Northland

Hey everyone,

So after Kawhia we headed up north of Auckland, but not before doing a very important thing first.....
Driving around Auckland is a bit like driving around Calgary so kudos to Jared for navigating the labyrinth so I could see the "Outrageous Fortune" house in West Auckland. This was the house the West's lived in on the show. Pretty sure most of you have no idea what I'm talking about but it's a kiwi sitcom Jocy got me into when she was in New Zealand. It is just a normal residential house now, so we had to walk by all nonchalantly and pretend we were reading the bus stop schedule while I snapped some pics. I thought I had been so sneaky until I got looking at the pictures and realized the woman in the driveway was looking right at me as I snapped the picture! Awkward! I'm a terrible paparazzi.

Jared thought I was completely insane that I was so excited. From there we made a bee-line out of Auckland. We stopped in a town called Warkworth. We were only planning on getting groceries and moving on, but we ended up staying on at a Holiday Park in Marvin's Bay. It is only 1 hr from Auckland and it's peak tourist/holiday season here so the camp ground was packed. That evening we went fishing out on Mullet Point, a 15 min walk from the camp site. Jared caught his first fish on his surf-casting rod, a snapper.

The next morning we drove up the point to Goat Island Marine Reserve. We bought some snorkel gear and were super excited to play with our new toys! Of course, we couldn't really take any pictures of the actual snorkelling but I promise it was cool :) We saw tons snapper, and a bunch of other fishes. Jared saw a stingray but he was too quick for me. Some of the snapper were absolutely enormous, they didn't even look like snapper any more.

From there we headed to Whangarei. We stopped at the i-site to figure out what we should do while we're up here. We decided to stay at a DOC (Department of Conservation) camp site that night and head for Russell in the morning.

The next morning we were in Russell. It is such a nice place, right in the Bay of Islands but still very quiet. In the late 1800's it used to be a whaling town and was called the "Hell-hole of the Pacific" because everyone was either a sailor, whaler or a prostitute, and we all know how law-abiding those folks were.

Looking out from the town of Russell into the Bay of Islands

In the afternoon we took a boat tour out to "Hole in the Rock" at Cape Brett. This gave us some great views of the Bay and we even saw some dolphins. We were a little spoiled in Kawhia because there were way more people this time and we only saw dolphins for about 5 minutes. 

The Hole in the Rock

The cruise was lovely, we even drove the boat through the hole in the rock. Real cool. They zipped us over to Otehei Bay, and let us hang out on shore for a bit. Jared and I went snorkelling. I saw a bunch of oysters. Jared saw fish but he is braver and actually dives down when snorkelling. I'm getting there. Baby steps. 

Otehei Bay

Pohutakawa trees in the background

They drove us back to Russell and the tour was over. Now we are hanging out in Paihia. We took Esther (our van) on a ferry across the bay. We lucked out and the place has free wi-fi so we are bloggin like mad. 

Hopefully there will be more chances to blog in the not so distant future. Hope everyone is doing well at home, miss you heaps