Another long day! After the nightmare of finding our hostel last night we were treated to a nice early 7am start as Charna drove us to Tane Mahuta or the "God of the Forest" - the largest known living kauri tree. These things are so massive that Maoris used to carve entire wakas (boats) out of their tree trunks. This one stands at 17.68m and its trunk measures 13.77m around. We then walked to Te Matua Ngahere - the Father of the Forest - whose "trunk girth" is a ...

We tried to kick off early for our "main event" day, and the roads were so clear I could use all of it. SO much fun! We ploughed our way through the gravel roads up to Cape Reinga, where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. You can actually see the water swirling and dancing at the meeting point. Cool. Next stop: the giant sand dunes! We firstly saw the route out to 90 Mile Beach and pretty quickly decided that wasn't going to happen. I've never known anyone ...

If you answered "to kayak!" to my last blog post, you'd have been the proud owner of, well, nothing. Except the satisfaction that you were right. Well done. Yes, we went out for a quick (free) stroll around the Waitangi treaty grounds and saw the big ceremonial waka and a golf course (I think the waka was there first). Then Mel, Shanna and I dragged the free kayaks from our hostel and kayaked up to H Falls, which were pretty cool. We even got back by 1pm which wa...

I started this morning in Auckland with relatively little idea what would happen today. What actually happened was I hired a people carrier or "family wagon" and drove four English girls to Paihia. Sound suspicious? Not at all. We're on our way to Cape Reinga to see the proper north of New Zealand. So far we've only seen One Tree Point (which has several trees) as we started late in the day. The only issue is what to do tomorrow. Definitely go to Waitanga where ...

So I arrived back in Auckland after just over six weeks of Kiwi Experience travel. Predictably, YHA Taupo rang me to say my towel had arrived as soon as I'd got off the bus. Anyway, my kiwi trip is coming to an end here soon. But not until I'd met Liz Hogan, who I'd raced back up the North Island to see before she jumped across the water back to Oz. It was good to see someone from "back home" and have a conversation that didn't start with "how long are you trave...