March 07, 2014
We began our day with a remarkably good breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, along with great and helpful advice on our day’s itinerary from our waiter.
Side Topic: While it’s a rather big job to sort through information researching a trip, sometimes the best tips come from shop keepers, waitstaff, friendly locals, etc. I totally understand the feeling of “Argh, I’m tired of learning about this and have made decisions; so no more distractions!” But I’ve found it’s best to take a breath and consider the information, even if it means having to reconsider one’s earlier decisions.
Several times Rich and I have been in the position of seeing friends who’ve gotten bad advice which we’ve tried to fix, to no avail. People often listen to the first advice they hear and decide that’s who they should trust, simply on the basis of it being the first advice they’ve gotten. Once decided, they don’t want to hear differing opinions, even if they’re just as worthy of consideration.
Of course, it goes the other way, too, especially in cruising—you decide to do something and get some naysayer telling you that it’s not possible. OK, this needs to be the subject of a separate blog post; so I’ll get back to the matter at hand, which was that our waiter had good and valuable advice for us. (Thank you, James, wherever you are).
Our first stop of the day would be Pukekura Park, New Plymouth’s city park. Seeing as how New Plymouth is considered the garden city of the North Island, we expected this park would be special. And we weren’t disappointed.
Immediately one can see Pukekura Park is uniquely beautiful, seeming a bit lower than the surrounding landscape which gives it the feeling of being a shallow valley, full of impressively tall trees, greenery, lakes and ponds, and surrounded by hills.
But they also do an interesting thing in this park, and that’s to very subtly place large press-buttons near the water features, so subtle it’s hard to notice them. They also don’t advertise this—you just have to be lucky enough to be in the know. James had told us to seek them out because pressing them makes things happen.
We came to the first lake, managed to find the button and press it. Suddenly a fountain shot up high from the middle of the lake. People around us admired it but had no idea we caused it until we pressed the button and caused it to shoot up again. It’s amazing no one else seemed to know about this. Below, some photos of the park and the fountain (click to enlarge any photo in the galleries that follow).
After that, we continued to another lake, this one featuring a gorgeous Japanese-style bridge with a view of Fuji-like Mount Taranaki behind it. It’s a striking scene and if not featured in New Plymouth travel brochures, it should be. We then discovered a waterfall gently cascading over rocks nearby. Rich located a button and pushed it, and suddenly the volume of water picked up and it turned into an impressive cascade.
We finished our park visit at the Fern House, a garden in a series of greenhouses. Entering that was like entering a magical world where you don’t walk down aisles so much as follow a pathway through fern grotto caves and beautiful flowering plants, going from cool fern forests to tropical greenery to walls of flowers and ponds. It is simply the most beautiful garden we have ever seen.
We finished our visit with a walk around a small lake and then back to the car. We had another garden to visit during the course of the day, and if it was as pretty as this one, we’d definitely have “beauty overload.” For now, our next stop would be the coast. –Cyndi
