We. Love. This. Maunga.

PartnersOctober 30, 2019

Five essential tips for visiting Taranaki this summer

Staff writer

We. Love. This. Maunga.

With its snow-capped mountain, black sand beaches and rich arts culture, Taranaki is a region absolutely bursting with hidden gems. We’ve put together a list of all you need to know before you explore this stunning part of our backyard this summer.

If you’ve got friends or relatives visiting Aotearoa, top of their list should be sorting out their NZeTA (New Zealand Electronic Travel Authority). Head to the Immigration New Zealand website for all the details.

How do I love thee, Taranaki? Let me count the ways. I love Taranaki for its snow-capped maunga, it’s too-hot-in-summer black sand beaches, and for Yarrows Bread, the company that blessed the nation with one of the finest giant statues we’ll ever lay our eyes on. This is a place where you can surf and ski on the same day, and there’s something here for everyone, even if your idea of getting into the great outdoors is, like mine, lying on the beach drinking wine.

Taranaki is also home to New Plymouth (Ngāmotu), a frankly delightful city of nearly 60,000 people that’s often confused with Palmerston North. Forget your standard provincial city stereotypes, because New Plymouth punches above its regional weight in terms of arts and events. It’s a place small enough to keep that friendly small-town feel, but big enough to have shops open on a Sunday. Plus, you’ll never get stuck in traffic, no matter how hard you try.

Still not convinced? Here are some of the best gems in Taranaki’s crown.

The Best Single-Day Outing

If you’ve ever fancied climbing Mount Taranaki but aren’t sure you’ll have the oomph to get to the top, the the Pouakai Crossing could be the walk for you. It’s a shorter 4-5 hour day walk that’s part of the longer 19km Pouakai Circuit, Taranaki’s answer to the often overcrowded Tongariro Crossing. It’ll leave you breathless, but in a good way.

The Pouakai Crossing takes you across the lower slopes of Mount Taranaki, where you’ll be rewarded with incredible views over Taranaki and the central North Island. The best views are at the picturesque Pouakai Tarns, where you’ll see the maunga reflected perfectly in the waters of the lake. A photo here will give you at least four new followers on Instagram, so it’s definitely worth it.

An image of the Govett-Brewster gallery in New Plymouth, Taranaki, against a blue-red sunset — Beautiful outside, beautiful inside; New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Gallery. Image: Patrick Reynolds for Venture Taranaki

The Best Way to Get Cultured

The Len Lye Centre is an iconic building in Taranaki, thanks to its gigantic walls made of shiny stainless steel. Once you’ve stopped looking at yourself in the mirrors, check out the internationally acclaimed Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Len Lye Centre, home to the collection of kinetic sculptor and filmmaker Len Lye.

The Govett-Brewster has a variety of weird and wonderful exhibitions and displays, but it’s worth a visit just to check out Len Lye’s moving sculptures, which bend and wobble in mysterious and magical ways. Afterwards, be sure to check out the Wind Wand, an amazing 48 metre high Len Lye sculpture that bobs around on the New Plymouth foreshore.

The Best Hard-to-Find Eatery

The legendary White Hart Hotel was lovingly restored a few years ago, and is now one of New Plymouth’s most beautiful heritage buildings. There’s a hidden treasure tucked away inside called Snug Lounge, a Japanese inspired cocktail lounge that cleverly mixes a cosy old-school pub feel with fresh Asian fusion food.

Come for the Snug Lounge’s luxurious red velvet interior, stay for the amazing food and cocktails. It’s the perfect place to meet up with friends for a quiet drink or a pre-show meal, or better yet, grab a table in the covered courtyard with its open fire and fairy lights. The food is delicious, the service fantastic, and if you need me, I’ll be in a dark corner stuffing my face full of Butternut Pumpkin Wontons.

The Best Passion Project

Just outside Hawera in South Taranaki is Tawhiti Museum, a privately owned museum that’s been wowing visitors since the 1990s. Former art teacher Nigel Ogle’s passion for Taranaki is so strong that he’s created this award-winning museum about the region’s history, with all the models and displays handmade on site by Nigel himself.

Tawhiti Museum is full of surprises. An old dairy factory has been transformed into a series of themed galleries that bring Taranaki’s past to life, and visitors can ride the Tawhiti Bush Railway or check out the Farmpower Hall filled with vintage machinery. Best of all is the Traders and Whalers exhibition, which was built with Weta Workshop and takes visitors on an underground boat ride through an exhibition about early encounters between Māori and Pākeha in Taranaki. A boat ride, in a museum? Now I’ve seen it all.

A shot of a three-piece band playing at WOMAD in New Plymouth — WOMAD festival at the Bowl of Brooklands, one of NZ’s oldest and finest music events. Image: Rob Tucker for Venture Taranaki

The Best Fest

WOMAD is an incredible three day international festival of music, arts and dance, held each March in the Bowl of Brooklands and Brooklands Park. It’s a big deal in Taranaki, and since WOMAD began in New Plymouth over 15 years ago, the festival has welcomed more than 1000 artists from 100 different countries. Each year over 12,000 visitors travel to Taranaki to attend.

WOMAD is a magical celebration, with musicians and performers from around the globe coming together to perform. There’s an uplifting atmosphere of peace and unity around the park, and the festival is filled with a hugely diverse mix of music and people. You’re guaranteed a good time, you’d be (wo)mad to miss it.

For more from our ‘Top of the List’ series, check out the below:

Six great reasons to check out the Far North this summer

Five of Nelson’s must-try attractions

Five ways to fall in love with the Coromandel

A starter’s guide to summering in Central Otago

This content was created in paid partnership with Immigration New Zealand. Learn more about our partnerships here.

Keep going!

A real photo from the Nobel Prize ceremony

ScienceOctober 27, 2019

After decades of service, the lithium-ion battery has won a Nobel Prize

Justin Hodgkiss

Guest writer

A real photo from the Nobel Prize ceremony

The lithium-ion battery has won this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize. Justin Hodgkiss celebrates the slow and steady speed of technological developments.

Back in the 1970s, when the lithium-ion battery research recognised by the Nobel Prize committee was still in the lab, mobile phones and laptops existed only in our imaginations or science fiction.

Today, chances are you first learned that the lithium-ion battery had won this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize by reading of it on a device powered by a lithium-ion battery. And that unless your battery goes flat, I’d bet you (along with the rest of us) rarely give the inner workings of the battery much thought. But it deserves our attention for the lessons it teaches us about the way science changes our world.

Lithium-ion batteries have been successful because they’re compact, lightweight, easy to recharge and can hold that charge for extended periods of time. They’ve changed the way we live and work. And their greatest reach may be still to come. We increasingly see the value of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles, and as a critical part of a renewable electricity grid, storing energy when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.

But lithium has its own challenges. Its supply is limited and there are environmental impacts of lithium mining. So we need to find new ways to recycle the lithium-ions we already have. Chemists within the MacDiarmid Institute are working on the chemistry for recycling lithium-ion batteries, developing ways to not waste the precious lithium-ions already in use in our phones and other devices.

Many lithium-ion batteries use cobalt, which is not only toxic but its mining is linked to human rights abuses. To combat this, New Zealand researchers are working on developing lithium-ion-inspired batteries made from cheap, earth abundant elements like aluminium, and other sustainable and scalable battery technologies. These alternatives can be used widely, from your phone through to EVs and large scale grid storage.

But it might not be quick. As this Nobel prize story tells us, it took decades for the first lab discoveries of lithium-ion batteries to make their way through to widespread application.

First, scientists needed to understand exactly how ions move in these porous electrode materials, how densely they pack when the battery is charged, and what limits the voltage of a battery cell. There was no guarantee that this knowledge would ever lead to the development of transformative technology like the battery, but we know for sure that today’s technology could not exist without that foundation of basic research.

For humanity to have a future on this planet, we’ll need disruptive new technologies that reverse the pressure we’ve been putting on the earth. This prize for lithium-ion batteries puts the spotlight on deep research – the type that doesn’t see the light of day for quite some time, but when it does, the impact it has can be enormous.

For us to now have the kinds of devices I’m writing on and that you’re probably reading this on, we needed the deep and innovative research that Nobel prizes reward. And we needed it underway four decades ago. Similarly, if we want the ‘science fiction’ future of our imaginations, we need to be doing basic research now. While the timescales of basic research tend to be longer, the rewards are often greater, as this prize acknowledges.

Today we are desperate to use lithium-ion batteries to help us cope with the climate crisis we’re facing. And it’s interesting to reflect that the discoveries of Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino were also made at a time of great upheaval – during the 1970s oil crisis, where we worried about global security, and researchers around the world were focussed on developing fossil free technologies.

Fast forward to today, and the crisis is no longer about the demise of a single resource, such as fossil fuels, but the loss of a singular resource – a liveable planet. Once again, we are looking to science for solutions, and it’s never been more urgent for research to focus on renewable sources of energy, and ways to store this energy more sustainably. Batteries are going to have to play a big role, as will renewable energy sources such as solar.

Perhaps we will not fully appreciate the impact of basic energy research happening today until we hear who receives the 2050 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

This content was created in paid partnership with the MacDiarmid Institute. Learn more about our partnerships here.