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Day 50

Kiwi Family Mission Take 2: Adventures in the Egmont National Park

All good days in New Zealand start and continue with coffee It’s the end of an era in New Plymouth, celebrated at the Ducks and Drakes Backpackers with barista-style coffee. We are saying goodbye to our super welcoming hosts, Brett and Paula, as well as some of the backpackers we have been sharing the hostel with over the last week,…

Day 49

Finding Three Sisters and the Elephant Rock

There’s a wild side to the Taranaki coastline – one that involves three sisters. If that doesn’t intrigue you enough, then there is an elephant too. So let’s take a road trip up north from New Plymouth to see these unusual rock formations with our own eyes. Are we going to make it?! Like all three sisters and elephants they only…

Day 48

A Surf Highway 45 Road Trip

We are entering big wave territory, so big that they named the highway going along the coast of Taranaki Surf Highway 45. But we aren’t road tripping down the highway for surf... No... There’s more to this scenic route. So, with our 15 Places to Stop at on Taranaki's Surf Highway 45 article on hand, we pick a few of the…

Day 47

The Climb Up Paritutu Rock

New Plymouth is really embracing the “four seasons” thing. There’s a saying that New Zealand’s weather is like “four seasons in a day”. While not that extreme, we were hammered with wind yesterday, hammered with rain the day before that, but today, we are hammered with the sun. Yay! And you know what people do in New Plymouth on a…

Day 46

The New Plymouth Art Crawl Finale: The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

The grand finale to our art crawl of New Plymouth ends with the unmissable Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. By unmissable, we mean that you literally cannot miss the sight of the curved reflective walls of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre building. By unmissable, we also mean this is a free museum/art gallery from fascinating historic collections to bizarre kinetic contemporary art, so…

Day 45

New Plymouth Walkabout: Discovering The City’s Gems

How did we underestimate this city? When you see New Plymouth on the map, you can only assume it's a farming community that happens to be near an effing huge volcano. We did not expect to find a city where you can actually go sight-seeing between the buildings. After going between the Coastal Walkway with huge kinetic sculptures to visiting a community art…

Day 44

A New Plymouth Culture Crawl: From Museum to Barber Shop Gallery

The more we stay in New Plymouth the more surprises we're encountering. It's got the mountain. It's got the sea, the surf and the islands. It's got the music and the art (which we are going to see a lot more of this evening). Today, we're about to discover it's got the history at the free Puke Ariki Museum. At the…

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