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Jess, 20 September 2007
New Zealand , Paihia, Bay of Islands,

Paihia and so on

Hey,

the weekend in the Bay of Islands was AWESOME!
Sooo cool. We met on Friday morning on a Catamaran and had a BBQ on board. With some Champagne.
Then we got on a bus and drove up north to the Kawhiti Glow worm caves. They were pretty cool, and they had tons of glow worms in there. In case you don't know why glow worms actually glow I'll tell you. When the glow worm eats it is burning the food (like all of us) and this is the process you are seeing. So Basically it is glowing worm poop! Yep, very romantic.
After the caves we drove on to Paihia to our 5 star accomodation. REALLY nice.
We took an sunset cruise on the same night to go to Opua, a little town near Paihia. There we had dinner at the Blue Water Cafe. I was really daring and had the Oysters as a starter. They were actually not bad, baked with cheese and bacon. After the delicious dinner, with really good chocolate mousse, we went back to the hotel and fell into our beds.
The next day started early. We had to leave at 7:30am to go to Cape Reinga, the most northern part of NZ. On our way up there we made stop at a Kauri forrest. Kauri are huge trees, which are sacred to Maori. They gave us a tour trough the forrest and told us a couple of Maori legends as well as the history of the place.
Then finally we got to the Cape, which is alos a very spiritual place for the Maori.
The legend says that the souls of the dead Maori gather on a big sanddune at the cape untill the next tide comes. Then they shed a last few tears for there loved ones (that's why the sand on top of the dune is red) and walk down the dune across a field to a small peninsula. From there they go into the ocean in the direction of the south pacific, wherer their ancestors came from long ago, they take on last breath and then they go back to their ancestors.
At the cape they also have light house and the Tasman sea and Pacific ocean meet there. ON some days you can even sea the two oceans flowing against each other.
From the Cape we made our way to the spirits bay where we could go and swim in the ocean and have lunch. After lunch we drove to the huge sanddunes and took our boogieboards, climbed up the dune (more than exhausting), put our boards down, lay on it and went donw the dune head first. Soooooo much fun.
After that we drove to the ninety mile beach and dug for Puaua (shellfish, like mussels. We even had some of them raw right there on the beach.
On they way back we stopped at the best fish &chip place in NZ and got some. They were really good. In the evening we meet for a bit of socializing and a drink. After that we went to a Backpackers bar, where the guys put the shellfish in the BBQ. We had some beer, watch the all blacks game ( NZ national rugby team) and had fun. A little into the game I went with two other to the bar next door to get some food, because we were hungry. There we met the local Sherrif of Paihia, which went to a night club with us, where we met the others from our group. At 2:45am that morning we finally got back to our hotel.
On Sunday we made a cruise to the hole in the rock and also did some dolphin watching. We even found a pod of 5 dolphins. They are so beautiful! Unfortunately they had juveniles in the pod so we could not swim with them. but oh well it was awesome anyway.
After the cruise we went to two other accomodations and did a site inspection. At russel Cottages they had put on a BBQ around the pool. Very cool! We had 25 degrees celcius ( 80 degrees fahrenheit)and they told us to jump in the pool if we wanted.
Then we jsut drove back to Auckland.
As I said aI had an awesome weekanmd and I meet so many people! I loved it. And if you ever get the chance to come to NZ you have to got to the Bay of Islands, it is amazing up there.

So enough for now.
I'll tell you later more about my samba course and our car.