Lake Waikeramoana and Te Urewera National Park

We asked Kendra, who has only weeks to go before returning to the states, what she wanted to go see before leaving NZ.  Number one on her wish list was Te Urewera National Park, a very remote bit of wilderness in the Eastern part of the North Island.  There are two ways in and out of the park, and they are dirt roads - one from the northwest side from Rotorua in the middle of the country, and one from the town of Wairoa, which sits on the Pacific Coast about halfway between Napier and Gisborne.

Last Saturday we dropped Jen off at the airport for her trip to Australia (more on that in a later post) and set off driving the five hours to Wairoa and spent the night in a holiday park there just off the river that bisects the town.  What a relaxing evening under the stars!  

Waking early, the girls and I took a drive through very shire-like countryside to Lake Waikaremoana and the Park.  An interesting side note to Te Urewera is its name! From Wikipedia...The name Te Urewera is a Māori phrase meaning "The Burnt Penis", from the tale of a Māori chief who died after rolling over in his sleep while lying too close to a camp fire.   Yes, you read that right!  Lindsay was seriously grossed out, but also giggled a bit, when she found out.

Our first stop was for a hike up, up, and up to a lookout of the Lake.  It was a gorgeous hike and it afforded a view of the entirety of the area.  The Lake is huge and surrounded by hills covered in dense virgin forest and rock outcroppings. And lake itself is beautiful to look at, the water crystal clear and having multiple colors, as you see the greens and blues of the lake bottom.  So it is pretty stunning, as this pictures shows. But I also liked this photo because it was windy and made for fun artwork with Lauryn's hair : )

Descending from that overlook, we drove to the Visitor Center and set out on a tramp to the neighboring Waikareiti Lake.  It was an hour long uphill walk through very dense native bush and forest.  Here is a pic of the girls on the hike.

We gained about 1000 feet as we climbed, and we were happy to arrive at the lake's edge and just marvel at it for a while.  If Lake Waikaremoana was clear and multicolored, it was nothing compared to Lake Waikareiti.  You could see thirty feet to the bottom at spots, and where the bottom was green, the water appeared the same, and where it was sandy, it was clear, and in other spots it was blue.  Unreal.  Not sure if this pic does it justice!

This lake is also famous in that it is dotted by islands, and the largest of them has a permanent lake within it...so...you guessed it, it has a lake on an island, which sits in a lake sitting on the island of New Zealand.  Only in NZ!  

We rented a row boat, and endeavored to paddle out to this island. We enjoyed the experience and the adventure...but man oh man was that difficult, and I am not sure we would do that one again.  We always seemed to be going straight into the wind, and we felt like we were making no progress, and either we would go too far left, too far right, and seemingly never where we wanted to go! Anyway,  the girls were superstars and all took turns, and I helped too, but mostly laughed as the girls struggled with it, and took these pictures on our very small boat!

We did circle one of the islands, but had been told that landing on the one island (the one with the lake on it) and hiking to that aforementioned lake was forbidden due to trapping and poison baits that the DOC had set in order to eradicate possums, stoats, weasels and rats and re-introduce native birds to the islands.  That ended up being OK with us because that island was about twice as far of a row as the little island we did circumnavigate, and I think we would have been out there all day on that rowboat if we had to make it to the further island!

Back on dry land, we completed our hike back toward the visitor center by taking a loop and seeing some waterfalls, which were pretty remarkable...

...but by the end of that hike we were all so exhausted from the walking and the rowing that we wanted nothing more than to check into the DOC holiday park at the Lake and get some dinner.  We checked into our cute little cabin (four bunks and a little table) and then had one of those awesome hot dinners while camping (2 minute noodles thrown together with some chicken I had cooked before leaving) and then Kendra and Lauryn trounced Lindsay and me in numerous games of Euchre :( but we had a great time.  And we were just about the only people in the park - we only saw one other couple at our holiday park.

One last note on our day there - the weather was unbelievable - sunny and relatively warm, and not that windy.  And it was clear, so at night we could see more stars than we thought existed, specially since we were about as remote as we ever had been while in NZ.

But overnight a huge storm moved in and the wind howled, and we woke to grey skies, heavy winds and cold temps (more typical for this park apparently) so...time to get moving!  Still, we did a few more hikes while in the Park - to Mokua Falls, a huge waterfall that drops some 100 feet or more from its stream bed and down this steep valley, then is met up with by another stream and waterfall that drops in from the other side of the valley.  The next picture shows a tall waterfall falling the valley below, and what we didn't know at the time of taking this picture was that we were standing just over an equal size waterfall which meets up with the one we were photographing.  The two rivers met below, and the scene was something out of Lothlorien in Middle Earth! 

I will also include these following shots at the waterfalls of the girls, who were awesome on this trip.  I had taken off to find a spot to climb down to the valley, and never knew these pictures were taken until I downloaded them later.  Nice work, girls!

Finally we left the park, but stopped by on an NZ Frenzy recommendation to see the "ferry lakes" that are just outside the park.  Apparently some of the water from the Lake is pumped out and into a man-made lake, and the water is used for a hydro-electric project on the east side of the park.  We were super glad we did this short hike, which was way off the beaten track!  The lake was even more crystalline than the others we had seen, and the lake bottom was green or blue in places, hence the name fairy lakes, and so had this ridiculous appearance of being phosphorescent green or blue.  The trail was overgrown and it didn't appear that more than a handful of people come out to this remote spot every month or so.  So another very obscure and beautiful spot in NZ that we could hardly believe.  This picture was taken by Kendra, and hopefully you get a sense of this spot!

After a long stop in Napier for time on the beach, some dinner, a little soccer for Lauryn...and some more pictures of the girls...

...we drove home to Wanganui to end a long weekend. We were really glad we had made the trip to this spot which so many kiwis have not even heard of, let alone visited.

Hard to get to? Check!  Remote native setting? Yup! A feeling like you have gone back in time to the mid-1950's?  Definitely! Unbelievable never seen before attractions? Of course!  Sounds like a place you should get to!