Not a lot to say about this trip…not because it wasn’t fun but because it was like three months ago now (Posting this on May 17th even though I backdated it). So far behind on pictures and posts…I have finally convinced Sheila to start posting too so hopefully that will help us catch up.
But yeah…we had not been up the North West coast so we decided to drive up that way. Just looking at the map Shelly beach sounded cool because it was on a point in a bay and it was one of the only beaches in that area.
Not wanting to drive to a crappy beach (if there is such a thing in New Zealand), we decided to stop at Helensville and check the tourist information centre to see what was cool to do in Helensville. As it turns out there isn’t that much to do in the Helensville area…seemed pretty boring. We told the lady at the information centre that we were thinking of going to Shelly Beach and she agreed that this would be our best bet. She said it was a really nice beach…I don’t know if she had actually been there because she wasn’t really right.
On the drive between Helensville and Shelly Beach we passed a Macadamia nut farm…we joked about going in and taking the tour that they advertised. I thought it was a joke but apparently it was in fact not a joke for one of us…J
If Shelly Beach was back in Canada it would probably be overrun with people and everyone would think it was awesome but by New Zealand beach standards it was not great. It kind of seemed more like a mud flat than a beach…walking around in the water was kind of gross because the mud was so soft and the water was really muddy/murky. It got its name because of all the crushed shells…most of the beach above the muddy waterline was crushed up white shells.
Shelly Beach
There was a ton of little crabs too…Sheila wasn’t wearing her glasses and was worried the entire time about stepping on them.. Not sure if she didn’t want to kill a crab or didn’t want to hurt her foot…:-)
So after walking up and down the beach a bit and enjoying a slightly warm beer we decided to jump back into the Vitz and go somewhere else. Somewhere else ended up being the macadamia nut farm that I thought we were only joking about going to. So we pulled into the farm…got a couple macadamia nut ice creams (which was incredibly good) and went on the complementary self tour. There were a lot of fun facts about macadamia nuts…none of which I can remember. Seems like all these food related tours is a commercial for how healthy eating that particular food is….pretty sure if there was a cigarette tour here they would tell you how darts are the super food and cure cancer…:-)
As you can see in the picture below macadamia nuts grow on trees like apples and have green shells. I think they must be roasted like coffee or something to get the brown dry shell.
Nuts
Macadamia Nut Fun Fact:
As you can see below if you run out of gravel when constructing a driveway you can substitute macadamia nut shells.
Nut Driveway