Auckland trip summary

Sunset from Henry's room

Here is my update, finally, of my trip to Auckland.
I left Wellington around 7:30am to catch a flight at 9:30. I gave myself WAY too much time. The Kiwi way is to be as laid back as possible and that means that security and also time constraints are often blurry and relaxed. I went through the whole process so quickly, in under 10 minutes, that I was sort of stunned and wandered around not knowing what to do with the extra hour and half I had before boarding.
When I arrived in Auckland I was shocked to find the airport so far away from the city itself. It took a 30 minute shuttle ride over to Henry's building in the center of the city. Also, I found Auckland to be a very different city from Wellington. To start, Auckland is much larger and although it is hilly and windy, nothing can compare to Wellington's gusts. Auckland also has city vibe that Wellington lacks and what I love Wellington for. There is a denser population and the traffic patterns are much more hazardous in Auckland than in Wellington. Both cities are very clean though and both cities have a lot of art and gardens scattered around. To my surprise I found myself missing Wellington while I was there, further confirming how right I was in my decision to go to Wellington.
Henry showed me around the city. We went to all the landmark spots, the major hang out and shopping streets and we saw the skytower. Later I took a long nap in Henry's bed and then we ate dining hall food for dinner. That evening Henry planned out our trip with his friend Ben to the Bay of Islands and then we went on a brief outing to the city with a few of his friends and ended up eating some late night kebabs.

Auckland as we were leaving the city

In the morning Henry, Ben and I walked down to a car rental place and rented a pretty crappy nissan four-door. Over the phone the car rental place had called it a Blue Bird, which we lovingly named it despite the car actually being a Circo. After eating lunch in the dining halls and packing ourselves some snacks for the road, we left around 12:30. It was a bit overcast but we caught some good glimpses of the city skyline as we drove out toward the northern tip of the island. I managed to sleep for a good 2 hours in the car while we drove toward Dargaville, our first stop.

New Zealand landscape

Along the way we stopped in a few towns. The first town we stopped in had a thrift store that had been highly recommended by a tourist site and it turned out to be, as they say around here, rubbish. We bought coffee instead and switched drivers. Dargaville was our next town, where we were advised to buy food and also the town that we would become most intimate with during the trip. We bought a horrible supply of food. Ben and Henry, being boys, wanted to get the cheapest and easiest thing to cook with little to no variety in our meal plan. So we ended up buys a ton of pasta, rice, butter, cereal, bread, sandwich meat, minced meat, yogurt, cheese and a large thing of mixed seasonings. Our dinners would consist of a ton of cooked pasta, minced meat, butter and seasoning. Our breakfasts was cereal and yogurt and lunch was a ham sandwich with cheese and some of the seasoning we used on the pasta. Although it was pretty gross the amount of carbs I consumed over the next few days it was a pretty funny experience cooking (we had to improvise a lot of things such as cooking pans and utensils). Also in Dargaville we bought a tape adaptor in order to play our ipods in the car, this was a good investment until Bluebird decided to turn on us mid-trip.
After Dargaville we had the full intention of driving to the Bay of Islands that day. We left with Henry driving, heading toward what we thought was the right road. We ended up driving through some pretty dramatic landscape with loads of forests and winding roads. After about an hour of driving we hit some dirt roads and started to suspect we were a bit lost. We stopped at a random outlook and talked to a man who lived in the area. He was pretty amused by us and asked first, "Where do you THINK you are?" We were totally off. Somehow, as we were driving along, we ended up going south instead of north. It does not make sense to me how this happened, but there we were, on Pouto Point, a peninsula no less. So we turned around, a bit embarrassed, me behind the wheel. As we reached Dargaville again, we decided to just spend the night at one of our stops we had planned called Bayleys Beach. We got a small campsite at a place they called "Holiday Parks" which have campsites, cabins, and rv sites. They also have kitchens, toilets, showers, washers and dryers. We set up camp and went down to the beach just as the sun was setting.

Bayley's Beach

I was looking pretty sloppy from travelling all day

Bayleys Beach proved to be one of the best stops on the entire trip. The beach was HUGE and beautiful. There were tons of people taking pictures but the beach was so huge you barely noticed them. The water was warm and part of me regrets having gone down without wearing a bathing suit. We spent most of the time taking tons of pictures and wandering around. I could describe the scene, but I think the pictures do it a better justice than my meager writing abilities.
That evening we cooked our first dinner of pasta (it took forever for the pot to boil but fortunately there was a TV) and then Henry and I shared the two person tent and Ben slept in the car because he decided it was too cramped in the tent for three.
The next day we woke up early, made breakfast, and then hit the road again. This leg of the trip was fairly smooth and beautiful. We saw the oldest tree in New Zealand. It was 2,000 years old and enormous. My pictures do not do this giant justice, at all. We also saw lots of jungle like forests although the weather remained the same. We stopped at a sketchy natural mineral springs. I had been excited about seeing the mineral springs, but the town had put a jeopardy on all the springs, creating this creepy "bath houses" that we had to pay to get into. So instead we snuck around and saw some of the streams that bubbled with heat.
We reached Paihia around lunch time and ate lunch by the Haruku Falls.
After setting up camp we went to the beach and swam for a couple hours. The beach was pretty calm because it was in the bay area, but it was really warm compared to Wellington waters so it was a welcomed change. We also explored the tidal pools and later took naps on the grassy hills near the beach.
We cooked dinner that night (getting a head start on boiling the water this time) and then wandered around the camping grounds and ended the night watching some TV (kitchen nightmares).
The next day, our last day, was cloudy and rainy. We were warned that it was going to be a huge rain storm that evening so we had to rent a caravan on the premises to stay dry. It was pretty grimey and ghetto, but later we were very thankful to have it. We spent the day hiking (where we met a bizzard Swiss Frenchman who babbled to us for a good 10 minutes), we saw a nice lookout of the bay and ate lunch up there. The rain sort of put a damper on our plans and we were feeling a little down on things until I found a little add for a glow worm cave. It was a short 25 minute drive and it was a perfect activity to do on a rainy day.
Our guide was the 16th generation of a family that had owned the land with the caves for 300 years. He was obviously raised around glow worms and it added a creepy quirky vibe to the tour. The glow worms were amazing and if I ignored the fact that they were gross worms, I was completely stricken by the beauty of having a nighttime sky indoors.
After the caves we went exploring other towns. We went to Keri Keri which proved to be a disaster because all we wanted was to buy a pie for that nights dinner and every single shop began closing around 5. So we ended up leaving empty handed until we saw a winery still open oftering tastings. It was here that I experienced my first wine tasting, had a really cool port that had a crazy after taste of almonds and we split the cost of buying a bottle of wine we all liked. For dinner we splurged and bought some pasta sauce and had a very richmans dinner compared to what we had been having previously. The rain started as dinner ended and we ended up getting into our bathing suits and running around in the rain for a good hour. We ended the night watching bad soap operas.
The next day we left early and dropped Ben off at another beach where he was going to be in a frisbee tournament. We had an easy time getting back to Auckland and Henry drove me to the airport with no problem. I spent my time in the airport reading "Lovely Bones" and thinking a lot about home and people I missed.

I would write more but as of right now I think I might miss my bus to class. OOPS! It's only my first day!

The next few pictures are as follows: Bayleys beach at sundown, a lookout on our way to the Bay of Islands, the campsite we stayed at in Paihia, and lastly the beach we swam at in Paihia in the Bay of Islands.