It is a short 20 minute drive up to Kerikeri where there are a couple of waterfalls to view, and an old Stone Store of some sort. We drive up the “highway,” the winding narrow 2 lane “highway,” and arrive at Kerikeri quite easily. We decide to get gas here so we know we’ll have enough to get back to Whangarei and manage to figure out that this station is semi-self-service. They pump, you go inside and pay. We figured that out, after the attendant pumped the gas, then left to go service other cars. Ok. We’ve got it now.
Driving out of the station, we go right through town, but it’s sort of odd. The road splits off and becomes one way – going the opposite direction – in the middle of town. So we have to circle the town – basically going around the block, to get back to the main road. We can’t figure out why they’d do that – it’s just odd. And because I don’t think we’ll come back this way, we’ll never know if there was something special in that 2 or 3 block one-way road area. Odd.
But, nonetheless, we successful drive through Kerikeri and find our way out to the Rainbow Falls park area. There is a nice paved pathway leading to 3 different viewing areas. While we didn’t see any rainbows, we did get some great views of the falls from different perspectives.
First glimpse:
Closer view, from a more sideways angle:
Then from the top pond, looking down toward the falls – oh, and right past the sheep pasture:
This is a nice little diversion, a good way to stretch out our legs and get some fresh air after all the driving. But now we have decisions to make. There is another waterfall nearby, the Wharepoke Falls, which is supposed to be just as good, if not better than Rainbow Falls. However, it’s a 20 minute walk just to get into see the waterfall. It’s almost 1:30 and we still want to try to make the loop across to the Kauri coast, so we decide to ditch Wharepoke, and just head out onto the road.
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