Bay of Islands - Paihia - day 1

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Today was more relaxing than my last 3 days in Auckland. Woke up at 6am to catch the 7:50 am bus to Paihia in the Bay of Islands on the northern end of North Island. (Auckland is in the Center of North Island). I used Stray bus to get to Paihia. Along the way we hugged a very large Kauri tree for good luck, passed “strawberry” sheep, and photographed a tree house café.

Once we arrived to Paihia, we received our free passes to go on a dolphin watching cruise. What I thought would be a 45 minute or so cruise, lasted 4 hours. But it was amazing! We saw quite a few dolphin pods - all with small dolphin babies, so we weren’t allowed to swim with them. (I was going to anyway, water was way too cold and it would have cost $30 extra). We learned that dolphin babies need to be fed every 4 minutes, and if they miss a feeding they could die, hence why we couldn’t swim. We didn’t want to distract the babies from their feeding. We also learned that dolphins mate 15x a day and the female dolphin can choose with which partner to release her eggs. New Zealand is one of only 3 countries with a growing dolphin population. The other 2 are the Bahamas and Scotland.

The cruise took us along the bay which has 148 islands. Some are tiny, while some are pretty large. Most are just forests and park areas with beaches. We boated through the “hole in the rock” which, as its name, is a small hole in a giant rock. From afar, it didn’t look like the boat could make it through the rock but as we neared closer to the hole; we saw that it was much, much greater than it looked. We were lucky though! Sometimes the tide is really high and the boats really can’t make it through. But this wasn’t the case with us. Unfortunately my camera battery died from taking so many photos of the dolphins that I couldn’t capture any of the “Hole in the rock”. We had also stopped on one of the islands for 45 minutes. There was a walking trail to the summit, but most of us decided to just relax along the shore.
Upon disembarking the boat, I headed to the supermarket -a good 15 minute walk, and then headed back to the hostel to rest up, as the morning would surely bring the next adventure. At 6:50 am, I would be picked up to go to Cape Reinga, the most northern point of New Zealand, where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet.

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Comments

[Kelly]

wow!
Every 4 minutes? That's insane! Talk about time consuming. How long do they have to be fed that often?? (in other words when do they outgrow that phase)

[saranakash]

no idea.. i think only a few weeks or days.. but not sure.