CAMPING IN NORTH ISLAND! BAY OF ISLANDS

Day 333

Wednesday 30th January 2008

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Happy Birthday to our gorgeous nephew Rhys! 14 now! Wow..quite the young man!
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Beachside Caravan Park, Bay of Islands $16 each for tent site.

We packed up our gear, including our tent, from the hostel in Auckland, bought $50 worth of fuel, went shopping at Spotlight to stock up with sheets, pillows and pillowcases, towels (all for $60 NZ which is good value!) and then headed to Bay of Islands..The drive there was spectacular!

As we were driving around Dome Hill we saw so many HUGE tree ferns. I have never seen so many lush, green and towering tree ferns in my life! Oh, to have some of them in our backyard….

We took photos of trucks against the backdrop of tree ferns just to show the height of these incredible ferns. With ferns like that, there has to be a great rainfall..and we were hoping we wouldn’t be experiencing too much of that! Not while we’re camping anyway!

We veered off at one point and took the Marsden Tourist drive which was about 21km’s off the main road. So beautiful.

Talking about camping. Our first night in the Bay of Islands, which I have to say is the most beautiful place on earth! It opens out onto the South Pacific and you can see lots of coves and inlets that are aqua blue. So beautiful. The scenery is just beautiful.

I just had no idea how gorgeous the countryside really is. It’s lush, and fresh, and green, and breathtakingly beautiful. I couldn’t even begin to compare it with any scenery I’ve seen before…Switzerland or Canadian landscape maybe..but the NZ landscape is uniquely beautiful. We know we’ll be back to take more of this in, our time is far too short here.

We stopped at Whangarei at about 5.30pm. The coastal towns we saw on the way to Bay of Islands were so pretty! We could have stopped at any one of these little towns and stayed the night!

We arrived in Paihia which is the main town of the Bay of Islands at 7pm. It took about 4 hours for us to drive from Auckland after firstly checking out the 90mile beach.

We also managed a short walk through the Opua Forest where there were kauri trees in abundance..it just cleansed our souls..there’s something about green forests that are so peaceful..and romantic.

We consulted our tent site handbook to find our campsite and drove to it and yes, they had a spot. Just. It’s still school holidays here! After saying hi to a few of the locals…we began to assemble our new dome tent. The sooner this was up, the sooner we could sit back, eat our sandwiches we were going to make with the ingredients we’d bought at the supermarket and drink our nice bottle of wine in our Chile glasses!.

We actually had to use a set of instructions to put it up as it had been so long since either of us had done this! The last time was in Bunbury on a camping trip with mum and the kids..about 10 years ago. Greg hadn’t put up a tent since he and Aiden went on a trip up north of WA..so we were both novices.

Dome tents are pretty easy to put up though. And ours is a two man tent! With only just enough room for our blow up mattress to fit in. We were glad we bought pillows…stuffing our sleeping bags with jumpers, as we did on the Inca Trail, just wouldn’t have been too much fun for 18 days! We did need a pump for our mattress though..it took ages for us both to blow up our bed!!!

Smells of everyone’s cooking was wafting our way…..but we only had the stuff we’d bought at the supermarket. We didn’t have plates, cutlery or other useful camp things like deckchairs etc because….what we buy, we carry! And..we had to cross the Cook Strait to get to South Island in a few days..so we didn’t want to get too extravagant! A pump was needed tho!

Later when we had showers in the communal showers, I could hear a mother telling her son (about 16) about the benefits of camping…and how life without xbox, games, computers and tv would be good for him!!! It was VERY funny listening to her!!! He had this solemn pouty look on his face!!

After dinner we walked down to the beach, people were fishing, but the tide was way out. But still pretty. People were SO friendly here. We’d come back here in a heartbeat!

We went to bed about 10pm EXHAUSTED! The sea air had gotten to us…