Oct 15-16 Paihia

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So, I’ve been really bad at writing in my blog. It’s been a month since I last wrote anything down, so I’ll try and recap what I’ve done in the past month.

So on the day of the last entry (back on Thursday October 15th), it turned out to be a really nice afternoon weather-wise. So my roommate and I had decided to take a hike over to the nearby waterfall. It took up about 30 minutes to get to the trailhead and from there the trail was about 1 ½ hours to the waterfall. We passed plenty of NZ native plants - later which I found out that all NZ native plants are evergreen. I fell in love with the native NZ fern. At one point we got to a bridge and we were surrounded by the Waitangi River and there many schools of tiny fish swimming below us. Once past the river, we were surrounded by mangroves which are these leafless branches that grow in salt water marshes. Further up we saw about 20 or so birds nesting in trees and giant water lilies. The Waterfall itself was quite a disappointment, but the trail itself was not. As soon as we were about to turn around and head back to the hostel, it started pouring. We therefore decided to get out of the forest, and find our way back via the road. We asked a nearby motel for directions which ended up to be walking along the highway for 2 miles. And so away we went, walking in the pouring rain along the highway. We ended up getting back to the hostel soaking wet.
Later that evening, a few of us headed to some local bars - but being that it was in hostels that were used by the major backpacker tour companies, they were pretty much filled with 18 year olds. One of the bars, however, had a free raffle. I had won 2 for 1 bungee jump, which I had given away to one of the guys in our group. Originally I didn’t regret giving it away, but after sometime I started to. But in the end I came to the realization that I really didn’t want to bungee anyway.

On Friday October 16th, a few of us had made use of the free kayaks available by our hostel. And so, we carried 3 kayaks over the beach just a couple of blocks away and kayaked over to one of the closer islands in the bay of islands. Being that I had only kayaked once before - and wasn’t very successful at it, I had jumped into a double kayak with one of the girls. Luckily she had more strength than I and quickly got us over to the island. After a short swim in the bay, we decided to try and kayak our way around the island. But it proved to be an impossible task as the winds were getting stronger, the waves were getting rougher, and one of the kayaks had a hole in it which caused one of the girls to continuously get overturned.

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