Bay of Islands

Kiwis will tell you that the sun burns more in New Zealand because the ozone layer is thinner over them than it is in Australia. They also complain it's hot when it's 23 degrees (they're very english like that), which kind of made me think they didn't know what they were talking about.

Needless to say after a day in the Bay of Islands I was sunburned and pretty damn hot.

The Bay of Islands is basically a really big bay with lots and lots of islands in it, the most famous of which is called the Hole in the Rock. When explorers discovered Australia and New Zealand they rapidly ran out of ideas for interesting names and went back to the map of England and started recycling city names from it. After they'd exhausted all the good place names they started to name things after themselves, followed by (in order) Kings and Queens, Lords, wives, daughters, friends, random acquaintances and finally family pets. But the lands are so vast that they just kept on finding new areas, so in the end they resorted to playing simple games of "Say-what-you-see". Hence The Bay of Islands makes complete sense in an uninteresting but informative way. Once they stepped off their boats and stopped slaughtering the indigenous people, the New Zealand explorers were delighted to discover that the Maori had already named their settlements, thus saving them from having to listen to Captain Cook announce "I-Spy with my little eye something beginning with B..." for the twentieth time that day.
Little did they know that when you translate the Maori place names into English they all come out meaning things like "Big River" or "Lots of Water". I guess that some problems are common to all cultures.

On Sunday night we arrived in Paihia (the most picturesque town in the Bay region) and we checked into a hostel called the "Pi Pi Patch". Kiri reassured me that the hostel was named after the fields of shellfish (pi pi) and not the yellowish stains on the dormitory mattresses.

Everyone on the backpacker circuit seems to be an 18 year old ex-public school girl on their gap year before university. Apart from me of course, who as you know is a 30 year old ex-public school boy having a premature mid-life crisis. I could have sworn I heard a "So What A-Level's Did You Get" conversation going on in the bar on Monday night but it could have just been an auditory hallucination brought on by the banging music, lack of sleep and my sunburn. At that point we decided to go off and find somewhere to go for dinner that the younger backpackers couldn't afford.

The next day we were up at 7am to go on a tour to Cape Rienga. After carefully waking up everyone in the dormitory who had snored that night, we were off on the Awesome Adventures coach to the Cape. The "Awesome" trip is like the standard trip, but geared around younger people.

The bus drivers dont wear a uniform or anything. Awesome!

The trip comprised a visit to an ancient Kauri forest (Big Trees), more sandboarding on a sand dune (Steep Hills) a trip along 90 Mile Beach (Long Beach), a quick dip in the sea (Deep Ocean) a walk to a spiritual Maori headland (Big Drop) and finally a quick stop at the pub on the way home (Dirty Toilets). I loved it, plus it wasn't sunny so my face didnt burn any more than it already had. Then it was back to the hostel to get shedded and wake up everyone in the dormitory again by stumbling in at 3am giggling like an 18 year old.

Backpacking's great!

Sandboarding at Cape Rienga