Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-ninth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Story of the Stubby the Vengeful Crab", is about a crab who is named Stubby because one of h…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-eighth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode entitled "The Story of the Caterpillars Who Never Gave Up" is about a caterpillar brother and sister whose…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-seventh episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode is entitled "The Story of Wiley the Mischievous Fox." This story is about how a fox, who is a prankster a…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-sixth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode is entitled "The Story of Late, Lazy, and the Meanie Bugs." This story is about how two brothers, named Lat…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-fifth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode is entitled "The Story of How to Win by Losing." It is about how a new girl at her new school is bullied by…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-fourth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, which is our first new episode of 2023, is entitled "The Story of the Greedy Princess and the Toymaker." …

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-third episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Surprising Superhero," is about how a very unusual and surprising superhero, named Sam, save…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-second episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "Willa’s Amazing Treasure Hunt," is about how the legend of a lost treasure inspires a young gir…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twenty-first episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Seed of Truth," is about how a very wise old king invents a contest to choose who will be th…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twentieth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Story of the Most Unusual Fairy Tale Princess," is about how a very unusual Fairy Tale Princess…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the nineteenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Way Story," is about how a Doctor, named Dr. Whynot, tries to heal the people in the Kingdom o…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the eighteenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Story of Larry and the Lie Flies," is about how a ten-year-old boy, named Larry, learns that l…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the seventeenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Story of the Ugly Mermaid," is about how a less-than-perfect statue of a mermaid, made by a g…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the sixteenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "Robby the Selfish Redwood Tree", is about a selfish young redwood who refuses to share and care for…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the fifteenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "Harvey the Unhappy Hippo", is about how a young hippopotamus with a negative self-image finds how t…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the fourteenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Toaster Kissing Story", is about how a girl named Pam discovers that being selfish and vain ca…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the thirteenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Singing Christmas Puffins", is about how a group of singing Puffins, who live in Santa’s Laugh…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the twelfth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Monkey Trap", is about a monkey named Marvin and his friends, who find out just how dangerous a m…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the eleventh episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Story of the Bewitched Tongues" is about the power of words, and how they can be used either to …

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the tenth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Parable of the Terrible Day", is about a Wisconsin farm boy who finds out just how to make a day re…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the nineth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This Halloween episode, entitled "The Scariest Monster Ever", is about a huge scary monster who comes to a big city and how an…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the eighth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The House of a Thousand Mirrors", is about two small but very different dogs who visit a place called …

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the seventh episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Clock Who Stopped Ticking", is about a beautiful newly made clock who got discouraged and hopeles…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the fifth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Eagle Who Believed It Was a Chicken", is about how an eagle became convinced it was a chicken and w…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the fifth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "Hershel the Stone Cutter", is about how a man named Hershel finds out that getting everything he thinks…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the fourth episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode includes two stories,"The Story of the Two Seeds", and "The Story of the Three Little Bears", which is an origina…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents the third episode of The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This episode, entitled "The Most Important Animal on the Farm", is about how a new puppy discovers just who the most important …

Maverick Minister for Kids presents The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This second episode, entitled "The Two Princesses and the Gift", tells about two very different sisters and how an angelic gift helped them to reali…

Maverick Minister for Kids presents The Life Lessons Stories for Kids Podcast Series. These are enjoyable stories with a life lesson message for kids, young people, and grownups who are young at heart. This first episode, entitled "The Happiest Bird in the World" tells about a crow who is searching for happiness and where he finds it. We hope you e…

This post follows up my two earlier posts about the wild Catlins region of New Zealand. I went through in a campervan at the start of June 2021. I visit the waterfalls, and list freedom camping sites. Information about freedom camping sites can be a bit hard to come by, so I have made the effort to identify all five such sites in the Catlins. I als…

THE Lake Marian Track has lately become very popular, although tourist numbers are down at present because of Covid (so, if in NZ already, you should go there!). The track begins from Marian Carpark, one kilometre down the unsealed Hollyford Road from its intersection with the Milford Road, some ninety kilometres out from Te Anau. It now has a wood…

The Taranaki (NZ) Around the Mountain Circuit turned into an epic for me! I only got halfway before falling into a ravine on the way north and injuring myself, so the northern side will have to be written up some other time. But meanwhile, here are some thoughts on doing the southern side. Which is what you miss out if, like a lot of people, you on…

Reefton, on the West Coast of NZ’s South Island, was one of the first towns to get electric light and is the gateway to many trails today. It is the only sizable town on the West Coast that’s some way inland. The town got its start in 1871 following the discovery of a gold reef nearby, and was originally called Reef Town. To this day it’s got plent…

Hanmer Springs is a popular hot-spring resort east of the Lewis Pass in NZ’s South Island. It’s also the gateway to a wilderness. You get to Hanmer Springs by turning northward, off State Highway 7 between the Lewis Pass and Culverden. The town lies in a small plain just south of the Hanmer Range, which includes Mount Isobel and Jacks Pass. It’s a …

That’s a question we need to ask in New Zealand. Should immigration targets be linked to positive spending on infrastructure and housing to cope? On last Sunday’s Q+A, most of the panel and the interviewees seemed to think that New Zealand needed a larger population, built up by immigration. Or that immigration-fuelled growth was, at any rate, inev…

THE PAPAROA TRACK is New Zealand’s most recently-commissioned Great Walk. The track partly follows an old gold-miners’ pathway with the hopeful name of the Croesus Track. And it partly also follows a brand-new course, including the epic gorge of the Pororari River. This part of New Zealand is probably the southernmost place on earth where you will …

THE population heartland of the South Island’s West Coast lies in the area around Greymouth and Westport, where mines in the hills are joined with a comparative abundance of flat land by West Coast standards. The plain sits west of the South Island’s gigantic Alpine Fault: a crack in the earth’s crust that runs southwest like a ruler to Fiordland, …

Visitor numbers are up in the limestone country near Karamea, New Zealand. Which is a good thing, as it’s really worth a visit! Things to see include the incredible Ōpārara arches and Mirror Tarn, accessible from a road built by loggers decades ago when logging was still allowed. Starting out from Westport, the first place you’ll want to make a tur…

The two ends of the Heaphy Track, one of New Zealand’s ten Great Walks. are far apart. But flying back over the top is just as amazing! I’ve done the Heaphy a couple of times from the eastern end. So, this time (March 2021) I decided to go from the west, for a change, and also because I was on the West Coast already. I hastily booked a flight with …

This post takes a closer look at the New Zealand state’s longstanding historical unwillingness to make plans for Auckland’s growth. A COUPLE of weeks ago we blogged about “the paradox of retrenchment in the face of growth.” We wrote about how it was practically an orthodoxy some forty years ago that the populations of Auckland, and of a New Zealand…

Auckland Council, New Zealand’s so-called Super City administration, has become known for at least four areas of failure in a decade. Why? It’s time to question the approach of chief executives such as Jim Stabback and his predecessor Stephen Town, and their sub-chiefs in Auckland Transport, Ports of Auckland and Watercare, which all too often focu…

It was my amazing luck to hike the Banks Track at the end of January, 2021. It’s on the ‘wild side’ of the rocky, volcanic Banks Peninsula. Billed on its website as New Zealand’s “original private walking track,” the Banks Track invites you to spend three nights on the remote south-eastern tip of Te Horomaka or Banks Peninsula, also known in Māori …

AFTER my month on Rakiura/Stewart Island, I left for Whenua Hou, also known as Codfish Island, to work on track maintenance. Even in normal times, to stay on the island you have to go through quarantine, which I did in Invercargill. During the process, they checked for foreign grasses in my gear,so I had made sure to purchase new socks and wash dow…

THE small size of Oban belies its importance as Stewart Island’s only town and the entranceway to the North West Circuit Track where I was to be spending a few weeks volunteering as a hut warden, and also to the much shorter Rakiura Track, the southernmost of New Zealand’s official Great Walks. The Māori name for Stewart Island is Rakiura, which me…

Christchurch, New Zealand, has some amazing Lord of the Rings country to its north & west. You don’t have to go far from town to get there! Looking at just one of these areas, the Hakatere Conservation Park, it's close to Erewhon, the setting of the English writer Samuel Butler’s fictional utopia Erewhon,but also an actual place. This district incl…

Banks Peninsula (near Christchurch NZ) is an eroded volcano with several harbours, historic ports, wildlife, and lots of hiking trails. In its topography it resembles one of the Hawai‘ian islands, though naturally somewhat colder and bleaker. The biggest harbours on the peninsula are Lyttelton Harbour just south of Christchurch and Akaroa Harbour f…

BETWEEN Blenheim and Nelson, there is a ruggedly beautiful area that extends from the Marlborough Sounds in the north-east to Nelson Lakes National Park, in the southwest, via the Richmond Range. To the west, and south, of this great triangular block of mountains there are the river flats and plains of Nelson and, on the Blenheim side, the Wairau v…

NELSON is a lovely, leafy city at the top end of the South Island of New Zealand. It has a sunny climate, lots of old buildings both in wood and stone, and a frankly amazing abundance of hiking trails in the hills that overlook the town.‍ The locality on which Nelson was established is known in Māori as Wakatu or Whakatū: names that look and sound …

With an abundance of gothic stone architecture and a large pedestrian area, Christchurch, New Zealand, is like a quaint old city in Europe. Indeed, I never get sick of visiting the thriving metropolis of Christchurch, or Ōtautahi, which is in fact now the largest city in the South Island, its current population about 420,000 overall. Much of its he…

Kaikōura is a major whale-watching destination, between Blenheim and Christchurch on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The town sits just to the landward side of a deep submarine trench, whose chilly uplifting waters nourish large populations of crayfish, the namesakes of Kaikōura, which means ‘eat crayfish’ in Māori. The town is also j…