Taranaki Region Day Three: My Kingdom for a Quadbike

Still New Plymouth

In the morning, we visited The Market cafe for breakfast (Earl Grey tea and a blueberry and lemon loaf).

The decor was rustic, and they had the same birdsnest light fixtures as some of the lights on the Poet's Bridge.
We walked around a bit as a few shops were opening their doors, and I bought a new pair of jandals as the ones I was wearing had been purchased in a Greek supermarket over a year before and were wearing through. They had served me well.

We decided to try to drive up Mount Taranaki some way, but Google Maps was not helpful and we ended up driving around it instead. Looking it up later, we discovered that the only way to access is it from Stratford. If we had known that at the time we passed through, we would have ascended in order to get some good views.

Along the road that circled the base of the mountain, we stumbled across a "garden with the rhododendrons or whatever [sic]". Yannick wasn't impressed and said it was more of an arboreum (a tree garden).

I did find this pretty flower though, which was near the toilets.

Driving away from the mountain, we wanted to visit Egmont Lighthouse. We had passed a sign saying something about a museum for it, but wanted to see the real thing so we kept going. It wasn't very impressive. (Imagine a white lighthouse. Now you've seen Egmont Lighthouse.) Yannick took a panorama near it to show what the lighthouse may see when it looks out, as we found the landscape more interesting than lighthouse itself.

South-bound on Surf Highway 45, there were loads of signs for surf beaches. One of the most famous, Stent Road, had to have its road sign replaced with a large rock as the sign kept getting stolen so often (a souvenir for hippie surfers worldwide). We selected a surf beach at random and drove down. 

The road ended and we walked for a little while down to the beach. The path was sandy, and being black sand it was scalding. The short walk seemed to take twice as long, and once I saw the sea I made a run for it to cool my toes. 

A quad bike seems like a much better way to get there, and we saw that a fisherman had done just that, casting his line into the tumultuous surf waves.

On the way back to Wellington, there wasn't much to note. We took a break in Wanganui and then carried on our merry way home.