Days 53 - 55: Camping at Uretiti

This weekend (March 12 - 14) I went camping with Alana, who I met at the church camp I was at a few weeks ago.  We drove north to stay at a DOC campground at a place called Uretiti.  Unfortunately, by the time we got there on Friday night, the gate was already closed, so we continued farther down the road and stayed at another campground quite close by in a place called Ruakaka.  We just set up the tent and then took a walk along the beach before we went to bed, but since Uretiti has been beach access, in the morning we left there and moved to the other site.  Then that day we went and visited an oil refinery.  They had a cool visitors center with a scale model of the entire refinery, including every pipe!  There was a video that explained how the oil is refined (it was pretty chemistry heavy - Bek, you would've loved it) and another that talked about how engineers find oil and get it out of the ground.  Both of us agreed that our favorite device at the refinery was the Hydrocracker.  It breaks hydrocarbon molecules down into smaller pieces.  That's about all I know about that.  If you're thinking that is seems weird that an oil refinery would have a visitors center, well, so was I.  I think most oil refineries would have gates up miles away to keep people out, but this one welcomed you.  I guess it has to do with how low New Zealand is on the terror threat list.  Anyway, it was pretty interested and I enjoyed our visit there.  I felt as though it was not just the oil that was refined, but our very lives (with credit to Average for that joke the first time around!)  I had the Port Stanvac song stuck in my head for days!

After we left the oil refinery, we headed north to a town called Whangerei.  It's pronouned Fhangere, because in Maori 'wh' makes an 'fh' sound.  We visited the fernery and botanic gardens there (photo is of Alana and a plant she liked), wandered through the park, and sat in a pub to have a coffee (well, Alana had one) and watched the cricket game.  I am getting a better understanding of cricket - it's actually not as complicated as I once thought, but I don't yet understand all of the abbreviations and statistics, or how the rules for the different types of matches you might have work entirely.  My instructor for that is Pete McMillan. While we were watching cricket in the pub, we saw an update on a local game that was being played in Whangerei, so we set out to find it.  The game was being played at a fairly small oval, with nothing in the way of stands to speak of, so we sat on the steps of a model house that was on the oval and watched for a while.  I sent Pete a text message to educate us on the finer points.  It was fun to watch the game live, but I wished we'd been up a bit higher so we could see better.  The whole thing was very relaxed and it was evident that it was a small, local team playing.

Once we left Whangerei, we headed home and fixed some noodle surprise for dinner on my camp stove.  Then we sat on the beach for a little while before turning in for the night.  During the night there was some excitement, as we were woken up by someone yelling about someone breaking into cars.  Unfortunately that night was the first time Alana hadn't locked her car, and I ended up getting $5 taken out of my wallet.  We spoke to the woman at the campground's reception the next morning and she said this thief has come before; he comes off the beach and breaks into cars but only takes money and puts everything back where he found it.  In that respect I'm lucky because he could've taken my bank cards, my camera or my driver's license, but he only took the five bucks.  I was annoyed to lose the money but in retrospect I'm pretty fortunate.  We wondered why the woman at reception hadn't mentioned this when we checked in. This photo is me with a giant sculptured moth - that's for Mothra!

That morning we made eggs for breakfast and then spent a little while at the beach, swimming, but the weather wasn't great and rain showers kept coming through.  We next headed to Waipu, a little town a bit farther north.  We grabbed some lunch from a bakery and then continued south on smaller roads, with a stop for a while to lounge around at the Waipu beach.  The beach was really beautiful, with volcanic rocks making striking shapes as they poked up through the water far out on the horizon.  The weather got better and we both ended up going in for another swim.  After that we jumped back in the car and headed back to Auckland.  On the way home we passed a farm with pink sheep!  They must dye or spray paint them or something.