North Island - The Far North

Trip Start Sep 04, 2007
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Trip End May 28, 2008


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Sunday, March 16, 2008

After a brief stay in Auckland I traveled up to the Bay of Islands. As this was not part of my Stray Bus pass I decided to travel with Magic Bus instead. This was mainly due to the route they took, but they were also a bit cheaper.... unfortunately my first impressions of Magic were not that good. The drivers are grumpy, and certainly not as helpful as the Stray drivers I met.

We headed up to Paihia in the Bay of Islands. I had booked to go on a budget overnight cruise on "Rock the Boat". The boat is actually a converted car ferry, but it was a good trip. We set sail in the early evening and we were soon taking part in a shooting competition. We used a couple of air rifles and our target was a rubber duck pulled behind the boat. It was quite hard to hit an erratically moving target and I narrowly missed with both shots. My pool playing skills weren't much better, but the boat was rolling around enough that all the balls went in the pockets sooner or later!

The boat pulled into a sheltered bay for the evening and we all went fishing. I caught 5 fish, but only 1 was large enough to keep (for bait). Fortunately the crew had caught some fish earlier in the day and kept them alive in a tank. We had fresh sashimi and then a BBQ fish & steak dinner, but the fish was nowhere near as good as our blue cod on Stewart Island. At 11pm I went kayaking in the moonlight. The sea water is full of phosphorescent algae that light up when disturbed (such as when a paddle is moved through the water). It was a great and unusual experience!

In the morning we went snorkeling around mussel rock. There were loads of fish that we could hand feed using broken mussels. Some of the fish seemed to have problems spotting the difference between the mussels and my thumb! We then had a walk around a nearby island and had time for more kayaking and swimming. On the way back to port we tried some of the seafood we had collected - raw mussels and sea urchin roe. Some people pay huge amounts of money for sea urchin roe, which tasted a bit like strong mussel and certainly isn't worth the asking price.

The next day I caught a coach trip up Ninety Mile Beach to Cape Reinga. Ninety Mile Beach is actually only 55 miles long but it was still impressive. I went sandboarding down the huge sand dunes and then we headed off to Cape Reinga at the northern tip of New Zealand. There is a lighthouse and a nice beach but not much else. From the Cape we could see the rough seas caused by the meeting of the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
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