POPs or Park Over Properties, are privately owned properties that allow members of the NZMCA (New Zealand Motor Caravan Association) to park over for a night or two for a small charge, which varies depending on what extra facilities they may offer. Some may simply be a designated parking spot, where you need to be completely self contained for all your needs, power, water and toilet. Other properties will offer a variation of water, sometimes power, and a toilet and shower.
Last weekend we stayed at the Kauri View Farm POP in Whakatiwai, on the Kaiaua coast. It was pretty stunning.
Kauri View Farm does offer a flush toilet and a shower.
Yup, that’s right that would be the corrugated iron shed in the middle of the image above. The flush toilet is on the left hand side, and the shower is on the right. The toilet worked perfectly fine – to which I can attest.
However to use the shower required a few more steps, first you need to heat the water in the copper over a wood fire, (lower centre) and then take a bucket of hot water to fill the blue plastic container (currently up the dead tree, which may collapse at any moment). Next, hoist the blue container which is connected to a gravity fed pipe to the shower, up said dead tree with a winch.
I had it on good authority from Rod the caretaker who lives on-site in his own house truck, that whomever lights the fire gets the first shower, then an orderly queue is formed, whereby each bucket of hot water taken is replaced with a fresh bucket of cold into the copper. By the time the first person has finished their shower the copper has re-heated for the next. Apparently at Christmas / New Year the shower was used by 15 to 20 people in a row using the aforementioned method of copper replenishment.
We used the shower in Swifty.
Swifty eNZed - Start small. Start Now. 