Friday 2nd Nov

5.50am wake up call to catch the Kiwi Ex coach at 7.10am to go to the Bay of Islands. We did stop at the small cafe for mid morning break to have breakfast. The driver was great as he was certainly deaf aware and made sure that we know what was happening on our journey. If we didn't catch what he was saying, he had an extra help on the coach called Amy on stand-by for us to ask. The journey was about 5 hours journey.

We arrived to Paihia at about 12:30pm and had an free afternoon to do whatever we want. We have booked ourselves for Kayaking around the islands on Sunday at 9am. We stayed at the accommodation that our driver booked us in. Unfortunately for us, we stayed in the dorm room with other people who already knew each other and we were the 2 who were the odd out. It was difficult to mix as we couldn't follow what others were saying to start the conversations or at least join into the conversations.

we just browsed around, walked on the beach. The weather was raining and very dull, just like UK as you probably can tell in the photos! We walked about 30mins to get our food shopping. We decided to not to cook tonight as there was a BBQ with free drink going on that evening so we decided to take that offer as we couldn't be bothered to cook.

BBQ food wasn't that brilliant but it was still food to eat! We were tired from lipreading, trying to understand so we called a early night for us, in preparation to get up early again at 7.10am for a trip to Cape Reinga. We were hoping that we will be able to understand or at least follow cos we were told that there will be alot of talking on that trip!