Taranaki:

After doing the Tongariro Crossing hike, we made our way back to the west coast of the North Island. As there is no direct route back to the coast, we had to go north first and then wrap our way back south again once we had reached the coast. Our next stop was the Taranaki region of New Zealand.

Even though we spent a few days in this area, we didn’t see many sights or explore a ton of the area as we spent quite a bit of time doing the less fun part of traveling…which is planning. In other words, we spent quite a few hours in libraries figuring out things like crossing over to the South Island, our plans for the South Island, and looking into employment and places to live.

But, we still managed to get out and see a few things, and our favourites were:

Elephant Rock and the Three Sisters:

The coastline along the Taranaki region is quite unique, and one of the places that demonstrates this well is the Elephant Rock and the Three Sisters, which are just north of the town of Waitara.

There is a small parking lot just off of the highway, and you need to access this area at low tide as you walk along a section of beach which is underwater any other time than low tide. Along the way, you walk across a section of sandstone which has been weathered by the water and looks like dragon scales. It’s quite slippery, but someone has taken the time to cut stairs and a walkway through part of it.

Once you reach the actual coastline, you get onto a wide beach and you immediately see the three sisters. These are large sandstone and mudstone pillars which have been weathered away by the wind and water over time. Besides the three sisters, there are several other formations including giant blocks of sandstone with tunnels and caves through them, as well as one pillar that has a massive archway in it.

Along with the pillars, just the beach itself is worth the trip. The sand is a black and it gets moved around with every incoming tide and forms rolling hills of sand that trap water in small pools. Then there are rocks, chunks of clay, and blocks of sandstone that look like smooth, rounded dragon bones (or maybe elephant bones…).

My favourite, was a section of rock that was a pale light blue colour and had been weathered in a really strange pattern than almost looked like a rib cage of some kind of giant animal. In a section of it, however you could see the stump of a tree and some sections of fallen wood that had been somehow sunken and become trapped inside of the rock over time.

And finally, the elephant rock. Further down the beach past the Three Sisters, you finally see it, and you can’t miss it. It’s another sandstone and mudstone formation that looks just like a massive elephant standing on the beach. There are some things like this that require you to use your imagination where people say things like, “look at that rock face, and if you look in a certain way you can see the outline of a whale.” But this wasn’t one of those. It was unmistakeable an elephant.

We went at low tide, and there is one last section before the elephant rock that we couldn’t cross, no matter how hard we tried. It is possible to get right to the elephant rock, however on the day that we went we couldn’t find the way. There is one part that seems like you should be able to get there by jumping between rocks, but the water is murky and the tide kept coming in a covering all of the rocks so we weren’t very comfortable going.

We also didn’t see anyone else going, so it might have been that the tide simply wasn’t low enough during this low tide. But we managed to get a few pictures from far away anyways.

Taranaki Mountain:

The mountain of Taranaki itself is another thing to check out in this area. It’s a giant volcano that is in the middle of fairly flat terrain that looks like Mount Fuji. Actually, in the movie The Last Samurai, there is a scene of Tom Cruise at what is supposed to be Mount Fuji in Japan, but was actually filmed at Mount Taranaki.

If you look on a map of New Zealand, you’ll see a slight bulge along the west coast where Taranaki sits, and it looks like a giant pimple, which is how it got the nickname “The Pimple”.

So even though we saw Taranaki several times while we were in the area, on our last day we were planning to drive the circular road around the base of the volcano to see it from all sides. But it was raining very heavily all day so we decided to move on instead. Because of that, unfortunately I didn’t actually get any pictures of the mountain itself.

Some other things to do in the area:

Mount Damper Falls:

We decided to skip Mount Damper Falls as it was a little bit out of our way, but it might be something to check out if you’re ever in the area.

Forgotten World Highway:

A really popular drive in this area is through a section of road called the Forgotten World Highway. It goes between the towns of Stratford and Taumarunui. It’s supposed to be a beautiful drive with lots to see along it, but we decided to skip it as it took us in the wrong direction from where we were going. We hope to check it out later on in our trip in NZ.