Giedre tyttö Ozista

VIsitors from North (most places are North...)

Some of these pictures were taken by my mother. She and her partner arrived last Friday, were dragged around some 3-4 beaches and 2 bush walks over the weekend, drove to Northland (I'd assume walked a whole lot there) and are due to return to Auckland tonight.

Muriwai was beautiful as ever last Sunday, but it was difficult to enjoy it after 2 bush walks in the morning and some 4hrs driving to Te Arai and back (the waves were raging mad on the East coast for a change, so we didn't dare to surf there...:) I could only imagine how it must have felt for our visitors after 30hrs of non-stop flight from Europe...

NZ is a pretty small place, but there are so many interesting things and beautiful views, and the landscape changes so dramatically, that in those 3 weeks that my mother is here, I think they'll be able to make a small round of North Island (not even touching Wellington!!!)

I'll be taking some time off work and joining them for a small tour around the South of the North Island. There still are a lot of places that we with Kaj haven't seen on our trip last April, so this time I hope to catch up on those: Mt Maunganui, Tauranga, Gisborne, Napier, Mt Taranaki, etc...

From what I could tell, I think my mother is quite impressed by NZ. But she's easy to please, just bring her to a forest, let her wander and check out the plants for hours. NZ has plenty of plants that don't exist elsewhere in the world, so the first few days I was struggling to name any of them (the easy way out was to label them all as kauri... thats the famous one... :)

But then I got a plant encyclopedia from the library and checked out NZ native plants list on Wikipedia with Nicoletta and now I'm much more fluent in NZ flora.

Otherwise things are going quite well, the surf is calling us tonight to Piha... Maybe... So after a long day at work, we may be a little bit "pihalla" ("pihalla" in Finnish means something like "out of it"), as Katja pointed out... :)