Poor Knights Islands and back to Auckland

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The Poor Knights Islands and back to Auckland

When I got back to Auckland from the South Island, I hired a car for a few days again and drove north to a small town on the coast called Tutukaka. This town is the place to be if you want to do New Zealand's best diving at the Poor Knights Islands. The islands are mainly big rocks jutting out from the sea with some collapsed walls, resulting in holes in the rock. The underwater scenery is just as spectacular. Big stingrays swim around and there is a cave with an air chamber inside, where you can surface and breath, although not pleasantly. The water was quite cold though, about 19-20 degrees (Celsius) so we wore rather thick wetsuits to protect us from the cold. On the way back to the mainland, the weather changed from sunny to rainy, which resulted in a beautiful rainbow!
That same afternoon I drove further north to the Bay of Islands, which is exactly what its name suggests. I stayed a few nights in Paihia, a pleasant town where most tourist activities are located. One of those activities was a boat tour in the bay where I got to see a big group of dolphins and another hole in the rock.

Back in Auckland, I went up to Mount Eden, one of Auckland's volcanic mountains. It's less than 200m high and not active anymore, as you can see by the big grasland that covers the crater now. It offers great views of the city though! There's also a big round plate with directions and places from all over the world with the distance to it. Amsterdam is on it as well and it reminded me that I was over 18.000 km from home. New Zealand was the furthest I got from home on this round-the-world trip. I have about 3 months of planned travel left. As I will cross the pacific via the Cook Islands, I will start to move closer to home again.

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Comments

[Maart]

You didn't make the underwaterpix yourself, did you?

[Teun]

I did, rented an underwater camera :-)