By Bob McNeil
On a hot, stifling midsummer's day can there ever be anything more cooling than a large, colourful ice cream in a cone?
If that is what you are craving there is no better place to be than the front of the queue outside the Te Kao Store, in the far North, where they claim to serve the biggest ice creams in the country.
It's not as though there's nothing else to eat in Te Kao, it's just that those who visit the tiny town are looking for something special.
Bonnie Conrad's ice creams are famous, and have even made the Lonely Planet Guide.
Bonnie's ice creams come in scoops, the biggest is the “whoppa stoppa”.
“the whoppa stoppa is about five or six, even the truckies struggle with it. And the best people to look at with the whoppa stoppa is the surfies in summer, ‘cause they try to out-eat each other,” Conrad says.
But bonnie's best customers are the people who arrive on tourist buses.they come from many parts of the world.
The buses are supposed to stop for just seven minutes, but Bonnie feeds the drivers so the tourists can stay a little longer.
“This is delicious, very good. I think probably better than most of the American ice cream,” says American tourist Bill Comfort.
But scooping the giant ice creams does put some pressure on bonnie and her staff.
“You can get a sore back if you are rolling for more than 20 to 30 minutes, your wrists cause you lots of problems,” says Conrad.
But some icecream lovers just can't get enough.
There's an old saying about ice cream. It goes, “ice cream is often licked, but it's never beaten”.
3 News
source: newshub archive
