It's October 5 and Northport Ltd CEO Jon Moore is giving the Northern Advocate a 10th anniversary tour of Northland's port a week before the official celebrations (let's come clean, we arrived a week early by mistake but we scored our own guided tour).
Pine logs lie stacked in their thousands at Northport and a towering hill of woodchips eclipses Mt Manaia if you stand on the southern side of the pale orange heap.
Log trucks crawl in a steady stream to the new eight-bay queuing facility where the logs are measured and bar-coded.
Drivers yawn, stare at the view, take a snack, wait for the signal to move on to the unloading areas.
Within 45-60 minutes, they will be heading back to the forests.
No wonder people call it "the log port" - the logs, the chip mountain and the log trucks are about all that can be seen from ground level and the trucks form a big proportion of the 70,000 truck movements in and out of the port annually. But think laminated veneer lumber, plywood, coal, fertiliser and kiwifruit as well as logs for a more accurate picture, says Mr Moore.
The pine chip mountain exudes a fragrance that makes you want to go close and inhale deeply; not much fragrance coming from the much smaller pile of acacia chips. Apparently acacia chips are on the way out, with a decision made not to replace plantations.
Mr Moore says about 1500 tonnes of chips are trucked in every day from the nearby Marasumi mill. On ship day, two bulldozers push the chip into a reclaimer, the chip then falls on to the conveyor system into the ship's hold.
The product goes to Japan - 320,000 tonnes in the 2011-2012 financial year .
Most of the logs go to China, which took 1.2 million tonnes in 2011-2012. India took 650,000 tonnes, Korea, 50,000 tonnes.
And there's also one surprising import Mr Moore has never seen - molasses.
The product arrives in bladders inside containers and pumped into what looks like an enormous covered inflatable swimming pool. The molasses is later pumped out and blended with water according to the needs of the Northland clients of South Island firm Winton Stockfeed.
Coal from Indonesia, not dense black chunks like some New Zealand coal but a fine, dark gray product like gravel, is neatly heaped at the northern end of the port.
Sixty thousand tonnes come in every year for the furnaces at Golden Bay Cement at nearby Portland.
Now we are cruising past Lego land - stacks upon stack of white plastic-wrapped laminated wood veneer from the nearby Carter's mill waiting to be made up into consignments according to client requirements in Brisbane, Melbourne and Newcastle.
Veneer and triboard products from the Juken mill in Kaitaia are also exported through Northport, to Asia. Today, the freighter Nan Chang sits at the inside berth, as tall as a six-storey building, taking on 6000cu m of Juken veneer. There is a 2-m tidal rise and fall but the vessel will sit safely at berth, empty or loaded, with 13m of water at "lowest astronomical tide".
Mr Moore says there is also two-way trade in fertiliser through the port, with Ballance Agri-Nutrients of Whangarei sending fertiliser to other parts of New Zealand in coastal traders, and product coming in from overseas.
And in season, kiwifruit is exported through the port, 10,000 tonnes went out last season.The whole operation is by just 19 employees, but it generates work for about 250.
These include employees of marshalling, stevedoring and fumigation companies, MAF and shipping agents.
Fact file
Northland Port Corp and Port of Tauranga formed Northport to jointly develop a new port for Northland. Northport now operates the port and is still jointly owned by the two founding partners.