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Published: September 9th 2009
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Woke up extra early and packed up and had some breakfast before heading outside to wait for the Stray bus to pick me up. Ann (canadian girl) decided to come up north as well so we waited outside for the bust together and met Trina, a girl from Singapore studying in Dunedin, NZ. She was also headed up north so we all stuck together. Our tiny bus finally came to pick us up and there was only 5 of us plus a girl and her boyfriend who works for Stray and the driver.
Our first stop was to see some Kauri (pronounce cow-ree) trees. One of them is something like 800 years old! It was HUGE. If you hug the tree it's meant to bring you good weather for your trip so of course we all hugged it. Our next stop was in Whangerei (pronounced Fangaray) for some breakfast. We picked up another passenger there. Vera, from the Netherlands hopped on. The countryside as soon as you're out of Auckland is AMAZING.
We made it up to Paihia (pronounce Pieheea) in the Bay of islands. It's like a small beach resort like town. But it's pretty quiet up here
now as it's just turned from winter into spring. We got dropped off at the Pipi Patch Hostel. We had about a half an hour to get our stuff together for our dolphin cruise.
The boat takes you out through the islands up here with some amazing views. It wasn't long as we spotted a big pod of dolphins. This pod had some babies with it though so NZ law is that you can't go swimming with them if there are babies. We stayed with the pod for quite a bit of time just watching them jump and swim around. They are such amazing creatures!!!
We continued on our way and found a smaller pod of dolphins with no babies so some people went swimming with them. It was way too cold for me and I knew i'd see some more in warmer water to swim with haha. It was cool to see people swimming with them though, they are all wild dolphins.
After that the boat took us out to the hole in the rock. If the water is really calm you can go through the hole in the rock but our boat tried twice and
we couldn't do it. The waves were all too big. I was at the front of the boat when we were trying and it was so scary!!! I was holding on for dear life!
We got back into Paihia around 5pm and all of us decided to jump into the hot tub. That's right, the hostel has a pool and a hot tub!!! It was awesome! We spent almost an hour in there. The hostel puts on a kiwi bbq for us so we all headed over to the bar. They cooked us steak, sausage, potatoes, and salad. It was so good and probably the best meal i've had on this trip so far!!!
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Daddyio
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Love those Dolphins
What a great day you had! Swimming with the dolphins would be awesome! You are sure doing alot in a hurry! When will you rest?