West Northland

21st
We took a beautiful hour walk through the Kauri tree woods where we had crept last night in the dark and then started the journey south again. For lunch we stopped at the Pirou falls outside Matakohe, we thought we were lost for a while as the signpost from the main road had said 6km to the falls and after 7.5 km down a dusty gravel road we had the feeling we were on the wrong track. It just turns out that the sinage was worng because we soon came across a small sign that pointed down the side of a gulley to the falls. Beautiful little secluded spot with the falls tumbling down into a pool at the base and then down again into a further pool and down again into a third and finally into the river at the base. The water level is really low at the moment (at the end of the summer) but you can see that at times the volume of water is immense - I'm glad we visited it now, it was calming, and we sat on the rocks next to the river and ate oranges in the sun. Our journey then took us on further south back through Auckland and on south to a little town called Huntley were we saw a sign to a campsite and decided to stop. We ended up on the banks of a lake which we walked around for about 40 mins as the sun went down. It was ringed by fantastic plant life, some huge moorhens with blue breasts and loads of bullrushes that were seeding. (The lake was affected by blue green algae from the dry summer that they have had but this affected us none, apart from the fact that Celso would have loved to do a spot of fishing!).