2025 New Zealand - September - Day 06 - Goodbye Taupō, hello Napier.

 September 16, 2025

Our stay at The Olives in Taupō was amazing.  It was so clean and comfortable.  And Taupō is such a nice place with such an amazing lake all around.

We got up this morning, got ready and headed to Napier, about a 1.75 hour journey.  For the first 45 minutes, the road was straight and nice.  But then we ended up back in the mountains to get over to the coast where Napier is.  The drive was beautiful.  But I’ll always remember New Zealand because it was windy (weather) and windy (driving).  It has not stopped blowing and the mountain driving is some of the most crooked I’ve ever driven for such lengths of time.  Fortunately the roads are in pretty good shape and nice and wide.

Napier seems to be a coast town.  Since we arrived here a bit early, we decided to go directly to the National Aquarium.  This place sits right on the sea and as it turns out, about one block from our motel.  We are staying at the Pebble Beach Motel.  And it is quite nice.  Anyway, the aquarium was fairly small.  But we had some fun with it.  I was amazed, however, that they had no large fish like sharks and so on.  They did have some native penguins that are found in New Zealand.  I did not know they had penguins here.  One was named ‘Timmy’ which made us smile.  But one of the craziest things happened while looking at the fish in the large tank.  I noticed a fish that seemed to be really agitated.  It was going crazy with its mouth open.  It looked like he was trying to capture food or something with its mouth open and moving so quickly up and down through the water.  But as I watched it, all of the sudden the fish just stopped moving and sunk to the bottom.  It just laid there not moving.  I called Denise over and told her what I had just seen.  We just watched to see if it would move.  Finally, we called one of the workers over.  Sure enough, the darn thing died and I witnessed its last moments.  They came with a net and scooped it off the bottom.   We kinda were devastated.  So odd to have watched this.

After the aquarium, we walked to a fish and chips shop.  We bought ‘the deal’ which included 2 pieces of fish, 2 crab sticks, a hot dog and a pot full of chips (fries).  Way too much food and way too greasy.  I’m writing this in the evening and I’m still kind of fighting that greasy feel.  We did not eat all of it.  The hot dog was cooked like the fish and tasted horrible.  Also, while we ate, we were surrounded by seagulls.  We ate by the sea at some picnic tables and these birds just hovered.  It was freaky.

After lunch, we checked into our room and just kind of chilled.  We did some video calling to a couple of our kids.  We will catch up with the others tomorrow when the time is better over there.  But we didn’t do much else.  Around dinner time, we went for a walk and found a place that had some chowder.  So we shared a large bowl of chowder and called that dinner.  I guess we were ready for a down day.  Tomorrow, though, we plan to ride e-bikes around the bay here.  Should be fun if it is not too windy.  Oh…it’s pretty warm here…in the 70’s….which is the warmest we’ve seen.

Pictures:

Having some dinner in an eatery close to our motel…

Our room!  The view looking out toward the sea is quite nice.

This is our view overlooking a park and then the beach and sea.

Our hotel….

Our greasy lunch.  We could have chose better…just too greasy.

The lunch was wrapped in a paper bag and was quite large.  Too darn much…

Denise being consumed by a small shark…

Our dead friend.  May he/she rest in peace!

I’d love to see these guys in the open ocean.  Seeing a seahorse would be a dream come true in the open ocean.

No.  I’m not kissing the window.  I’m tapping trying to encourage the Moray Eel to come a bit further out.

Timmy the penguin poster!

They had a small dinosaur exhibit.  We were looking at it and then all of the sudden this dinosaur let out a roar and started to move.  I think Denise screamed.  It caught us both off guard.

It’s really hard to get a good picture of the amazing landscape as we drive.  But Denise did a good job trying get some of the beauty and the fact that they had windmills along the top of the mountains.  

Another landscape picture….

The putting green was just outside our little flat where we stayed in Taupō.  That was kind of fun.

The have ‘loser’ plates in their cars too (like England).  I’m sure they mean the same…not losers but learners.  But seeing this brought back some interesting driving memories for me in getting my license in England.

Denise in the tunnel under the big aquarium.