Time Out for a Walk

When Mac took redundancy in mid-December, one of the things we planned to do was to go for more walks. Ha! We've only made it to the beach for a couple of walks, let alone any where else. But last Tuesday we finally did it. It was so dry, a walk in green bush seemed like a great idea.

 We headed off toward Mt Pirongia after lunch and got to Kaniwhaniwha about 2pm.

 We had decided, somewhat nervously, to do the Nikau Walk, which was said on the DOC website to be a 2.5 hour walk. Nervously because I have little personal history of walking / tramping and have no idea of the accuracy of times, nor of the meaning of the difficulty levels with respect to me!

 The walk from the parking area to the Nikau Loop Walk ran between the stream and farnland, but was planted on each side, so there was shade even there.

 Disused ford.

 Free camp site with sunny dunnies. (Long drop toilets.)

 Finally to the Nikau Loop Walk.

 And it's not just a name - there were nikau everywhere! If a few years, our bush will look like this, as we have so many babies growing now there are no stock eating and trampling them.

 I love all the vines growing up the trees.

 One nikau had flowers, new seed and old seed, all on the one tree.

 New seed.

 Flowers and old seed.

 I love the trunks of the nikau.

 The nikau is the most southern growing palm tree.

 But it's not all nikau - there's kiekie

 and ponga

 and hundreds of other beautiful plants and trees. (Which I either don't know or can't be bothered looking up the spellings for.)

 It was a lovely day, and I felt so lucky to see the nikau flowers and berries. Home to a shower which I  tiled years ago inspired by this very tree. Oh yeah - it took us only 2 hours, despite stopping to take a couple of hundred photos.