The Bay of Islands

Another month, another trip for us. This time to the Bay of Islands in Northern New Zealand. Deb went up first and met her friend from womens college, Yvonne, in Auckland and the two of them took a tour up to Paihia, where we were staying. Kitch, being the working woman she is now had to work so she headed up thursday night and rented a car to join the fun. We stayed at the pipi patch hostel - which featured a luxury pool.

On Friday we took a day trip up to the very northern tip of New Zealand - Cape Reinga. On the way we stopped at a ancient kauri forest. There trees grow for thousands of years. This one is about 1000 years old.



Cape Reinga is the northern most point of new zealand - and the closest we're going to be to home for a while. It's the gateway to the spiritual world for the Maori people and also the spot where the tasman sea meets the pacific ocean.

Well another trip - another adventure. This time we went sand boarding down the sand dunes in Te Paki. It's like toboganning down sand - head first! Yeah scary times...although in the end super fun.

Debi with our rental car!!! Okay just kidding. We drove back from the cape along 90 ninety mile beach - definitley the coolest highway we've ever been on. We came across this mercedes which has been slowly sinking into the ocean for the last 6 weeks since the driver got a little over confident about driving on the beach close to high tide - oops!


We got back to Paihia and hit the town. We found 2 for 1 wine and being the classy girls we are weren't afraid to do a little double fisting! We then went in search of live music and went to see a cover band - the hit list - that deb and yvonne had discovered on thier first night there. They were really good but the sketchy local scene was a bit much for us so we put our dancing shoes on and went to the saltwater lodge where we met this guy from Idaho (Ihado - no you da ho) who knew more canadian geography then we did.




Saturday we headed back in our little rental car Dolores. Deb and kitch both became experienced drivers on the left (despite some initial nervousness and one or two close calls) Luckily we had Madonna's immaculate collection cd to get us through the stressful moments. We took our time driving home and made a few cool stops, including the world famous toilets in kawakawa and the awesome wharangei falls. These falls might look really beautiful for swimming in - and that's what kitch thought too - until she tried to go swimming and got bitten by something that looked like a dinosaur...yup if it looks prehistoric the rule is get out of the water. And so she did. From there we went to do some caving but decided that our jandels (that's kiwi for flip flops) were not quite the footwear for deep cave exploration.
We then headed back to auckland and said good-bye to Yvonne (for two weeks - we're going back to do st patty's day with her in auckland).