Words on Wednesday (or New Plymouth Part 2)

Thistles and Kiwis

If you saw Monday’s post, you will see we took a short trip up to New Plymouth after Easter. The city is situated on the west coast of the North Island and apparently was awarded the most liveable city (for a population between 75,000-150,000) by the International Awards for Liveable Communities in 2021. As well as being home to the Botanic Gardens and Govett Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre I talked about on my last post, there is a wonderful 13.2km Coastal Walkway that takes you from Port Taranaki to the eastern end side of Bell Block Beach. Due to time constraints and other plans, we only walked a short way along on Friday evening. You can see Len Lye’s Wind Wand clearly just ahead of Karl in the middle picture below.

On Saturday we planned to go and see Dawson Falls. Unfortunately when we got to the visitor’s centre, there was nowhere to park (it being a sunny public holiday weekend I guess – and we were not that early). So we just parked up in a not very good spot and took a short walk to get some pictures of Mount Taranki with no clouds – something that doesn’t happen that often! Mount Taranaki is a dormant volcano, 2518m high, and was used in the film ‘The Last Samuri’ to represent Mount Fuji!

Below you can see the entrance to the lovely drive up to the visitor’s centre, the view over the surrounding land from a viewing platform and Mount Taranaki itself.

On Sunday when we left, the whole mountain was covered in cloud…and the most beautiful and complete rainbow stood in its place. It was just as magical in quite a different way. Here is one more picture, also taken from the viewing platform by Karl.

That is me for today apart from an update on the ‘likes’ issue I mentioned in my last post. Apparently a change was made, but they are working on fixing it. No comment!

Also entered in the weekend coffee share hosted by lovely Natalie the Explorer.

You can find Thistles and Kiwis on Facebook, and also on Instagram @thistlesandkiwis.  As for Twitter….am totally inactive these days.  If you want to get in touch, email me on thistlesandkiwis@gmail.com

Published by Thistles and Kiwis

20 Comments

  1. Pingback: This week’s small pleasures #280: a trip to New Plymouth – Thistles and Kiwis

  3. Wonderful pictures. Thank you for sharing. When I visited N.Z. a very long time ago I actually walked around Mt. Taranaki. We also had beautiful weather but I will never forget that I slipped on the scree but could hold on to a rock before I went all the way down.

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  4. You were lucky to have such lovely weather, and also to see Mount Taranki without cloud, unfortunately we had really heavy rain while at New Plymouth , and even when the rain stopped, there was cloud around Mount Taranki, so well done to get some photos of it without cloud. Beautiful countryside, like most of New Zealand.

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  11. That looks like a lovely place for a walk! I’m curious about the name New Plymouth – is it named by people from Plymouth, England who emigrated there?

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