Happy Easter - without photos

Photos to be added shortly...

Despite having lived in Australasia for a few years now, this year was the first Easter that Brendan and I have had together in this part of the world (due to different holiday schedules, business travel over the holidays, etc.). We opted to take full advantage of our 4-day weekend to check out the far north of the north island.

Day 1: We drove from Auckland to Cape Reinga. We had beautiful weather on our drive and, in our usual meandering way, we managed to turn a 6-hour drive into a 10-hour drive! Luckily we left early enough so that we made it to the lighthouse at Cape Reinga for sunset. We saw a lot of sights on day 1, but my favourites were where you can see the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea collide at Cape Reinga and the massive sand dunes from a distance as we wound our way through the green cow paddocks. We stayed that night at the most-northern campsite in New Zealand, a DOC campsite in Tapotupoto Bay. The campsite was fine as we have found many of the DOC campsites to be. They usually have fantastic locations and views, but are often too big and/or crowded to be much better than fine. I am just glad that we plan on spending most of our time in them during the shoulder seasons. I cannot even imagine how crowded they must get in the summer. Also, despite our 10-hour drive, we did not reach the northernmost point on the north island of New Zealand. This is actually at Surville Cliffs and requires some hiking to reach it. Perhaps next time...

Day 2: We headed out to the massive sand dunes after a leisurely breakfast at a nice viewpoint along the road. We came with the intention of sandboarding the dunes as we have seen on so many blogs, but when we arrived we found that there was nowhere to procure a sandboard (i.e. boogie board). We thought that maybe they were set up on the beach because how can someone not want to take our money to hand us a piece of cheap foam for a few hours, so we set off on a hike up and over the sand dunes to the beach. We never made it to the beach (turns out it was far), but we did get to experience the massiveness of the sand dunes with no other people even in sight. Amazing! We crested the biggest dune within a reasonable walking distance (Brendan went straight up it and I kind of angled my way up) and the back side of it was like you were on the moon. The sand was so fine and the wind so strong that our footprints quickly disappeared behind us. After some exploring, we did end up going to get a sandboard and we each got a few rides down the dune we had crested earlier (think 30 deg slope, 30m tall). The sandboarding was a little scary and a lot of fun. You had to earn the walk up each time and the dunes were started to get crowded (relative to us previously having them all to ourselves), so we continued on our travels after a few rides down. Note: eventually someone did come out to rent sandboards at the base of the dunes. They didn’t show up until after lunch and they were charging 6 times what we paid for a board down the street. Lessons learned: come prepared and go early.

After sandboarding, we had planned on venturing to our next campsite location and hiring kayaks. There were some amazingly white beaches (world’s purest silica sand deposits) that we wanted to check out and we both desperately needed a shower or dip in the ocean to get all of the sand off of us. Unfortunately, the weather took a bit of a turn and we failed to actually find kayaks. I still think we went to the right location, so perhaps no kayaks was just a function of the poor weather forecast and/or the fact that it was the shoulder season . We ended up spending some time on the beach looking at the white sand beaches from afar and going to New Zealand’s northernmost pub for a beer before finding our next campsite, another DOC campsite. Again, the campsite was fine, and the (extremely) cold shower was very much needed but definitely not enjoyed. We did get a little bit of rain the second night but not nearly the amount of rain that was forecasted, so were happy to awaken to a cloudy sky and a reasonably dry tent in the morning.

Day 3: We headed out to Rarawa Beach for breakfast, but found it to be too windy for cooking. We enjoyed the views and some fruit before venturing on south again. Our plan was to make it to the Bay of Islands by the end of Day 3 since we were still debating whether or not to book a cruise of the Bay of Islands on Day 4. We made a short drive long again, but got some fantastic views of the Karikari Peninsula, Whangaroa Harbour, Waitapu Bay, Wanui Bay, ... along the way. After we got into Paihia where our hostel was booked, we grabbed a ferry over to the much quieter Russell where we enjoyed excellent fush 'n chups (kumara chips to be exact, which were fantastic). We stayed in a hostel in Paihia this night in case we had an early morning cruise to make it to.

Day 4: We woke up early to check the weather and possibly head down to the water to book a cruise. The weather was terrible though with forecasts of it getting worse, so we opted to not go cruising that day. We again thought about kayaks, but the weather did not improve enough for us to even want to try that. So, we headed back into to Auckland for a fairly early evening. Brendan was feeling under the weather, so we had a quiet evening, takeout from down the street, and early to bed.

Day 5: Only Australia got Day 5. Day 5 was back to work for us Kiwis!