It was a long stretch of driving, and the map was misleading. The tiny red "local road" marked was winding and uphill a lot, but sealed. Then we reached Provincial State Highway, and it was GRAVEL! Rather slow and a lot of work for Henry and Jim! But eventually we got back down out of the mountains to good sealed road; came to our first real tunnel (Jim photographed it, I ran through it) - and finally we reached the coast and then New Plymouth. N.P. was not as "surf town" as we'd hoped, from what we saw anyway, having anticipated something more like Mt. Maunganui or Taupo. The only windsurf shop was out of town, overpriced, and not too promising*. We found a place to camp right above the beach - lots of wind, but the water (Tasman Sea) was beautiful, the view fine.
We went into "downtown" and cruised for theatres; finally went to see "Personal Services," a British sex comedy with Julie Walters, which had its quite amusing moments!
*In retrospect these complaints were unjustified given that I (Jim) was shopping for a complete windsurfing rig for a couple of hundred bucks NZ. I did find a decent board and rig for this price later, but not from a shop. The N.P. shop was run by the legendary "Biggie" who was out sailing double-mast high waves in 40 knots on the Taranaki coast at the time. You can read about him and other Taranaki legends at: http://gallifrey.taranaki.ac.nz/~ecentre/legend.htm.
