Kauri Grove

Easter Friday 10 April
I learned that the Easter bunny doesn’t hop by until Easter Sunday. But luckily Easter Friday is hot cross bun day. So today was hot cross buns for breakfast. The morning was time to catch up on the blog, we’d gotten behind – which seems to be a bit of a common thing. There was no work on over Easter, so it was a chance to relax and unwind. Not that we’d been working too hard anyway. We went for a walk in the afternoon, back up Hot Springs Road, to the Kauri Grove. This is a great walk, only about 40 minutes out and 40 minutes back. The track crosses a lovely little river/stream and passes a few kauri trees before climbing up a ridge towards somewhere further on. At about 40 minutes it passes through a kauri grove. Except there are hundreds of trees. Not huge ones, it must be some sort of regrowth but well-established regrowth. I had to wonder at what point a grove got escalated to forest, there were a lot of them. How and why this grove exists is a mystery, there is nothing to explain it. In fact, there’s not even anything to explain that you’ve reached the right place. Sometimes DOC is underwhelming with their information. Maybe this wasn’t even the proper Kauri Grove. Maybe the real one was around the corner 5 minutes further on. Whatever, this one was good enough. It was quite a thrill to sit in a small kauri forest that somehow got left behind when they stripped the ranges all those years ago. It wasn’t that late in the day, but when it clouded over it got quite dark making photographing it difficult. Back at the car we drove back along the road to the hot springs that give the road its name. These are in a camping ground. We found these a bit underwhelming as well. It was a couple of large concrete swimming pools. The water was clean and clear, and not that hot, less than 35 degrees we thought. And there was no mineral smell at all, so it was all a bit of a mystery. It was in a lovely bush setting that could have been so much more, with a bit of imagination, development, and some hot mineral water. We had a chat to an interesting English bird woman before giving up on the place. Still, it was good to check it out.