bit out of place since I mentioned in my previous blog post that our oldest building was built in 1820. So imagine my surprise last Christmas when driving through the South Island and we found Larnach Castle in Dunedin!
When we were traveling in Costa Rica about 10 years ago, we woke up in the middle of the night to the bed and building shaking — dirt and dust coming down from the ceiling and a muffled sound that you couldn’t quite identify but it sounded just… wrong. Brains fuzzy from sleep, we figured…
There has been a bit in the news lately about a new government campaign to make NZ predator free by 2050. It’s a bit of an odd concept for me since predators are just part of life in the U.S. In NZ though, predators such as rats, possums, and stoats are not native and were…
New Zealand is a new country in the grand scheme of things. According to Te Ara (online encyclopedia of NZ), “New Zealand has a shorter human history than any other country. The precise date of settlement is a matter of debate, but current understanding is that the first arrivals came from East Polynesia in the 13th century. It…