Piha and the voyage home

We drove south from Paihia to Piha for our final night in New Zealand.  On the way we stopped in a very small town for lunch, and they had a “Wharfinger” pizza on their menu.

In my prior life before retirement I was the Chief Wharfinger for the Port of Oakland, and nobody ever knew what in the hell that meant (basically like a commercial real estate manager mixed with a city government job).  We didn’t try the pizza because it sounded a little strange…..just like the name.

We also ran across this waterfall just outside of the city of Whangarei (pronounced Fangary….it’s a Maori to English translation screw-up).  Wh=F….gotcha.

Piha is a quiet little beach community that is just under an hours drive away from Auckland airport, so it’s perfectly situated for a stay before our flight home.  Here is the view from our place in the hills above the coastline.

Piha is New Zealand’s most famous surfing beach, and we saw quite a few surfers while we were there.  The beach has black iron sand and it’s supposedly very crowded in the summer time.  We only saw a handful of people on the beach.

Walking among the rock formations we ran across this hole through the rocks where the surf was running all the way through.

There is a short 1km hike near the beach to Kitekite Falls.  It’s worthwhile for the falls as well as the hike through some very dense NZ bush.

My attempt at a selfie.

The falls are pretty impressive but I would love to see it when they aren’t in the middle of a drought.

We had dinner at a nearby restaurant called Elevation, with an awesome view of Auckland.  We were even treated to a bit of a rainbow during dinner.

I really liked the label on this bottle of wine.  It helped that the wine was quite good.

During our drive to Piha we heard on the radio that NZ was shutting it’s borders to all but NZ citizens.  We knew the flight we were taking the next morning was coming from SF, so we were concerned United may cancel our flight, but fortunately that didn’t happen.  We were very happy when our flight took off.  Here is a last shot of Auckland out the window.

Getting through Customs at the airport was surprisingly fast.  Nobody was being screened in any way, and Customs only asked us two questions (any fruit? any alcohol?).  No paperwork to fill out, no health check, nothing.  We made it from the plane to the exit in 20 minutes.  I will say that we saw some people being screened before we boarded in Auckland, but it must have been random or they were simply looking for anybody who might appear sick.  I was expecting more of a vetting process based on how this is all playing out.

I am working on one last post regarding things we found interesting about NZ, as well as an update on my efforts to cancel 6 weeks worth of bookings in Australia.  It’s been quite interesting to see how some companies have reacted, both positive and negative.  Thanks for reading!