Although they were removed from Mahara Place weeks ago, it seems the two iconic phoenix palms are still putting up quite a fight.

As part of the major upgrade of Mahara Place the phoenix palms were removed and temporary stages set up. Now those are being removed and the area excavated. And this is where the phoenix palms are rising from the ashes.

It appears the roots of the trees cover most of Mahara Place, presenting significant problems to the contractors. The photo shows how deep they are at the southern end while it appears the root structure of the larger of the two palms at the northern end may present even more of a challenge.

(From the KC News website)

Along with Bupa (Winara), Ryman (Charles Fleming) and the Parkwood business, Summerset is the latest property renting group to move into Waikanae with its second retirement village in Kapiti, following the first one in Realm Drive in Paraparaumu (pictured).  The company’s first village opened in 1997 in Wanganui and it now has 24 of them around the country.

According to this article on the NZ Herald website, the new village is on a 25.5 hectare site in Park Avenue and will contain “around 300 homes, including two and three-bedroom villas, serviced and memory care apartments.”

The company’s website, however, states that the land it has bought is 8 hectares.

The land, located with an apparent site address at 32 Park Avenue, borders Waikanae Park and, it seems, NZTA land on the east side of the Ewy.  We will report more as information becomes available.

The land which appears to be involved with the intended Summerset development, a satellite view taken before the completion of the ‘Ewy’.

You may wonder why it should need one — perhaps he had to cross a Kapiti road with melted tar?

Nothing surprising: Facebook has for some time been accused, among other things, of censoring opinions that conflict with its left-wing Globalist agenda.  And of course, it’s a multi-national that doesn’t like paying taxes, as then NZ Prime Minister John Key scolded Zuckerberg about directly when they met.

A scathing British parliamentary report on Monday branded Facebook “digital gangsters” who failed to fight the spread of fake news and violated data privacy.

Its executives have further been accused of trying to either hide or suppress emerging evidence of foreign meddling flagged by its engineers.

Parliamentary committee chair Damian Collins said Facebook “deliberately sought to frustrate our work by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions”.

Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg turned down three requests to appear before the committee.

“Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law,” the 108-page report said.

Full article

East of the railway bridge, that is, a short section where it goes through a little natural rocky ‘gorge’. That’s another rock, not a tree trunk in the water.

A photo by Kapiti-based nature photographer Gavin Klee. Fabulous!

Info and more pics

Not only the Main Road, but this is the scene now in Mahara Place, and we’re told it won’t be completed until August.  In fact, it won’t surprise us if it’s like this till the end of the year.

Part of a larger map covering Otaki as well.  This is looking east with the coast at the bottom.  The township was then known as Parata Village and the beach as Waimeha Village; both were small compared with today. See earlier posts.