We can all agree that was a terrible pun. Moving on.
We’ve spent the last 4 days at the tip of the north island, in Paihia. It’s a tropical town in the ‘Bay of Islands’ (10 points if you can figure out why it’s called that) which is known as the ‘birthplace’ of New Zealand. It’s one of the places the Maori people first landed, and we can see why they stuck around.
We’ve been staying in a home built into the side of a cliff, with a host dedicated to barbequing anything he can get his hands on including pizza and mussels…in fairness they were delicious. He’s turned his house into a mini-hostel, and it has been nice talking to people from around the world.
Between BBQs, our host convinced us to upgrade our pre-planned ‘Hole in the Rock’ half-day cruise to the full-day ‘Cream trip’ (named after the route boats took to deliver milk to the islands). We bumped into some bottle-nosed dolphins before we were even out the harbour, followed swiftly by a penguin on a fishing trip and a whale playing hide and seek. This whale was a true master of the game. So good that we never got a view of him, but saw the jet from his blow-hole a couple of times.
A pod of ‘common’ dolphins came to play with the boat for a while on our way to the ‘Hole in the Rock’. This is a big hole, in a big rock.
On some days you can take the boat through the hole, but the swell meant that if the captain had tried, we’d have lost the top deck. So he reasonably did not.
We had a nice stop-off for lunch on one of the infamous islands, and then caught up with some more bottle-nosed dolphins. We also had a go at boom-netting, which is a difficult experience to describe. You hold on to some nets on the side of the boat and they start driving. It’s like a cross between surfing and being in a washing machine.
Overall, a good day.
The next day was an early start for a long journey up to Cape Reinga, the very tip of New Zealand where the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea collide. The scenery was stunning.
On the way we had stopped off to visit a Kauri forest. These are huge ancient trees native to New Zealand. The ones we saw were around 1000 years old, but the oldest are 2000-3000 years old – and they apparently they just keep growing with all that extra time.
The way home was down 90 mile beach – on a bus. We briefly stopped on the Sand-dunes for sand-boarding beforehand.
After that our bus driver cheerfully told us ‘I mean sometimes we get the bus stuck in quick-sand’, before setting off down the beach. Despite New Zealand’s usual ‘say-what-you-see approach’ to naming things, the beach is actually 50 miles long. Still that’s a fair way to go, especially if you are walking down it for 3 days like those hikers doing ‘The Great Walk’ of New Zealand from top to bottom. Thankfully we didn’t have to join them as we made it through without any quick-sand troubles, and we finished the day off with some local fish and chips.
We chose to have a bit of a relax for the rest of our time in Paihia, after two straight days of ‘organised fun’ we’d begun to feel a bit like cattle. So we caught a ferry to Russell the next day and relaxed on a pretty secluded beach. Russell used to be a Moby Dick-esque whaling town known as the ‘Hell hole of the south’. They’ve classed it up a bit since then, and we stopped for a seafood lunch at New Zelands oldest hotel, The Duke Of Marlborough.
Our final day was a coastal walk, which went off to a tricky start when we realised the high-tide had blocked the start of the path. Eventually we figured out a way around and had a nice scenic day seeing a lot of the native birdlife.
We’re now heading to Rotorua for a brief trip, which is a geothermal town where we’re going to see some Kiwis (the birds, not the people) and meet up with a few friends from home. We’ll post another update about that in a couple of days time.
There & Back Again 