Taranaki Region Day Two: Lights, Camera, Mountain!

New Plymouth

Hearing there was a French bakery to try, we plotted a course for Petit Paris in New Plymouth, which is 30km from Urenui. Not knowing what the city centre was like, we were pleasantly surprised to find plenty of parking and easy-to-navigate streets. The hot chocolate was great and very chocolatey. (I cannot understand why some places make a milky hot chocolate - it's not difficult.) The croissant and pain au chocolat tasted nice, but were flat. Perhaps they had not risen properly or had collapsed, but either way they were a bit dense.

Walking around the city streets, we saw a house of organised religion with a very pointy roof.

Going on the famed coastal walk, we saw the wind wand swaying to and fro. I prefer the wind needle (Zephyrometer) in Wellington, even now that it has been struck by lightning and taken down for health and safety reasons. The entire coastal walk is 11km long, but we just walked until we were bored and turned back. When it was a reasonable time to have lunch, we went to Lush Gelato, where the coffee flavour had won an award. (By now you know that we cannot pass up gelato or French pastries.)

Yannick chose chocolate, coffee, and caramel with a chocolate sauce. The caramel was salted so I ate most of it as it isn't to Yannick's taste. We both found that while the coffee gelato tasted very good, it didn't really have much of a coffee flavour to it. I would have thought that an award winning coffee gelato would taste like coffee. I opted for a lighter combination of raspberry and lemon sorbet.

Pukekura Park

So, we went to the park. And we had raspberries. And this is what happened. Don't ask.


The Poet's Bridge, with a hireable row boat drifting underneath. When we first visited the park, we were going to have our picnic and then take a five minute walk in the park just to see what it was like. We ended up spending rather a lot of time and our legs were sore by the end of it (probably also due to the coastal walk). There were many paths to take and things to see, including a zoo!

The zoo was community run and free of charge. It had monkeys! And meercats. We watched the monkeys for a while, as they were cute and mischievous.
Seeing that the park had a Festival of Lights on, we decided (after some hemming and hawing) to stay in New Plymouth that night to see it.


Needing to kill an afternoon's worth of time, we went to the museum,which was also free of charge. There were some interesting sights, including these moa skeletons. The tall one is normal moa-sized, and the little one beside it isn't a baby moa as I had guessed, but a pygmy moa! I had no idea there were small species of moa, but there you have it. The museum is attached to the i-site, which is attached to a restaurant called Arborio. Thinking it may be a good idea for dinner, we looked at the menu but it looked as though it might not be very authentic Italian - the menu was full of what sounded like huge portions of thick pasta and heavy sauce. We decided to just get dessert there later, and went off to find a campsite. After setting up Nefertenti, we read in the sun until it had nearly become dusk.


We started with a bruschetta at Arborio, which was okay but had a "raw vegetable" taste. The tiramisu was quite nice, with an espresso syrup to pour over it to keep it moist, and a grainy chocolate ice cream. Overall I enjoyed it, but the experience was nothing special. I'm glad we didn't go for the mains.


The Festival of Lights was actually a lot better than I expected, with many different exhibitions. The one above used orbs that changed colour on the top of the pond, and the fountain in the centre was also illuminated. Alongside the exhibitions, the foliage of the park itself was lit up with different coloured lights, which you can see to the right and behind the lake.

Jellyfish hanging above a stream that changed colour and looked like they were floating gently on the breeze.

The Poet's Bridge again at night. There seems to be a cloud perpetually hanging around the summit of Mount Taranaki, but it made an appearance on this clear evening.