2nd Day in Seam Reap, Cambodia

After our big day seeing as much of Angkor Wat as we could, we spent a quieter day around Seam Reap. Our tuktuk driver drove us out to a local temple and we walked around the city park to see the bats. In the afternoon Rich and Peter paid for a birdwatching guide while Ruth and I explored the local market and went swimming in the hotel pool. I love to visit grocery stores and markets and try new fruits and vegetables.

New and old temple south of town

Flying Foxes in the trees in the Royal Gardens

Buying rambutans from a bicycle vendor

Market vendor selling fish and clams

Mushrooms and vegetables for sale

Kids tending chili and vegetable stall

Man weaving fishing net, local market

Delivery wagon pulled by a motorcycle

Street vendor selling spiced clams

Tangled electricity and telephone wires downtown

Bangkok Day + Angkor Wat

We landed in Bangkok Fri. night and our old friends Peter & Ruth Dutton picked us up and took us to our very comfortable hotel. Sat. we spent in Bangkok seeing the Grand Palace, the temple of the Emerald Buddha, a textile museum with intricate woven cloth from different Thai tribes, and a national museum with Thai history and art. 

Bin it! sign outside our hotel

Peter & Ruth, Grand Palace

Painting stencils on the ceiling, Grand Palace

Guardian beast statues, Grand Palace

Guard & Thai Tourist

Temple inside National Museum

At the end of the day we flew Sat. evening to Siem Reap, the town nearest Angkor Wat. Our tuktuk driver (motorcycle pulling a 4 person cart) picked us up at 8:00 and we spent all day walking around the ancient temples and palaces of Angkor Wat. It's hard to describe the scale of the place: each temple goes on and on, with corridors, courtyards, more and more carvings and statues. It's a long drive between temples and there are lakes and restaurants and thousands of people, both tourists and workers. There seem to be at least a hundred women sweeping leaves into heaps in the jungle beside the road. I especially liked the twisty, drapy roots strangling the stones of the temple Ta Prohm and the large smiling Easter Island type faces of Bayon temple.

Relief: Riding Elephant into battle

Bas Relief Crocodile eating a fish

Smiling Faces

Folk group playing on the trail to one of the temples

Tree roots strangling temple

Peter & Ruth

Twisty Tree Roots

 Tuktuk driver sleeping in his hammock

By the time our tuktuk driver returned us to our hotel in the late afternoon, we were footsore and tired, so we've spent the rest of the day reading, swimming in the hotel pool, and eating Indian food. One more day here and then we fly to Laos tomorrow. It's been fun and relaxing to travel with Peter & Ruth. They've taken care of all the logistics, and they speak both Lao and Thai, so we can just sit back and enjoy. We're certainly in a very different climate, culture, and landscape than New Zealand.

View out balcony window, Siem Reap

Leaving Albany: Last week: Walk along Long Beach and Ferry to Rangitoto

We're packing, weighing luggage, and trying to get to bed soon for our trip off to Bangkok tomorrow. Peter & Ruth Dutton will meet us tomorrow night (Fri. for us), and Sat. we head off to Cambodia with them to see Angkor Wat, then up to Laos to see their work and volunteer in a school to help with ESL. We've had a great time here in New Zealand. So many of our favorite things: mountains, volcanoes, beaches, waterfalls, glaciers, lighthouses, boats, birds, not too hot, friendly people, forest. So amazing to drive 1 hour to the west coast to spectacular black sand beaches with crashy-bashy waves and drive half an hour to the east coast to warm water, smaller waves, and golden sand. New Zealand has more boats per capita than any other country and a lot of them are sailboats. I would immigrate in a heartbeat if all our kids and relatives would come.The only thing we would miss would be bicycling. Lots of steep hills with narrow roads with no shoulders. Oh, and stress. New Zealand has surpassed our expectations. I end up saying wow several times a day.

Rich worked this week finishing up his collaboration with his host here on a paper and working on taxes and financial aid. Mon. and Tues. I hitched a ride with a coworker and took a bus to walk along coastal walkways and beaches and swim in the ocean one last time.

Stile along the walk to headland, Long Bay Regional Park

Wed. I took a ferry from Auckland to Rangitoto Island to climb to the top of the volcano, walk around the crater, and explore some lava tube caves. The volcano erupted 600 years ago, forming the island, so there is still lots of exposed black lava flows that the vegetation is slowly claiming.

Entrance to the lava tube

View of Auckland from the top of the volcano 

Young tree growing on the blocky aa lava 

Walk through young forest back to the ferry

Last Weekend in New Zealand: Birds, Boats, & Beaches: Muriwai Beach, Goat Island, Sailing on Auckland Bay

It was our last weekend in New Zealand. We rented a car and Fri. after work drove over to Muriwai Beach on the west coast to see the gannet colony. Hundreds of birds with chicks beside them on the cliff and sea stacks. We walked on the beach south of the colony, black volcanic sand and big crashing waves, walked a short bit of the Edmund Hilary Trail in the jungly forest and saw another morepork (NZ owl), then walked on the north beach with the sunset reflected in the wet sand. It was very windy and it was fun to watch foam and bubbles race across the beach until they popped.

Gannet Colony, Murawai Beach

Sunset reflected in the wet sand at Muriwai Beach

Morepork

Sat. we drove north with a fuzzy plan to visit the Goat Island Marine Reserve. We decided not to try for the Bay of Islands because we didn't want to spend all day in the car.
We stopped in a town called Warkworth to talk to the tourist info office about where to walk and get a more detailed map. While I was there, Rich walked down to look at a boat on the river and it turned out the Maritime Museum was having a steam boat regatta. We hung around talking to people and admiring the boats and managed to cadge a ride on one for a short trip down the river and back. The one we rode on uses used cooking oil, although others use coal. Serendipity and a great start to our day. 

Steam boat regatta Warkworth

Engineer & steam engine

We were dismayed to find Goat Island beach fairly crowded with divers and snorkelers, but there were only 3 other people on the walk we took along the north end of the point. The day felt like being inside that famous Hopper painting with blue, blue water and white, white sails. Continuous views of sailboats against Little Barrier Island and other islands. After our walk, we were hot and more than ready to swim. Even with Rich's swim goggles, we saw lots of big fish while swimming out to the island and back. 

Goat Island Marine Reserve: Snorkeling

Walk along the north side of peninsula

Then we drove over to Pakiri beach with nesting dotterels and white sand and walked till we were tired with lots more beach to go. We drove back south to see another peninsula, stopping just to look at Matheson Bay, which turned out to be another perfect spot: picnic tables scattered on grass, small cove with rocks to walk out on, views of islands and boats, clear blue water, river with bridge, playground, toilets with shower to wash off the sand, so of course we ended up walking out to the tide pools. We also got to throw a ball for someone else's black lab. We drove out to Tawharanui Sanctuary and were so tired that we were just going to look at the beach and drive back, but we walked out from the car park to look and again just said wow again. Jaw-droppingly gorgeous. So we ended up walking on the beach: low tide, sea caves, a kingfisher, interesting rock formations, crashing waves. 

Sailboats against Kawau Island

Surf, Tawharanui Regional Park

When we walked back it was sunset and we were the only ones still on the beach. On the drive home we stopped to stretch at Orewa Beach. I was too tired to move, the moon was rising, and Rich said, let's just walk out to the water and make it a 5 beach day, so we did.

Sun. we went to the local Presbyterian church in Albany Village. They had an art exhibit of photos and paintings done by people in the congregation. Afterwards, we took the bus down to the Maritime Museum in Auckland. We'd booked a ride on the Ted Ashby, a reconstructed sailing scow, and had good wind for a sail under the harbour bridge and back. Saw someone bungy jumping off the bridge. It was Sun. afternoon and there were lots of beautiful boats out. From our first visit to the museum, we got interested in Peter Blake, the kiwi national hero who won the Whitbread round-the-world race and the America's cup, and there was an exhibition about him that we were glad to explore in more detail since we are both reading his biography now. Afterwards we took a ferry over to Devonport to walk along the seawall and climb North Head, the stub of an old volcano that guards the entrance to Auckland Harbour with gun emplacements. An outstanding view from the top of all the yachts returning from their weekend island cruises. We saw the NZ America's cup entry sailing on her ear.

NZ America's Cup sailboat, Auckland Harbour

Sailboats with Rangitoto Island, from North Head

A bus stop in Auckland had a saying describing Auckland: "low-lying land, high skies, and wide water" and its motto is City of Sails. There are 53 volcanoes, one to climb every weekend + an extra, so it's a bit like Edinburgh where I tried to  climb Arthur's Seat at least once a week. I climbed Mt. Eden last Wed. and we climbed North Head Sun. I'm hoping to take a ferry out to climb Rangitoto Island on Wed. if the weather is good. It's also like Edinburgh in that it's windy with fresh sea breezes most of the time, but it's 30 degrees warmer. For me it's perfect t-shirt weather 95% of the time, pretty much paradise.

We leave for Bangkok, Angkor Wat, and Laos Fri.

Rotorua to Auckland: Bubbling mud pots in Kuirau Park, Okere Falls,Walk around Mount Maunganui, Karangahake Gorge walk and swim

We left our youth hostel in Rotorua in a hurry to get to church. There was an Anglican church listed as part of the typical tourist itinerary right on the edge of Lake Rotorua, famous for its Maori carvings St_Faiths_Anglican_Church,_Ohinemutu,_Rotorua.. 

Inside the church: beautiful carvings and stained glass windows

We found out they had a service at 9:00, so we packed up quickly and went. It was a great experience. Friendly, warm-hearted people, a great sermon, and a bilingual service half in Maori, half in kiwi English. I got a better idea of how the pronunciation works and learned the word for God: Atua. Rich thinks Maori would be great for Scrabble, since there are lots of words with just 2 vowels, e.g. ai, but one would never use up the consonants that give the most points. I noticed that the minister kissed all the Maori congregants at the end and shook hands with the Caucasian ones, although at least half were mixed race. They invited us to morning tea afterwards and we chatted with several people. The lady sitting next to us has been living there for 40 years and I asked her if she liked it, since some people call is rotovegas for all the tourist hotels and souvenir shops on the main drag, but she said that there were 13 lakes around and plenty of non-tourist areas. 

Rotorua is famous for geothermal activity and there are vents all around the city. Afterwards, when we were walking in the park looking at bubbling mudpots and hissing steam vents, we met a couple we'd seen at church. Turns out that they are Americans, she a Lutheran seminary student in SF and a friend to one of my students and he a cs worker at Dreamworks. We had a long conversation with lots in common.

Steaming vent just outside the church

Hissing, bubbling mud pots in the local city park

We got a late start and tried to pack too much in on our last day, making a late arrival back in Auckland instead of a straight 4-hour drive, but it's hard to pass up all the treasures. We stopped at yet another waterfall. We tried to pass it, but couldn't resist. They're all different.

Okere Falls

Then we drove north to the coast to see Mount Maunganui. We were told it was only a 1 hour walk around this extinct volcano at the headland to the harbor, but stopping for pictures of crashing waves against the rocks, eating yogurt on a beach made entirely of shells, looking for a whole shell of a certain kind, taking pictures of sailboats and fishing boats, getting our feet wet... We decided we didn't have time to swim. So many places we would have been happy to linger for a couple of days.

Volcanic rock formations on the beach walk around Mount Maunganui

Eating yogurt on the shell beach

No sand, just shells amid the volcanic rocks

Then we drove for an hour for a planned stop for a walk in the Karangahake Gorge. It's an old mining area, and the short walk we picked took us over 3 suspension bridges and through an old gold mine tunnel (torch required) with lots of historical markers by bits of mining equipment. There were lots of people swimming in the river, so we broke down and decided it would refresh us to stay awake for the drive back. 

Walking through the old mining tunnel at one of the air shafts

One of the many suspension bridges, common in New Zealand

Got back at 9:30, still with a smidgeon of light, dumped all the dirty clothes in the washing machine, and made dinner out of the leftovers from our ice chest. The rooms we have now are right next door and the mirror image of the one we had before, so everything is backwards, a little disorienting when exhausted and trying to cook and unpack.

Rich is taking the car back to the rental outfit and is going straight to work after that. I get to laze around and skype and play recorder and do grocery shopping. Great trip.