Leaving the Northlands and heading south we had an overnight stop in Hamilton so that we could visit the only tea plantation in New Zealand on the outskirts of the town.

The Zeelong tea estate was founded by Mr Chen and his son who noticed that the flowering Camelia grew profusely in the area, in his homeland of Taiwan it was used to make tea. Starting with only one hundred and thirty cuttings they have gone on to propagate over 1.2 million tea plants producing Oolong tea. The estate is picture perfect with beautifully maintained growing fields a main office building and separate visitors centre built in very modern designs with both garden and grounds home to numerous hand crafted copper statues and sculptures. We arrived to late for the morning tour and would not be around for the afternoon tour so we settled for a pot of tea each in the restaurant area and on leaving we purchased a sample pack to take home with us.

Art Deco was calling so we hit the road and headed for Napier finding a freedom campsite overlooking the beach and only a short walk into town.

The museum had a very informative display of photographs, newspaper cuttings and information displays on the 1931 earthquake that devastated both Napier and the nearby town of Hastings as well as a video of survivors reliving their individual memories of that day which was very poignant. The rebuilding of the town coincided with the popularity of the Art Deco style shaping the design of the majority of the new buildings. Unfortunately the modern trend of large shop fronts has detracted from the beauty of Art Deco leaving the original designs mostly above ground level. However this has not stopped the city celebrating its uniqueness by having an Art Deco festival at the beginning of March each year.

The rubble from the collapsed buildings was used to rebuild the towns sea defences along the beach front with extensive landscaping to create a promenade which has overtime been developed to cater for all ages providing sunken gardens, seating areas around water features, skateboard and bmx ramps, a marine aquarium and numerous areas with play and fitness equipment.

The next stop was to satisfy Charles desire to visit the museum in North Palmerston dedicated to the history of the All Blacks which he found was fascinating, a small museum that managed to have displays about all the rugby union playing countries of the world. The two things that he learnt was that a) the first official New Zealand Rugby team shirt was purple with a fern in gold thread for the badge and b) the first wearing of the famous black shirt with a silver fern was actually by the 1888 New Zealand Natives (a Maori team and unofficial NZ Rugby team).

They travelled to Australia, Egypt and the British Isles in what has proved to be the longest tour in the history of rugby (108 matches in fourteen months) and becoming known as the All Blacks and were one of the most successful All Black touring sides in history.

I left Charles to his rugby and took myself off to explore the museum and gallery which was in the same complex and I was treated to the best display of ceramics I have seen in one place all by various artists. I am not a Lego person but my curiosity took me to the upper floor of the museum where there was a Lego display I was impressed, not only did they have large models of various personalities from Star Wars and the spaceships, the really big Wow was watching a video of an artist who had used Lego for his medium and created some spectacular works of art which were on display in New York certainly someone I shall look out for.

Having met up for coffee we took a stroll around the town and took a few pics.

Our final destination on North island was Owhiro bay a marine reserve on the outskirts of Wellington to be on hand to catch the ferry the next morning. Yet another freedom campsite which we shared with many like minded travellers. We arrived on what was an extremely hot afternoon so kept cool in the camper van all windows and doors open encouraging a cooling sea breeze to waft through. Later when early evening bought some cooler weather we stepped out for a walk along the beach (really a shingle path) aiming for The Red rocks and Bach’s (kiwi version of a beach hut)

Tomorrow the final leg of our journey.