Mangaokewa Scenic Reserve

Next stop was Te Kuiti. Not quite to the volcano area, but much closer. This was a small town on one of the main "highways" running through the country. Keep in mind, a major route here is a narrow, two lane road. I have yet to see anything close to a major highway here. Even in Auckland they are relatively small in comparison to the US highways. 4 lanes here is pretty heavy duty.

That night in my room the building shook and rattled a couple times. I thought it was the big trucks going by but no, it was an earthquake. Turns out, very common around here, maybe even more than California. I survived. As did everyone else....

The next day I did a rainforest hike in the Mangaokewa Scenic Reserve. A "reserve" here is what we would call a park, like Rocky Mountain National Park or Boulder Mountain Parks. This was an immersive rainforest, meaning you are on a narrow trail, it's shady from the dense green forest, everything is covered in moss, insects and bird sounds filling the air, and you're getting soaked from the previous night's rain. While you hike through it, you get absorbed into the thriving life surrounding you. Very beautiful. Much of NZ was deforested by the aboriginal Maori and then British for farms and ranches, which still looks beautiful but not close to the original state. 

The Mangaokewa reserve is an example of where, like everywhere in the world, they are recognizing and trying to preserve what remains of the primordial environment: Though it appears to be enormous from the limited view of the pathway, It is just a sliver of the original forest that was saved essentially at the last moment. Like the whales that seemed infinitely numerous and are now so rare in places that they awe tourists, so go the forests today. There is a desperate worldwide effort to save these places and animals, who knows if it will work. 

So there. Enough of that.

That afternoon I drove to my lodge in National Park. That isn't a grammar error (as I know are frequent in these posts). I was headed to a national park (Tongariro), and the *town* just outside the national park is called National Park. Seriously.. Next.

The primordial rainforest as it existed before human inhabitation of New Zealand