Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the mrlukeniktravels blog. This week I am in New Plymouth on the western tip of the North Island. I can just about see Mount Taranaki (a snow-peaked volcano) from the window by which I write. In fact, the views of Taranaki have been spectacular, better than those of Mount Fiji whilst I was in Japan. Fun fact: Fuji is Japanese for mountain so it is named Mount Mountain. I imagine a situation where a foreigner pointed to the peak and asked what that was called. The person responding, strictly speaking, was correct!
This past week has been a little quieter than usual as I have been suffering from a nasty cold. One of the downsides of constantly moving and living with other people is that germs and colds pass around very easily. As New Zealand is far away from pretty much anywhere, visitors have had plenty of time to gather germs in airframes. Maintaining good hygiene and eating plenty of fruit helps, but sometimes these things are inevitable. I have been pretty much existing on a diet of honey, lemon and cough syrup for the past few days now! It seems strange to be putting on sun-cream whilst boiling a kettle for the next intake. Fortunately, or perhaps not, I am now left only with a lovely cough that wakes me up at night. Hopefully I shall be up to full capacity again soon.
During my stay in New Plymouth I have had the opportunity to try paddleboarding. The board looks very much like a surf board which you stand up on and use an extra long canoe paddle to propel the board through the water. Although I have precisely no surf experience, I do have some kayak/canoe skills that I could bring to bear for the task. It was great fun! I managed to fall off only once which surprised me. In fact, after a while the wet-suit I was wearing became quite hot. The board was relatively easy to control and having a calm lagoon to learn in helped too. I’m looking forward to developing my newly-acquired skills further soon! I shall not, however, be needing to fit a paddleboard on my next flight out of New Zealand.
The Pōhutukawa tree flowers from late November to late January, hence its common English name the ‘New Zealand Christmas Tree’.
Yesterday I attended my first Christmas-related event this year, Carols by Candlelight in the local park. It was conducted with the backdrop of a beautiful sunset after a warm, sunny day. The event also had to be held quite late so that it would be dark enough to sing by candlelight! This is not a problem I’m familiar with back in the UK. Sunset there is about 4:30pm, here in New Zealand it is around 8:30pm at the moment. I am sure this will be the first of many, to me, strange South Hemisphere Christmas experiences. At the moment I have no regrets in leaving winter behind for a year. Surely no-one would choose long, cold, dark nights?! Well I am fortunate enough to be able to opt-out of those this year for which I am grateful.
Well that pretty much concludes this week’s post from New Plymouth. Next week I shall be down in the capital Wellington and preparing to cross the Cook Strait. Then my North Island adventures shall be at an end. I will be spending Christmas over on the South Island and will be writing about it on here! From now until next week there are updates on my Twitter feed @mrlukeniktravel. For those Instagrammers out there my feed is @mrlukeniktravels. Until next time, as always, stay safe and travel on!
