Day 136 Sunday 24th January 2010

Johno says

The flight to New Zealand was at 11.40am so we were hoping and praying that the category two cyclone would either re-direct away from Cairns or not hit Cairns until later in the day - there had already been warning notices posted to the rooms suggesting that the safest place to be would be inside the hotel (and possibly not boarding a plane!!). Luckily it was just a wet and slightly windy start to the day and the weather held out for our flight to take off on time. We arrived into Auckland without any delays and transferred and settled into a YHA hostel in the city centre for around 9pm. It was a bit too late to venture down to the local supermarket so we decided to take advantage of a Chinese restaurant offer to provide wifi and a bargain meal for ten dollars.
Mmmm nice Chinese food - reminded us both of the great food of SE Asia which now seems like a distant memory. Auckland seemed very much like any other big city with bars, restaurants, taxi's, token sky tower that you are obliged to visit on a day tour of the city and for some reason very densely populated with Asian people. Then we retired to have a look at what New Zealand had to offer - oh my goodness, how are we going to squeeze in so much in four weeks?!

Day 137 Monday 25th January 2010

Johno says

Thankfully the magic bus ticket was to the rescue. It was an early start to meet up with our tour company 'Magic' which is basically a bus company that takes you around the Island with other like minded independent travellers. The driver gave us a briefing on the hop on-hop off bus ticket and how it works throughout the North and South Islands and then went on to give us some information on what to do at each of the places on this particular journey, background on each town or place we passed on the bus and even offered to ring ahead and book our accommodation whilst we were tucking into our morning breakfast!! Impressive company!! It was good to have the bus ticket to package most of the traveling as they also offered tours and activities along the way. Today we were traveling North of Auckland to the Bay of Islands based out of a town in the name of Pahiha, this was the original place that the contested treaty was signed between the original Mauri people of New Zealand and the British Crown which established British Sovereignty or a bit like that depending on whether you are reading the Mauri or English version of the document apparently. Anyway, enough of the history, they have a party here every February 6th to celebrate the nations birthday - we are not around to celebrate but I am sure we will whether we may be on that date. Prior to our arrival we looked at the Magic discounted tours on offer and decided we would swim with wild dolphins, whale watching combined with a catamaran cruise around the 150ish undeveloped Islands. Another couple from London (Kate and Lizzie) also wanted to go on the tour so we all set sail together with a couple of German guys. The Bay of Islands looked the part with green undeveloped Islands randomly placed throughout the blue seas, we passed the supposedly famous site of the 'hole in the rock' which is basically a hole in a rock! Nice. We then spotted a group of dolphins showing off in the water so our boat moored up beside them - unfortunately the group had some young with them so we couldn't swim with the dolphins as the mother of the young would get all stressed out and it may end in the young not feeding and subsequently dying so we unfortunately had to pass on this opportunity. Lizzie thinks 'they knew from the start'. Paihai was a lush green town with lots of trees etc, the coastal town was reasonably quiet but looked like a really nice place to stay so we stayed at the YHA for the evening and had an early night as it was such a busy day.