New Zealand: North Island

Hello!
How are you? I hope this finds you well although as I write this I hear that a giant volcanic eruption in Iceland has left the UK covered in ash. I actually happen to be in Chiang Mai, a city in Northern Thailand now, following a 12 hour bus journey, a 14 hour wait and another 16 hour train journey! All that has brought me to, among other things, cheap internet, so here I am!

I arrived in Auckland, NZ, on the 20th Feb some annoying time in the middle of the night. In the early hours I opted to stay in a terrible multi-storey hostel and as a result decided to leave town as fast as possible! I used the same system that I had to find a car in WA, which was to take a look on gum tree and indeed I found a french Dr with a van looking for a crew. She was joined eventually by myself and 2 Dutch girls, all of us recently graduated psychologists.

So with this new team and our shiney convertible toyota car/ van thing we headed off north up into Northland (ie. the land north of Auckland) and first of all to the bay of islands. In the bay of islands we took a boat trip in th hope of spotting some dolphins and swimming with them, but this did not come off and the consolation world's-smallest-penguin was not quite so impressive. Still, not to put the place down, Bay of Islands is a very scenic spot, with many similarities to the west coast of Scotland, or Ireland, but with better weather, and some say more dolphins.

From the Bay of Islands we continued North to Cape Reinga, the sacred Maori place where you look across breath taking cliff tops to sea the waves crash in mid-ocean as the Tasman and Pacific seas meet with a light skirmish against each other. The spot is also marked by the epic sand boarding that you can do on the nearby 'giant sand dunes' which did yurn out to be fairly mountainous and were alot of fun. Sandboarding is really a cross between sledging and body boarding on sand, but faster, and with the occasional highlight of some lads boardshorts being ripped straight off as they went for an over-ambitious jump.

From Cape Reinga we decided to make a bee-line to Rotorua, the centre of strange and wonderful thermal/ volcanic things. However unfortunately we had badly misjudged the small matter of distances and by near midnight we had not even got back to Auckland. However this cloud did luckily come with a silver lining as we found oursleves parking up in the coolest campsite in the world. It was actually part campsite, part reconstructed 19th centuary NZ and part fun park full of more free games and activities than you could do in a week, but we settled for spending a few hours on the trampoline. It was here that my 22nd Birthday began and many hours later (after taking a picninc lunch in Cambridge) in a hot spring in Rotorua.