After a few days sunning it up in The Bay Of Islands we decided to head further north to the much spoken about 90 Mile Beach. What a waste of time that was, the beach is huge and drivable, thats about all it had going for it to be fair, we stayed and went for a bit of an explore for all of 20 mins before deciding to head back down the other side of the Northland to Dargaville (more about this place later)
The drive down was pretty epic in more ways than one, the scenery and terrain literally changes every 40 miles, from flat farm land to massive rolling hills and thick rain forest, which the road actually goes through. Waipoua Forest on State Highway 12 was the most difficult driving yet, see the pics but they certainly dont do it justice. We were driving through it for about an hour, half of which was done in the dark with no street lights what so ever. We pulled over in a Kuari Forest, basically the biggest trees in the world, ive never seen anything like it. To get to the trees you had to walk through pure tropical forest on raised wooden platforms, it was getting dark so it was fairly scary, Pete was terrified it was hillarious. There were some pretty weird noises going off arround us, but he's still a big girl.
We carried on driving all the way to a place called Dargaville, this place was on one of the New Zealand tourist sites so we thought it would be fairly decent, all we were looking for was a place to sleep and eat. We pulled over for 10 mins having driven arround and decided to leave sharpish, it was a weird back water inbred heaving hole, thats putting it nicely, probably the Nottingham of New Zealand. We ended up driving cross country 50k back to Whangarie where we knew we could leave the van alone for more than 10 secconds.
In the morining it was back on the road for the drive south off Northland and past Auckland to the cental area of North Island, good times ahead.
