Turn turn turn..

We have just travel to Coromandel Town over beautiful mountains and many 270 degree bends with 5 warning chevrons and 15 kph signs and Δ with a car precariously perched on the hypotenuse. Hence the Byrds song title! We used the C/H facilities this morning and had a very English breakfast of toasted crumpets with poached eggs which I cooked in a pan of boiling water. Unfortunately, one of the eggs broke as I put it into the water so it all ended up looking like some egg foo yong. With minimal cooking and eating facilities it made for an interesting test of ingenuity for me to get any egg actually on my crumpet! Margery was alright, because being a very polite(cough) gentleman (cough, cough) I gave her the whole egg. Margery said I was getting very eggy and so I suggested she drove today, as I keep on putting the windscreen wipers on to indicate I am turning. I did it as well –apart from when you said “indicators right”..I got a bit confused then as I was trying to turn left at the time! Ok, it is only a rather sad Mazda Familia with 154,000 km on the clock and it is automatic and the controls are in the wrong place and it has the grunt of a piglet and...am I getting to sound a bit Jeremy Clarksonish? Anyway it’s a good thing that the national speed limit is 100 kph as it takes us and hour to get to that speed, and going up hills Margery daren’t take her foot of the accelerator as we would start to go backwards, and we would have to get out and push (shades of Austria and a coal lorry, Dad). Still the guy in front took one look at us in his rear view mirror and wasn’t impressed by the view: he hi-tailed it up the hill as quick as he could. When he eventually stopped at a view point we finally arrived, but for some reason he decided to ignore the view after seeing who was alongside him - that it reminded me of the 50’s song about a bubble car with a chorus –beep, beep, beep beep, his horn went beep, beep, beep! We are intending to visit a pottery tomorrow. I know; I don’t do potteries. But this one is different... cos its got the only narrow gauge railway in New Zealand. For the anorak (aka Adrian) the track is 15” gauge and climbs over 3 kms with 5 switchbacks and one double deck viaduct, to a height of 165m. The steepest gradient is 1:14!! It was built by the potter, Barry Brickell over 26 years to extract clay from the hillside. Some love of his craft to go to such lengths. I will post a picture after we’ve been to the pottery (don’t you mean the railway, Ron!!). Having been to the Pottery/Railway it’s obvious that Barry loves nature in it’s truest form, and the railway, whilst he was passionate about it, was a means to get to his beloved piece of land – now a 60 acre conservation site, where he is replanting native trees – Kauri in particular – he’s planted 20,000 so far; when they get to 56,000 they plan to stop! At 74 years of age he’s still a nationally famous potter (and the recluse he always was!) The Railway was opened to the public at the suggestion of the bank manager , to repay his overdraft – now it has done that, the money it raises goes into further conservation work. From our viewpoint it’s a fantastic (in every sense of the word!) place to visit. Wonderful views, great ingenuity (supporting walls made from wine bottles and clay when the money ran out!) and great conservation project.