We had a somewhat eventful first night in the Campervan. I made the stupid mistake of letting Roger borrow the torch. I know that Alex will think I was out of my mind but he only needed it to locate a video. Anyway he used it for about 3 seconds but it took us a good three quarters of an hour afterwards to locate where he had put it down. We also took ages to assemble the bed on that first night (we have got better at it since) and somewhat optimistically assumed that we would only need a sheet so consequently woke up about 1am freezing!

On Saturday we took a day cruise on the Bay of Islands and had a brilliant time. The weather was glorious and the Bay is stunningly beautiful as we cruised from one island to the next, taking in lovely secluded beaches and a fair bit of stunning scenery and wildlife, including penguins! We spent an hour swimming and lazing on a sandy beach and even navigated, rather scarily, through a hole in the cliff with a huge rise and fall of waves.

The high spot of the trip was however dolphin spotting with the opportunity to swim with them. Roger was very keen to do this and was consequently overjoyed when we spotted a pod of dolphins who seemed happy to frolic around the boat. The swimmers were asked to assemble and told to jump into a boom net and be dragged along, until the boat drew level with the dolphins. When the call was given to go, Rog set off from the boat at a rate to rival Ian Thorpe's world record, with the other swimmers in pursuit, but failing to keep up with his blistering pace. Unfortunately it was in totally the wrong direction and they were all recalled to the boat for a second attempt. (We were put in this huge net and had to hang on whilst the boat went flat out in order to catch up with the dolphins. This time when we swam out they came towards us and seemed to want to play. One magical moment when I looked down to see a large dolphin directly below me and no more than a couple of meters away. Another when one swam directly towards me on the surface only to dive and pass below me so close I could almost touch it. Awesome!)

On Sunday we visited the Waitangi treaty ground (where agreement was finally reached between the Maori tribes and the British as to the future government of New Zealand thus marking the birth of the nation) and a lovely little historic village called Russell. Russell was once used as a whaling centre and developed a reputation as "the hell-hole of The Pacific" due to the number of grog shops and houses of ill repute designed to provide the sailors with "rest and recreation"! It is however very pretty with some lovely old buildings and a real colonial air.