Bay of Islands
Trip Start
Jan 19, 2009
1
14
19
Trip End
Ongoing
Loading Map
Paihia,
North Island,
New Zealand
Saturday, April 25, 2009
It's a lot colder and wetter here but the scenery is much better. We arrived in Auckland, NZ's capital city which is kind of small. NZ dollars have a much better exchange rate than aussie dollars so luckily for us that makes everythign quite cheap around here, a bonus for our wallets.
We spent a few days in Auckland just gettign to know it, the central area is not actually very big so it didn't take long. Already though you can see the famed kiwi crazyness. Like some other cities we've been to they have a sky tower, a large tower you can view the city from, but that would be too boring for kiwi's so they've added a thing where you are attatched to a zip-wire and jump off the top of the building. The zip-wire then decelaretes you so you land nice and softly (hopefully). We also went to the museum where there was some interesting stuff on the Mauri who are very different from the aboriginals of australia. There was lots of their carvings around which are really good and I may buy a couple before I leave.
We bought our tickets for soemthing called Magicbus back in Australia. Basically this is sort of like a tour bus but it's hop-on hop-off so we can just wander around NZ at our own pace. Our first trip was up to the Bay of Islands in the North of the north Island. This large bay area has about 146 or so islands of various sizes, most of which are volcanic. The drive up there was good and the scenery was really good. It's very rugged up on north island.
Museum
At the bay we stayed at a tiny town called Paihia which had maybe 3 streets if that. There wasn't actually all that much to do without the cash to back it up but we did decide to go on the dolphin watching trip. We cruised around the bay of islands looking for them as they are completely wild. The cruise itself was pretty good with some really great views of the islands. Eventually we did find a large pod of dolphins in some shallow water. Unfortunately because they had soem babies with them we weren't allowed to swim with them. But just seeing them was really great, they are really friendly and playful and came right up to the boat. We were told to lie down on the front of the boat and lean over where they would swim right below us, a couple of them spraying us with their blow-holes, they were maybe only 15cm from our faces. So it was a really good trip and pretty cheap too. On the way back to Auckland we stopped by a forest where they had the world's largest Kauri tree which is worshipped by the Mauri. We also stopped by a small town where we heard about Opo the Dolphin. In the 50's a wild dolphin kept following boats around in the bay and enjoyed being scratched on it's belly by their oars. Eventually it became so friendly it would come to the beach and play with people there even letting children ride on it's back. This drew massive tourism to the town and it got packed. We watched a video showing the dolphin playing with everyone. Unfortunately someone killed it, so not really a happy ending there.
At the pub there was a free raffle going on and me and Dan managed to win a 2 for 1 bungee jump off the Auckland Harbour Bridge. So we'll probably try and sort it out today. Our next stop is Rotoura down south and along the way I believe we are stopping at the glow-worm caves. Should be good!
