After the unsuccessful attempt to spot a kiwi the night before, we figured we're here now so may as well set our alarm for 4:45am and try again. Alas, we spent an hour walking the entire kiwi trail in the dark by flash light (again covered with red cellophane), waiting patiently in various places, but did not see a kiwi. So we headed back to our cabin and went back to bed for a few hours. Following breakfast outside on the deck of our cabin we packed up, caught the ferry from Okiato to Opua instead of taking the long road around to get off of the peninsula, and headed in the direction of the Coromandel Peninsula, some 350km south. Not far from Opua we visited a kauri grove where a short walk took us to some impressive kauri trees, the oldest of which was about 400 years old.
The remainder of the day was not particularly interesting although enjoyable enough as we are in New Zealand and on holidays. As the RAV4's built-in USB port did not do a very efficient job of charging phones, we picked up a proper car charger and later on also some more groceries. We came through quite a few rain showers until late afternoon but we managed to have a picnic at a dry roadside rest area in between showers. Traffic was very slow approaching Auckland, through which the only road south leads, mainly due to roadwork, and still busy just on the south side of Auckland as well. After leaving the main highway south to go east, the low fuel light came on in in the RAV4. No problem, I got Siri to find us a gas station within a reasonable distance and we followed the directions to get there. She leads us off the highway to the "gas station" which turns out to be a single unattended ancient looking diesel pump near some closed buildings on a country road. Luckily the next gas station she directed us to, not far down the same highway, did have regular fuel. When filling up Don found that we actually had quite a bit of fuel left, but seeing that we were not familiar with the car we didn't want to take a chance.
We arrived at our destination at about 7:30pm. We had googled a campground - holiday park - and the one we picked just north of Thames charged a very reasonable NZ$45 for a powered site (so we can run our cooler and charge eg the laptop) compared to others that charged NZ$60-$70. We had not booked ahead but had no problem getting a site at this particular campground. The campground is older but everything is clean and looked after, and we had some good chats with the nice German/ Spanish couple (maybe a few years older than me) who own and run it since about six months ago. We decided to finally pitch our tent as the weather forecast was pretty good.
I really like the green fields at the viewpoint! Those meals look delicious as well :)
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