I managed a few short hours sleep at the backpackers before having to get up for the start of the Connections tour. I caught up with Steve, and over the next hour or few managed to amaze/bore him with stories of Africa. Soon we were on the coach heading from Auckland up to the Bay of Islands for a couple of nights. The accommodation is quite good compared to what I’m used to – motel as opposed to hotel or campsite, and the food too is intensively prepared, so we eat really quite well.
The Bay of Islands is really quite nice, similar to the Whitsunday Islands, but cooler, with more (smaller) islands and only slightly less picturesque.
Steve and I got on quite well with a couple of blokes we met in Auckland – an Indian Kenyan from London called Ash and a Scot called Jamie. First night in Paihia we went down to the local Woolies (“open til 10”) and stocked up on drinks, then went round to the girls’ dorms and invited them over. Of course after a few girls came over, most of the group was sitting on our front grass on chairs from their rooms, and a nice quiet evening ensued.
I fell asleep halfway through the dinner, in Steve’s bed out the back room, with the idea of being woken in an hour or two when the others would bring back some chicks from the “great bar place” our driver recommended. Turns out the place was a rust old ship and quite crap and no-one came back afterwards so I slept through til morning.

In the morning we chose to do a tour up north to Cape Reinga on a yellow bus with a mob called Awesome Adventures. We stopped off to see a big 500yr old Kaori tree, drove up sixty mile long “90 mile beach”, making sure to pull over for the Mercedes that was half buried in the sand – that far gone in just over a month!
We stopped again a bit further up at a big dune for some dune-boarding. This involves trudging up a large dune with a body board each, and then throwing yourself off the top. This is all good, except on our day there was quite a strong offshore wind that stirred up all the sand in your face, clothes ad most nook and crannies you care to ponder. This made the experience sill fun, but quite unpleasant, so not something I wanted to do a second time.
Next stop was a beach (Taputuputu Bay?) for a swim though, so we got to tumble-rinse ourselves in the Pacific. The surf wasn’t poorly shaped, but there were some ridiculous rips so we had to stay in close so others wouldn’t follow us.
The pinnacle of the trip (or at least the highest/northernmost point) was the visit to Cape Reinga, the far north tip of NZ. The spiritual belief is that the dead spirits pass through the ground of the long narrow land up to this point where they leave through the branches and exposed roots of a particular really really old tree there, and find their way “home”. What else is cool about this place is that it’s where the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea meet, and on our particular day, from the lighthouse on the cape, you honestly could see the different coloured waters (not from varying depths) and some white water foaming where the two met. A pretty cool sight to see – two large bodies of water colliding and joining, but not really mixing.
We turned to go home then, stopping off at a Kaori wood shop along the way. It was a pretty good day and our guide was great, I just wish I hadn’t left my brand new watch on the bus.

That night we went down to the nearby club strip for a few drinks. I met up with Nina, a Swiss girl I was chatting with on the bus tip, but ended up walking home with Lauren, and Adelaidian girl from our tour group.
It ended up being a really late night for a few of us back at the hotel though – we were up late playing stupid dirty-talk games with two of the more loser girls; terrible waste of time really, especially for someone in the throws of jetlag.