After the hard good bye with Claire we made our way to the next stop of our journey, Wanganui. On the way we made some stops at some beaches along the coast and at the Queen-Charlotte Park. The highlight was supposed to be a black sand beach, but it figured out to be rather grey… In Wanganui we even found a couchsurfer for two nights, named David. It was quite a challenge to find the right house, but then we were welcomed by David’s neighbour Kane who told us that we’d have a whole house for ourselves rather than living at David’s house as expected. Obviously, David has a spare house with 5 bedrooms, which he offers to couchsurfers, but we were the only surfers at that time. After we picked a room, David came to say hello, too, and after a short chat he offered us to show us a bit around in Whanganui. Very cool 🙂 It was pretty cool to have the whole house for ourselves, but on the other hand a bit of a shame as we didn’t have the chance to really get in touch with our host.
The next day, we first drove to the Visitor Information in order to get a map for our day trip. We wanted to drive along the Whanganui River and stop at some important spots. It is possible to travel the whole Whanganui River with a kayak for 3-5 days, which is one of the Great Walks of New Zealand. Along the river one’ll find untouched nature and Maori villages, an old church called Jerusalem and an old water mill. Additionally, we were able to see the height of the river some thousand years ago while looking on some petrified oysters very high over the actual water level. At the end we made a short walk up a hill in order to get a good view over the river and other hills with a lot of sheep. Back in Wanganui we met David who started his tour with a quite famous glass blowing gallery where we were supposed to watch them blowing. Unfortunately they already finished working for the day, why we wanted to come back the next morning. Then the historic part of our tour started. David told us the story about the Maoris in Wanganui by pointing out some statues and monuments. Writing everything here would be a bit too much for the blog, but whoever is interested in it we’re happy to repeat everything during a private chat 🙂
The next morning we said good bye to David and Kane and drove to Taranaki. But before we left Wanganui we visited of course the glass blowing gallery, in order to watch them working. They were producing a big bowl while we were there, so we were able to see all of the process which took around 1 ½ hours. Afterwards we had a short look inside the local museum, which basically substantiated David’s story with some historic facts and then we headed to Taranaki, to our next couchsurfing host Chris, this time a farmer…