Auckland to Rotorua

So much has happened since I last wrote. Where do I begin? Ah yes, I'll start with the Bay of Islands. We departed Auckland for the north and stayed in Paihia for two nights. It is a nice little town with magnificent views over the ocean. But the best part was out day trip up to the northernmost point in New Zealand, Cape Reinga. You can even see a picture of me being the northernmost person in the country. At the very peak is the lighthouse which is just about as far north as you can go. The views from the top of the hill are spectacular. You can see both coasts of NZ, with great rock formations on either side. A nice long beach on the west is also nice to look at. The greatest part was that we could actually see the line where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. The Tasman is green and the Pacific is blue in colour. Looking north from the cape the deviding line is visible. Its a great sight. On our way back to Paihia our bus took us to some sand dunes to go sandboarding. I was so excited because I also went sandboarding in Peru and that was a blast. The bus took us through the bottom of the dunes literally through a small river. We stayed there a good hour climbing and sliding down the dunes at top speed. Great fun. As we left the dunes we drove down the famous 90 mile beach (which is actually only 64 miles, but 64 mile beach just doesnt sound as cool). We stopped for about 30 minutes over the hour that we drove on it. It's a magnificent beach that seems to have no end. There were also thousands of clams that were washing up on shore. And some people were eating them. This English guy who was devouring them told me that you can eat anything raw from an unpolluted sea. So I ate some. I smashed them together to open them and poped them in my mouth. They were ok. Kinda salty. So that was the Cape Reinga and the Bay of Islands.

Two days later after a short stop in Auckland we arived in Whitianga. Stephanie and I liked this place a lot. Our hostel was a converted old folks home and still had that atmospheare to it, like 60's decorations and probably the first colour TV ever made. We met some cool people there and were reunited with another girl from our free day tour in Auckland. It was great since they also had a car. The best part of this area was the Hot Water Beach. This was incredible. It's a nice beach with hot springs that run under it. So in low tide, you can dig a ditch in the sand that will fill up with water at 65 degrees celcius. Our own private hot tubs! So there are two low tides a day, and on that particular day the low tide was at 3 am. So the five of us decided to hire some spaids and drive out there to do some midnight bathing. We got there at about 1 am. We dug a very nice pool but the water that came through really was over 60 degrees and was imposible to go into. It was literally burning. Scolding. So we abondoned that pool an kept digging looking for cool water. We found some, but that water was too cold. So we kept diggin out and joined some scolding hot water with some cold water and tried to mix it together. But that was futile, it wouldn't mix except for a thin line where the hot met the cold. So we all jammed together our hot and cold pool at about 2:30 am. Despite the manual labour involved it was a lot of fun and the stars were so good it looked like you could reach out and touch them.

So it seems that I'm being kicked off the computer. And I still have so much more to say! I'll probably get back on tomorrow to write some more, so talk to you then...