New Zealand, North Island day 5

Hattieontour.eu has gone down due to a problem with the server. Whether this will be rectified we don’t know and worse case we could lose all our blog posts. Fortunately all the posts on our hard drive, but we are trying not to think about the time and effort that would be required to reload them all onto an alternative server. Frustration with communications technology has reached breaking point since we arrived in New Zealand where the internet infrastructure is much less advanced than in south-east Asia. It is much more expensive to get onto the net here and far less reliable. Just at the time when we need to be in regular contact with our letting agent in London to finalise the re-letting of one of the studio flats, we are having the greatest difficulty sending emails and making mobile calls. We’ve taken free high-speed wifi internet access for granted for granted for the last 5 months and it’s a shock to find that it’s not widely available here and the price for dial-up can be as high as $9 (£3.25 an hour).

We leave Matakohe around 10.30am (check out is at the unreasonably early hour of 10am) having had a hair-pullingly frustrating half-an-hour on the computer trying unsuccessfully to send an email to London. (Last night we were standing in the pitch dark trying to get a wifi connection because the signal kept dropping out in the internet room – only to time out before we could finish.) Aaargh! This is supposed to be a first world country!

We are heading for Kauri Park and we stop at Dargaville, a small provincial town with a single-storey centre to get some shopping for lunch and tonight’s meal. We are also on the hunt for Lonely Planet’s New Zealand guide although we don’t hold out much hope of finding a copy here. To our surprise, though, we find it in the most unlikey-looking book-cum-card shop. We also stumble upon a ‘proper’ camping shop selling the tents and other camping paraphernalia we couldn’t get in the ‘smart’ outdoor shops of Auckland.

The holiday park at Kauri is in a stunningly beautiful location enclosed on three sides by the wide meander of a small river and surrounded on all sides by kauri-forested hills. The site itself is immaculately maintained and there is tubing on the river (if you’re into that sort of thing) as well as swimming. We are in a cabin but there is camping on the river bank and we would be tempted to take a pitch if it wasn’t for the rain, which has been falling on and off all day and part of yesterday. Just our luck to be here for two of the six days rainy days in the month! Ah well, maybe it will improve tomorrow.