Our Ninety mile disaster...

Hello all!

Well what have we been up to over the past few days ... what haven't we been up to! We left the Bay of Islands and headed north to Cape Reinga, the northern most part of New Zealand and watched the sunset, really beautiful, and then camped next to the beach and spent the night with 10, 000 mozzies, not nice! Salt was in her element!

There is no exaggeration in the story that we are about to share with you, it will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth ...

Left early to go drive down south again and we were told by the locals that you (and I quote) 'Could not see the Northlands without driving down 90 Mile Beach' which is virtually the local highway, everyone does it, or so we were told! Anyway, so we decided just to drive the last 20 miles or so of the beach in the camper, despite the fact that there are only 4 roads in the whole of New Zealand that we are not insured to drive on; 90 Mile Beach being one of them!

Anyway, we go less than half a mile down the beach before getting stuck in some soft sand. No big deal we thought, we'll be out of here in no time! Ok, not 4 and a half hours later we left the beach!! Serious now, we got so stuck, in fact the other 4 vehicles that helped us get out said that they'd not seen anyone get that stuck before! A group of guys from Hamilton stopped to help us in their car and after several attempts to pull us out including snapping our vans electricity cable (yes we did actually think that it might have worked!!), it was not happening! So we found a local guy, who came to rescue us in his 4 x 4 and then he got totally stuck as well (something he said that had never happened before!).

A 52 seater tourist bus then came past and actually slowed down to allow the tourists to have photo's and record the 'stupid people who thought they could drive 90 Mile Beach in a campervan!' but he then u-turned and came to help us, along with the 52 people who were on the bus! Anyway, to cut a very long story short we finally got out. We had a car, 4 x 4, bus and a Tow truck to help us get out, and fortunately the whole saga only cost us our time plus $40, we were so lucky. So please, never trust any of the locals here and never, ever drive down 90 Mile Beach...ok, never drive down ninety mile beach in high tide! oopsy!!!

You really have to see the pictures to believe it!

From 90 Mile Beach we headed south again and stopped at the oldest and largest Kauri trees in New Zealand, something really worth seeing, they were massive!

We went to see Snow Patrol last night which were great.

Going surfing this afternoon .... adios x