New Zealand Part 1

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Hello sorry this has taken a while to arrive, ive been slacking on the blogging front! This last month in NZ has been amazing and ive been so busy i havnt sat down to write about my adventures but here it is, part one from me to you.

I arrive in Auckland on saturday 6th march and make my way over to my hostel in town. Many of the people ive met en route have said Auckland is a very dull city with not much to see so i only plan to spend a couple of days here. I arrive in the evening and have a wander around the city centre. Theres lots of souveneir shops and normal city shops. I have an early start so i can wake early and have a full day the following day. I meet an irish guy named Tommy whos moved out here, lives in a hostel and makes his money with online betting, strange i know! The problem is that it makes him nocturnal because sport happens back in europe during the night time in New Zealand due to the 13hr time difference. I awake the following day armed with a map and some good tunes on the ipod. I walk down to the waterfront and find theres a sightseeing bus around the city so i hop on and ride around to the Kelly Taunton Aquarium, it contains much sealife from New zealand and Australasia as well as the history of Captain Cook's explorations to the south pole.
There was some great things to see like big sharks and turtles but the best thing was seeing a woman jump in the tank with the Giant Stingrays and feed them, they were about 6ft wide and 8ft long with the tail!
There were some nice views of the city from this distance at the aquarium- its known as the 'city of sails' because the harbour has many sail boats and it hosts international sailing competitions. The highlight of Auckland funnily enough though was going to a shopping mall and finding a place that did roast dinners and so i ate a full beef roast- it was amazing and the first one ive had in around 6weeks.

The one main building on the skyline is the Skytower which is 328m tall and looks like the Seattle space needle. I get a lift to the top to overlook the city and there are some great views of the surrounding scenery including some really posh houses on the hills of the suburbs overlooking the harbour. I go to a bar on the way home and then decide from looking at my guidebook that i'm going to go north to the Bay of Islands and a town called Paihia so i book a bus for the following morning. This is the great thing about travelling alone, you just think i fancy having a butchers at the north, book a bus and jog on up there!

It takes 3hrs to get to Paihia but i instantly love the feel of the place, its about the size of a english countryside town, next to the beach and really quiet but with backpacker hostels and lots to do. I do the usual routine of checking into the hostel and picking up all the leaflets i like the sound of. I pick up one for a dive shop that runs trips to the Rainbow Warrior (a shipwreck) and other interesting dive sites. The problem is i need another qualification to dive the sites because they are quite deep so i decide to do a 4 day advanced open water course. When i return to the hostel i meet the other guys in my dorm. Theres three english lads on their gap year and it was cool because we instantly got on and started joking around and later went to a bar. The lads left the following day and i started my dive course, the weather was nice and warm but not boiling and humid like in Fiji- i think it was around 20 degrees.

There's two other people doing my course- Kath, a lovely girl from Auckland who's spent her life travelling and working on rich people's boats, and Becca, an Aussie on holiday. The advanced course is made up of five modules specifying certain types of dives- i did Boat diving, Peak performance buoyancy, Wreck diving, Underwater navigation and Deep diving. On the first day we did a shallow boat practice dive and in the afternoon we did my favorite dive because the bloke we went with was a local Kiwi training to be a scuba guide. This meant that he didnt care for rules or anything, we were foraging around right down in the thick seagrass searching for Eels and rays. This site has been dived so many times that fish arnt afraid of you at all- Triggerfish literally swim right in front of your face and you can touch them. The guide picked up an urchin off the rock and stuck his knife in it cutting it open and sending all the insides floating out which sent the fish into a feeding frenzy right in front of us it was really cool. We carried on swimming on and the guide gave me the sign to look inside a crack of rock but when i looked in it was too dark to see anything so he stuck his arm in all the way to his armpit and thrashed around for about 30seconds and then pulled out a lobster! (Kiwi's call them Crayfish). We had a stroke and then put him back; apparently New Zealanders have a very hands on attitude to animals; hunting and fishing are very popular sports here.

Another amazing dive we did the following day was the Rainbow Warrior which was a Greenpeace boat that used to travel around the world protecting animals and the environment in the 70's and 80's. In 1985 it came to Auckland harbour to protest against the whaling going on in NZ. Then one night 2 french sabateurs swam under it and planted two bombs on its hull sinking it to the harbour seabed. There was controversy as to whether they were sent to do this by the french government but the two men were arrested and i think the french ended up paying compensation for its sinking. There was a cameraman onboard who died when it sank. It was brought to the surface but too costly to repair so they moved it north to the Bay of Islands to become an artificial reef. It sits at 29m deep and the hull is coated in colourful Rainbow Anenomes and is filled with the aptly named 'Big Eyed fish' and Snapper. When we swam over the deck there were many small fish protecting their eggs and if you moved your hand too close to the eggs they bit your fingers, only they didnt have any teeth so it was only a small suck! We also went inside the bridge of the ship which we were later told was where the cameraman had died lol.

We also did another wreck, The HMNZS Canterbury, a fairly recent warship that had only been underwater for 2years so it wasnt covered in much coral. The great thing about this wreck was swimming into a helicopter hanger that sat perfectly level at the stern of the ship. It was really dark and eerie and you could just imagine it being on the surface and containing a chopper. As we swam back to the ascention rope we passed a gun turret that stil had full maneurability.
The other eventful dive was our deep dive, Kath, the instructor and I went down to 30m and did coordination tests because at depth you are less coordinated than at the surface. We had to spell DEEP DIVE backwards on our hands, i did it fine but Kath was really confused and then stumbled and had to grab the instructor because she was feeling really dizzy. She was 'Narked'- suffering from Nitrogen Narcosis which is when your body absorbs too much nitrogen under pressure and you feel pissed. its nothing serious and you just need to ascend a few metres for the feeling to pass; she was fine after a few minutes at a higher depth.

While i was doing my course in the evenings i met some interesting characters back at the hostel. A german bloke called Frank moved into my room; he was really nice but so stereotypically german straight outta the 80's. He had a really strong accent, a massive bushy tash and wore really small, tight denim shorts. I met a nice Kiwi called Chris who was on holiday from Wellington, and Courtney, a Canadian girl. One night i got back and met up with Chris and Courtney and we went for a walk through a forest to a high viewpoint. Ive never seen so many stars at night since i went camel trekking in the desert in Egypt. You can see the clusters that make up the milky way, the southern cross, Orien's Belt with the saucepan and the two particle cloud nebulla (Chris was a bit of a star geek who taught us about all these).

After my diving course finished i decided i would stay in Paihia for 2more nights. Courtney suggested i do the Cape Reinga day trip and then thought i would get the bus the following morning. Cape Reinga is the most northern tip of New Zealand, a national park and sacred area for the Maori people (the indiginous race of NZ). The bus picked us up early the next day and we had commentary all the way to the site. The driver told us many Maori folklore tales along the way of how mountains were created by gods and they would walk the earth finding a place to settle and find a wife. Cape Reinga itself is a stunning place where you can see the Tasman sea to the west meeting the Pacific Ocean to the east. Its very hilly and surrounded by completely unspoiled beaches and bushland. 'Reinga' means underworld and refers to the Maori belief that this is where the spirits of the dead leave for the journey to Hawaiki. If you look at the photo you can see a tree growing out of a rock at the tip of the land; this is a Pohutukawa tree. The Maori's say that spirits go to the tip of the land and jump into the sea, then they travel up the roots of this tree and find their way to the underworld known as Hawaiki. When you look around you can understand why they thought this was a sacred place: stunning scenery at the tip of the island with strong winds always blowing, two bodies of water colliding and a solitary tree growing out of a rock at the tip.

On the way back our bus (which was actually a massive all terrain vehicle with a bus body on top) drove along 90 Mile Beach, which is officially neither a beach nor 90miles long! Its actually classed as a coastline and is only 60miles long but early settlers thought it to be 90miles. It is like a long desert surrounded by sand dunes and the Ocean, half way alone the beach we got out and went sandboarding, ie going headfirst down a dune lying on top of a bodyboard, great fun! It was a lot faster than i thought and these two crazy Canadians went down on one board between 2 of them and crashed near the bottom which was funny.
On the way home we stopped for Fish 'n' Chips (or as the Kiwi's pronounce it Fush 'n' Chups lol). They were really tasty, its strange the English influence found in NZ there's loads of Fish 'n' Chip shops, and pies are really popular. People here understand english coloquialisms and idioms which i find i normally have to tone down for foreigners. Chris, the Kiwi i met said despite having never been to England nor having direct family ties he still feels a connection due to history and similar culture. Indeed there were times we were driving home on the left side of the road surrounded by lush countryside full of livestock that i forgot i was outside of England. Thats another funny fact- there is only 4.2 million people living in NZ, but 40 million sheep and 9 million cows- they are heavily outnumbered!

The other cool place we stopped on the bus trip was the Kauri Ancient Village. Kauri's are trees that once covered the New Zealand landscape and they exude a gum resin that is used in varnishing furniture. In the last ice age much botanical life was destroyed but in this area the Kauri forest that was coated in their layers of gum they shed, protected them from decimation. So now they dig up these trees and their wood which is some 45,000 years old and make furniture and beautiful carvings out of them. The most spectacular thing was a whole tree they had carved into a spiral staircase (see photo).

When i got back to the hostel that night it was around 7pm and the girl at reception asked "Are you Chris?" so i said yes and she said i hadnt paid for tonights accomodation so i was kicked out, there was no space as they had given my bed away! I had to find another hostel for my final night lol.

When i went skydiving in Fiji i met an englishman called Nick who said that if i wanted to learn to solo jump i had to go to Taupo and do an AFF course with a world renowned guy called Geoff so thats my next destination at the centre of the North Island.

Wow i havnt even covered half of what ive been up to this month but think i will leave this part for now and in a few days time hopefully i will get the rest up on here.

Catch you soon!

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Comments

[Phil Silver]

That's a brilliant cliff-hanger for the next part. Sounds amazing as usual mate, sometimes reading on here I forget I'm not reading Wikipedia, seems like you've learnt so much about the local heritage and customs. Keep up the good work.