North..but not to Alaska!

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Stray tour up North
Six nice people to tour with
Let the games begin...

Okay, finally I get to move on from Auckland. My tour pass with Stray up to Northland begins today and I'm super excited to finally be headed out of the city.

Since it is now the off season there were only six of us on tour which is a nice sized tour group. Our driver/tour guide for the day, Auto was one wacky dude. Really cool and super knowledgeable. Although his love for taking nude photographs was a little much for me. lol

We stopped a few times along the drive up to Paihia. We saw a huge Kauri tree, a waterfall, went for a walk along a beach where you could go snorkeling (really freezing cold waters though!) and stopped at another beach where there were the coolest shells ever (simply amazing colours!)

If you drove straight to Paihia it is about 3.5 to 4 hours. But with all our stops along the way we didn't make it into Paihia until about 3:30PM...or 7.5 hours. There were a lot of windy roads along the way too. Thank goodness I don't get motion sickness!

Since it was still early in the afternoon a bunch of us decided to check out what Paihia had to offer after dropping off our stuff at the hostel Basically we headed for the beach! The sun was shining and it was even warm enough to only be wearing a t-shirt. It was so nice to have the sun welcome us like that since just a few hours before it was freezing cold. Yes, the weather in New Zealand changes quicker than you can say fish and chips!

After walking along the beach and looking for some cool shells we plunked ourselves down to just enjoy the view of the surrounding islands. After all, this isn't called the Bay of Islands for nothing since there are 144 islands to be discovered. After a while of just lazing about some went off to the local grocery store to buy stuff for dinner. It was still at least an hour or more to sunset so I decided to stay out a little longer to enjoy the sun before heading over to the grocery store myself. Jasper and myself decided to walk a little bit further along the beach and over the bridge to see what else there was to see. We came across this rocky area where a woman was fishing with this big ass fishing pole! I'm not exaggerating when I say this fishing pole must have been at least 15 (if not more) feet in length. We chatted her up a bit and I felt a bit bad that while we were chatting with her a fish got away with her bait. Whoops! Time to move on. haha Well, the real reason we decided to move on was because the tide was coming in and we didn't want to be stranded out on the rocks.

So we started to walk towards the grocery store. Man, are we there yet? Walking along the beach we didn't really realize how far we had actually walked since there are no real landmarks. So when we were walking along the sidewalk it seemed like forever before we came across our hostel. Guess it didn't help that at this point we were starving and weighed down with our groceries.

We eventually made it back to the Pipi Patch Lodge where we made dinner. Too bad the kitchen facilities weren't the greatest. I was lucky that the burner I chose was actually working. Not so lucky for some others. 😊

It was a pretty quiet night. A bunch of us just chatted and then the Pictionary board made an appearance. Now that was fun. It is always challenging playing Pictionary with English as a second language speakers. One English dude was drawing for a German and Norwegian. The word was Jigsaw Puzzle. So the obvious thing to draw are puzzle pieces. Well, I guess Jigsaw isn't really a word that would be in everybody's vocabulary so the whole time they kept saying, puzzle, puzzle, puzzle. It was super frustrating for the drawer but super funny for our team to watch especially since Alex on my team even pointed to the jigsaw puzzle on the shelf to give them a hint...

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Photos

On the way to Paihia
I don't know why I bother to brush my hair.

Made it to Paihia.
Yup, still have that windswept look. haha This was taken just before sunset close to the lady with the huge fishing pole.