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Published: September 4th 2008
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New Zealand - A land filled with sheep, adventure and a nation of people obsessed with rugby!
The flight from Fiji was relatively event free apart from this strange woman sitting next to James on the plane. For the entire 3 hours she had her Ipod on full blast and was dancing around like she was on crack and it took several people to ask her to turn it down as it was 2am and we were trying to sleep. Kim was also in a lot of pain, but we will explain that shortly…….
We landed in Auckland at 4am and made our way to our hostel called Lantana Lodge. As you can expect we were pretty tired and were looking forward to some sleep, but were shocked to find some random guy sleeping in our double bed and we had the pleasure of waking him up and booting him out of the bed, he seemed a bit grumpy about it all, but he was French so we didn’t care.
The following day Kim appeared to be quite under the weather so she had a bed day to try and recover while James went off to explore the
city. Over the next couple of days Kim’s health was deteriorating so we paid the doctor a visit. To both our shock she was diagnosed with 1) A perforated ear drum, 2) Bronchitis and 3) Tonsillitis!!!!!!! The doctor gave her a bag full of medication which seemed enough to sedate a small elephant. The following day we were back at the doctors as Kim started having a bad reaction to the medication i.e. insomnia , hallucinations and feeling general ‘trippy’…..normally you have to pay for those privileges!! We decided that a few more days in Auckland was a good idea to give Kim enough time to recover.
As expected New Zealand was a lot cooler than Fiji, but we hadn’t really prepared ourselves for how cold it would actually be. As we were mostly equipped with shorts, t-shirts and flips flops we quickly had to purchase a new wardrobe otherwise we would have been adding hyperthermia to the list of illnesses.
Before we arrived in New Zealand we decided that we wanted to tour the country using a backpacker’s bus company called Magic instead of hiring a van and doing it ourselves. This is for obvious reasons (Breakdowns,
arguments over directions etc) and we suspect that if we did choose the van option there would be a lot more funny/life threatening experiences to talk about in this blog. So after spending a small fortune on medical bills, winter clothes and a bus pass we departed Auckland for the Bay of Islands which is situated at the very top of the North Island of New Zealand.
After crossing the harbour bridge we headed north to the Northlands and the Bay of Islands. This region is often called ‘The birthplace of a nation’, owing to all of the historic sites and memorable events that took place in the region. With Auckland well behind us, we had a brief stop at Sheep World giving us a chance to learn about New Zealand’s most famous livestock. Did you know that there are 38 million sheep in the country, outnumbering people 10 to 1!!! Back on the road to the Bay of Islands we passed through Waitangi where the famous treaty was signed between the Europeans and the Maori chiefs in 1840 before arriving at Paihia. We stayed in a cool little hostel called The Bay Adventure that had its own pool
and hot tub, however it was a wee bit cold (7 degrees!) for a dip. Whilst there we enjoyed a Jazz and Blues festival, taking in local singers the usual arts and crafts. We took the ferry to a neighbouring island called Russell, which happened to be the first capital of New Zealand. Russell has lots of historic charm and stylish architecture which we took full of advantage of when visiting the local pub that seemed to be host to The Hells Angels biker gang. Trying our best to mix in we had a few beers, watched some people get tattoos and observing the world go by before going back to the mainland.
After 3 nights in Paihia we travelled West across the country to Opononi, a lovely town on the edges of Hokianga Harbour. The Hokianga region is generally accepted as the residential place of Kupe the very first voyager and Maori, to discover New Zealand over 1,000 years ago. Opononi earned its status as a tourist destination in 1955 when a lone dolphin began following local fishing boats into the harbour to perform tricks for the locals. People flocked from all over the country to see the
dolphin and he was later nicknamed ‘Opo’ the Gay dolphin which James found funny and when we later watched a video from the 1950’s about Opo, James couldn’t stop sniggering every time it suggested that Opo (the gay dolphin) liked to stroke himself up against the locals. We stayed 2 nights in a lovely and very homely hostel that was run by an English woman called Sue who looked after us like we were all her children. There wasn’t that much to do at the hostel and since there wasn’t a TV to entertain us we relived our childhoods by playing Scrabble and Pictionary, which we both embarrassing lost as we were the all English team playing against a group of Japanese and Germans…Dam those Japanese, they are excellent drawers!! Kim was still feeling quite groggy and didn’t seem to be improving, having headaches all day and heightened travel sickness due to the drugs. Sue being an ex-nurse decided the best thing to do would be to contact the doctor and as the town was so small, the doctors surgery actually doubled as the local hospital. After being discharged from the hospital we got back on the Magic bus and
headed back to Auckland going via the Waipoua Forest to visit the Tane Mahuta (Lord of the Forest), New Zealand’s largest know living kauri tree which is estimated to be 1,200 years old. The road back to Auckland consisted of vertical drops and 90 degree turns every 10 meters and reminded us of Snake Pass but on a much more extreme scale…..let’s just say that we had to take double the amount of travel sick pills to prevent us from puking.
When we got back to Auckland we went to see the new Batman movie at the IMAX cinema which has to be the biggest screen we have ever seen, it actually felt like we were in the movie (not good for Kim’s trippy state). The following evening we met up with Simon, Kim’s brother-in-law and he took us out for a meal at a good old Irish Pub (toad in the hole…a bit of English tradition) and a few ‘quiet’ drinks, that later lead to a messy session of wine, beers, cocktails and whiskey shots! You can only imagine with our seven o clock start how James felt in the morning.
Our next stop, South........
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Migs
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Looking good there Kim