No natural hazards to avoid today, so we took a trip up the east coast. First stop Whakatane where the sun came out so we took a trip up to the viewpoint above the town and then a walk along the shore.

The statue represents the story of a Maori woman who had to rescue a canoe of supplies after it drifted out to sea. Women weren’t supposed to row apparently but the men were busy exploring new lands (or something like that!).

We then moved on down the coast to Mount Maunganui where we watched some people surfing. Tom would like you to believe that this is him, but unfortunately it’s not true.

Final stop of the day was MacLaren Falls before we headed for the motel. We  worked out that by the time we’ve dropped the car off back in Auckland we’ll have done about 1,000 miles in NZ. Better add that to the offsetting account!

[Tom: - No photos with this post yet, because the wifi in this coffee shop is painfully slow. I'll add them to flickr when I get a better connection: http://flickr.com/photos/tdroza]

We flicked on the TV whilst having breakfast this morning to see news of a tsunami heading towards NZ following the earthquake off Samoa. They were predicting that it would hit Napier later in the morning with waves of up to 1 metre. This is quite scary news when you’re from the UK and not used to such things (noone else seemed particuarly worried!) and as we were staying on Marine Drive and could see the sea from the window, we decided to pack up and head inland instead of driving along the coast to Gisborne as planned. As it turned out, the wave when it hit was a bit of a non-event and we could probably have carried on as planned, but better safe than sorry.

So we headed back down the road to Taupo, just to check that it really does rain all the time there (we can confirm that it does). We stopped at this viewpoint and almost missed the waterfall by not getting out of the car in the rain. We couldn’t see it from the car, but could hear as soon as we got out.

In Taupo we stopped for coffee and to pick up some lunch from this bakery (well we had to really). I tried out Brumby’s date cake which is similar to, but not as nice as, Mrs Brumby’s date and walnut cake.

We then headed on to Opotiki where we had planned to spend the evening. Not much here, but we did find a man selling rather nice pizza from a van, oh and Tom managed to get his feet wet by standing on the beach taking pictures with his back to the sea – made me chuckle.

Tomorrow we head back up the coast towards Auckland.

Opotiki map