Auckland - the city of sails and Northland

Auckland and the start of the next chapter on our travels. We are staying with a friend in a gorgeous house, in a great part of town, so we settle in for a few days and plan the next 10 weeks. We organise an hire car and get a motel booked for our trip north on Saturday 20 November. So we have a few days in Auckland to explore the sights. We walk into town and see the marina area, the shopping area and enjoy the sunshine.

We head to Auckland Museum which is really interesting and well worth the time. There is lots of Maori history and also lots on volcanoes and New Zealand history.

We explore the areas of Parnell, Ponsonby and Newmarket having a lovely lunch in Parnell at Verve Cafe.

After our time in Auckland we are ready to head north to Paihia. We stay at a lovely motel owned by a couple originally from the UK. They look after us very well and we get our tours sorted. The next morning we head off on our first trip. We head north stopping at the Gumdiggers Museum. The gum (amber) was dug out of the ground from around buried Kauri trees in the late 19th Centtury/early 20th Century. It is estimated that these Kauri trees in the ground are in the region of 45,000 years old and were knocked over by a tsunami travelling (they think) at about 800 km per hour. Then we make our way to Cape Reigna the most northerly point on the north island. It is a very sacred place for the Maori and it was really windy while walking down to lighthouse.

After this we start to head south again and head to the huge sand dunes on 90 mile beach. We go sand dune surfing down them and its so windy at the top it's very hard to see where we are going on the way down...but maybe that's a good thing!!

We then head back along 90 mile beach at 100km/h pausing briefly to let a little penguin waddle across in front of us on its way to the water.

A long day but a great one!