November 11 - Sandspit to Otorohanga

What's with these names anyways? The British came over in the 1800s and pretty much took over. But for some reason, every street name, town name, place, etc. is still Polynesian. I don't get it, and no one seems to be able to answer why. It's a tongue-twister, and no mistake.
We left Sandspit like a bullet with the intention of reaching escape velocity so we could shoot through Auckland on the way south. We were really depressed. When we tallied up the time that we have spent so far between Auckland and the Northland, it comes to over half our allotted time here. It took way longer to get through the north than we had hoped or planned. We didn't care much for that half of the trip, and think it was a waste of valuable time.
Once we got south of Auckland it was like a giant weight was lifted off our shoulders. We were headed to a place called Otorohanga to fish the Waipa River. Its a beautiful little stream that meanders along through awesome pastoral valleys and farmland. The vast majority of fishable waters in NZ are on private land and permission to access the rivers has to be obtained from the farmers. Very rarely do they deny you access, but the trick is to find them. We wanted to fish the Awakino river so we drove up a road that parallels the stream. After about 20k we finally stopped a farmer on his ATV. We asked who we needed to see to get permission to fish the land, since we passed only two houses in 20k. "That may be difficult" he said; "you need to talk to me". The reason that we had trouble finding anyone was because he owned 12k of the river himself.
A quick note about farmers and ATVs. It cracks us up. The farmers all use dogs extensively to manage their stock, both sheep and cattle. You'll be driving down the road when here comes a farmer the other way at 50 mph...with two dogs standing on the back rack, tongues a flappin'.

Even funnier is when they're going across their bumpy fields at the same clip without losing a pup. We were on the Marokopa river, and I was making another futile attempt to catch a fish. Along came a large woman with ATV and dogs, replete with the Crocodile Dundee hat and duster. She told Cynthia that she was going to be moving a bunch of bulls. Five minutes later up the road she comes, dogs on point duty. She stopped and talked to me for about 15 minutes. In the meantime the bulls fanned out in all directions grazing. When she was done talking to me she hollered something in Kiwi and the dogs took off like a flash and had the bulls back on the road in about 10 seconds.