Auckland And The Bay Of Islands

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After a short 3 hour flight we landed in Auckland to find our hostel double booked, excellent news. We were the unfortunate ones and had to move for one night to a different hostel down the road which can only be described as… crap. The next day we were allowed back into our original hostel and to be honest, pretty much stayed there for next 2 days solid. Auckland as a city is pretty dull so we used the time to do some laundry and just for a change, play cwango.

On Monday we decided to hire a car for a couple of days and drive north to check out the bay of islands. After successfully navigating new zealands main highway (which is more like a “b road” in the uk) we arrived in the town of Pahia and checked into probably the only hostel in the world with a hot tub!

This is where we started to see the real NZ and enjoyed it a lot more than Auckland. We took a boat trip on Tuesday to see the islands and also bumped into a group of wild dolphins which swam along side us for a bit! Unfortunately they were too fast for our cameras to catch them but was cool to lye on the catamaran and look down and see 6 or 7 dolphins beneath you. We also did some kayaking and biscuiting which is being pulled behind a speedboat on an inflatable trying not to fall off! Luckily I didn’t fall off…but annoyingly neither did ryan. After the trip we went back to the hostel and had some beers and got chatting to a couple of dutch guys for the evening which was cool, and although they seemed to take offence to my sarcastic views about their “average” football team, all was forgotten and we exchanged details and are gonna try and meet up on the south island.

The next day we left Pahia and headed west to Hokianga and stayed in the town of Opononi. This was really just to break up our journey back to Auckland but the scenery was pretty spectactular on the way so was worth the couple of extra hours drive.

To our joy we arrived back in Auckland today, as we have to spend one night here before we get on the Magic bus tomorrow and head south! So will speak to you all again soon

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Comments

[john Garvey]

New Zealand
Hope you enjoy NZ as much as we did last year, you've got to stop in Rotarua to see and smell all the geysers, etc

[Caroline]

auck
Hey told ya auckland isnt that great of a holiday destination!! glad to see u had lots of fun in other parts of nz tho. have fun in ozzy!!