Big Trip

Another long drive today, but this time it was my fault. I fancied driving over to the west coast before heading south. In truth, it wasn't really worth it. The scenery wasn't radically different from anywhere else - nice enough, but nothing we hadn't seen elsewhere - and it just made the journey 100kms longer. The highlight, apart from our arrival in Auckland, obviously, was seeing NZ's largest kauri tree, the monster Tane Mahutu in the Waipoua Forest. It's enormous, at over 50m tall and, well, I can't remember how big the girth is, but it's just immense. You'd get a lot of matchsticks out of it, if you made matchsticks out of kauri. Estimates of its age vary. Some reckon it's around 2100 years old, others just say it's over 1000. It's old. Very old.