Road Trippin' Part 2.

So here is the promised part two. 

On day two we headed over to Waitangi Treaty Grounds & House. It's basically the place where New Zealand became part of the British Empire, although it's a lot more complicated and controversial than that. The grounds are nice and peaceful, looking out over the bay of islands. They have a huuuuuuge waka (canoe) with beautiful intricate carvings. It was built to commemorate something, but I've forgotten. I'm a bad tourist.

By the treaty house there is a meeting house, each panel representing a different Iwi in New Zealand. 

Next we headed over to the treaty house. There was a dress up box so I got in the spirit of things and dressed all 1840s in my bonnet pinafore. Obviously the clothes were for children, but I reckon we styled it out pretty well. 

I got some lols in the treaty house. This display clearly shows that this is where the inspiration for 'The Village' came from. 

A house within a house? Houseception. 

We stopped off for lunch in Mangonui and had delish lasagna with a roast vegetable salad on the waterfront. 

It was divine.

It was also comforting to know as we were driving round Northland that there was only ever a low fire danger.

We continued on our drive up to Cape Reinga. Once we hit the home stretch it was 100km of nothingness. Just us, the countryside and some staunch poultry. Seriously, there were turkeys and chickens out in the road, among all the roadkill possums.

We finally made it to Cape Reinga and headed to the lighthouse. It's the place where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific ocean. The water was a beautiful green blue and ever so choppy. The place was just beautiful. I love the sounds of the ocean.

On our way back down, we took a detour and drove 20 minutes down a dirt track wondering if we'd ever actually make it to 90 mile beach. We made it to the beach, seriously, beach for as far as you can see.

We managed to get some signal on our phone and booked to stay the night in Ahipara. It's at the bottom of 90 mile beach and it's a gorgeous place. We got ourselves some chippy and headed down to the beach to watch the sunset. And take pictures. As we sat there it was like we were on the beach set of the Last Song.

The next day we began the journey back to Auckland. We came across this beautiful place, which I can't remember the name of, but they loved a dolphin there. Not only was there two statues of this dolphin, it was also buried outside the village hall.

We stopped off in the middle of the forest to check out a Kauri tree. And it was huuuuuuge.

We got to Dargaville, a place famous for growing potatoes. There wasn't much there but we drove up to a museum on the top of a hill where they have the mast from the Rainbow Warrior.

We then decided to take another beach rest and headed to Baylys beach. Somewhere between Dargaville and Baylys beach my camera battery died. Woe is me. For that reason, I have no pictures to prove how gorgeous the beach and the surfers were was. Must. Go. Back. To. Baylys.

After lunch we continued on road, finally made it back to Auckland and then I bade farwell to Sarah and Hamish as they drove off into the sunset.

Road Trippin' - Part 1

This past weekend Sarah and I escaped the city and road tripped it up to the very top of New Zealand. It was a rather epic road trip distance wise. Just check out this google map of our route.

Now, I don't know how precise it is, but google tells me we did 1,016km. That's 631 miles for you imperial-heads. That's equivilant of travelling from Manchester to Ahlen in Germany. That's just 40 miles more than driving from John o'Groats to Cardiff. It's quite far, ok, get it? We did it all over 3 days.

We drove through the countryside (which Sarah said looked like Wales), through forests (which Sarah said looked like a rainforest), along the coast and on dirt tracks to get to beaches. Sarah was right, it did look like we were in Wales and the Amazon at times. It was pretty cool when we were driving though the countryside and spotted the sand dunes off in the distance. I ain't ever seen that before. Those sand dunes gave Formby a run for it's money.

We agreed to meet at the car rental place just before 9 on the Friday morning. As both me and Sarah suffer from chronic tardiness we both knew this meant anytime before 9:15. Well, we both shocked ourselves by turning up by 9 and our speedy getaway was only slowed down by the guy who took forever sorting our rental out. We were happy to discover that our rental was a yellow Honda Fit. We named him Hamish and he was quite a cutie. Sarah even wore a coordinating top, it made Hamish happy. Well, I imagined it would have done if cars had thoughts and feelings.

Hamish's song was definitely Black and Yellow by Whiz Khalifa. A song which featured on the mix CD I made for the journey. We so ghetto.

It took me a moment to get used to driving Hamish. After 3 months of cruising round in a Ford Territory (which has no name), I felt like I was back in my little Polo (RIP Nora). It was like sitting on the floor, and seriously, where was the cruise control? We kept the tunes blaring as we took a little detour to try and find One Tree Point. We ended up at an oil refinery. True story.

We left the highway to check out Whangerei. You probably read that place name with a 'Wha' sound at the beginning. Wrong. Try again. It actually is pronounced with an 'F' sound at the beginning. Now I know nothing about linguistics so I hope I explained that correctly. Anyway, I don't know if we were in the wrong part of town but there isn't much in Fongarray (again, no expert with them phonetics). There is a restaurant called Killer Prawn though.

We spent a long time in this second hand book shop. We get drawn into second hand book shops quite easily, they're the only place in New Zealand where you can buy a decent book without having to sell every limb and your firstborn. Sarah browsed the books that would actually be read while I looked at the pretty old books, looking for ones with inscriptions. I can only assume my fascination with these stems from watching Definitely, Maybe a few too many times. We both know I watched it for Ryan Reynolds, not the story line. After the purchase of a book, we went on the hunt for food. As we were running out of time we ate our lunch in the car. For those interested, lunch was from Subway not Killer Prawn.

Back on the road, we continued our journey to get to the Bay of Islands. We decided to check out the Lonely Planet to see if there was anything worth seeing on the way to Paihia. And there was. What we found was some pretty famous bogs created by Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Kawakawa is also famous for it's train line which runs through the middle of town. And as we were heading back to the car a train passed through, right by where we'd parked the car. Kawakawa is the perfect place to stop for a toilet break as you get to see those famous loos. Between the stalls there are bottles in the wall, so you can totally watch people on the loo,  if you're into that kind of thing.

As we approached Paihia we were in awe of the sea. I guess coming from a landlocked town that seeing the sea is a pretty big deal. We rocked up to Paihia, checked into our hostel and went to explore the town. It was a nice little place but not much to do unless you wanna fork out a load of cash to get out to sea. We ended up at a bar chatting with some fellow Brits. Like you do, because obviously we came ALL the way to New Zealand to talk to fellow Englishmen.

Stay tuned for part two. And possibly three. I'm not making any promises.

Home is wherever I'm with you.

Hopefully if I've done this blog scheduling thing right, this should post while I'm away for the weekend. Sarah and I are heading up north, right to the top and will check out the bay of islands while we're at it. Today it is 5 weeks until I head home.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little bit sad to be leaving New Zealand. And I'm well aware this is pretty pathetic because I'm coming back again in January. But the closer it's getting, the more excited I'm getting.

I'm looking forward to seeing my lovely family (and yes, I include my dogs in my family).

[I love this picture of my grandad. Shows how dapper he really is.]

Champions

Unless you live under a rock (or a country that doesn't care much for rugby) you may have heard that the All Blacks won a little thing called the Webb Ellis Cup. That's the trophy for the Rugby World Cup people. And boy, are the Kiwis celebrating.

I watched the match with Sarah over at Chapel Bar. The cheering was way underway before the team even got on the field. Me and Sarah (along with some french fans) were the only ones who didn't shriek along with the national anthem. It's not that I didn't want to sing along. I would have and I really thought the room could have benefited from my dulcet tones. But I don't know the words to 'God save the Queen' let alone the words to 'God defend New Zealand'. And they even sing it in Maori first, there was no hope for me. I sang a song in Maori once at church with RS and could not help laughing at my terrible pronunciation.

he match was a tense game and I pretty much watched the last 15 minutes through my fingers. I was so happy when it was finally over and felt a little bit of pride when they picked up the trophy. Yeah, I pretended I was Kiwi that day. I mean I've been here almost 6 months, that's surely enough to get citizenship right? When the fireworks began down on the waterfront we headed outside to check it out. I love fireworks!!

The next day was a public holiday. Not because of the world cup, it was Labor Day but I'm sure it wasn't a coincidence the final was the day before.

I had the day off so I headed into town to catch the parade with Dani and Serena. Once I managed to get off the bus I had to walk for about 30mins to get round the crowds and blockades just to meet the girls. Luckily they'd managed to find a spot where it wasn't too busy so managed to get quite near the front.

Here's a selection of photos for your perusing.

Piri Weepu, the guy celebrated for pretty much saving the All Blacks got into the parade dancing along.

Now that the world cup is over I can return to my equilibrium and go back to not caring about sport and rugby.

Yay!

A day out with Miss Raybould.

Today I somehow managed to get the afternoon off work and slinked away to the city to spend time with the fabulous Amanda. We headed over to the museum to check out the Webb Ellis Cup. We waited our turn to step onto the platform and get a little bit closer to the cup. I told Susan about how only one group were allowed up at a time (i.e. only me and Amanda that were on the platform) and she told me it was probably because last time they put a trophy - America's Cup - on display someone took an axe to it. 

2011 - New Zealand?

We managed to win the world cup once at least.

As we were leaving the museum, we saw our bus go past. I suggested we walked down to Parnell. Amanda told me about Chocolate Boutique. Obviously, as it had chocolate in it's name, I just had to try the place out.   Amanda got herself an italian denso and I got a hot jaffa - hot orange chocolate. Yum!

When we made it back to town, we had about 45mins before Amanda needed to head back over to her side of the harbour bridge so we went to the cloud to play some games. Amanda was the winner of the day as she managed to save someone's life, score two conversions and a try. I let the person drown and only managed one conversion. I love my talented friends.

In other news, I changed my flight. Instead of leaving New Zealand on 21st Nov, I'll be staying here until 3rd Dec. That means I've gone from having 2 weeks in America to two days. It's a long story that I can't be bothered to share, but it's all about the money, money, money.

It's been a while.

Dear Blog,

Please accept my sincerest apologies for neglecting you over the past 20 days. It's not that I don't have much to write about because, well, I have heaps of things to share with you. Unfortunately I can't remember it all.

The big news is that I finally took the plunge and made that important decision. I arrive in Manchester on 6th Decemeber. On 17th January 2012 I will be boarding the plane again to take me back to Auckland until the end of April. That's right Blog, I'm coming/going back to New Zealand. 

Did you hear that England got kicked out of the World Cup by the Frenchies? I don't know much about rugby, but after playing like that England deserved to lose. While on the subject of rugby I got to go see South Africa play Samoa at the North Harbour Stadium. Amanda kindly procured tickets for us. When I got to Stacey's house, the face painting was in full swing and I even got a flag painted on my face.

Once we got to the stadium we realised that we weren't all actually sitting together! Woops! Me and Amanda were together but the guys were on their own. Our seats were impeded view, but we were sat right at the side of the pitch by the try line. The only thing impeding our view was the security-type man and even he wasn't really in the way. It was an exciting game and me and Amanda supported opposite sides. I shouted 'GO BOKKE' while Amanda cheered on Samoa.

I also headed down to Queen's Wharf to watch the England V Scotland match. Amanda and Serena were equipped with the Scottish flags and Serena even wore and quilt and had painted her nails with St Andrews crosses. For most of the match me and Stacey sat wrapped in our England flags, a little bit embarrassed as most of the crowd were supporting Scotland.

Amanda and I have had a couple of good trips to Queen's Wharfe. I even went sky diving. Not really - it's a blue screen people! I put the picture up on Facebook and I can't help but think from the comments that some people thought it was legit. Well, it ain't legit. Let it be known, you will never catch me sky diving.

So what else is new in my life? Well, I've just got back from a week on Waiheke Island! Waiheke is a beautiful, beautiful place covered in native bush with gorgeous beaches and there's a whole bunch of vineyards. There's also a whole load of crazy birds. When we pulled up to the house there were a bunch of Pukeko on the lawn. Yes, I like birds. Here's a picture of a bird. It's a pigeon.

The family I work for owns a house out there, and as it's not always occupied and it's right in the bush, the place had a few too many spiders in my opinion. I lost count of how many I killed while I was there. I know what you're thinking and yes, I would never cut it as a Buddist. Susan gave me a bug killing spray and I got a bit scared using it. I'd spray the spider. It would fall off the wall and start scurrying around. So I would spray it again and it would disappear under some piece of furniture. So each night I lay in fear of mutant spiders coming to seek revenge or the avenge the death of a friend.

Moving on from my severe dislike and totally irrational fear of spiders and all other critters, let's talk weather. The first two days there, the weather was just divine and I spent my time on the beach getting burnt and freckled. The house was less than a 5 minute walk from Onetangi Beach. It was heaven. I went on long romantic walks (on my own) up and down the beach. But mostly I just sat reading and listening to music.

After the two days of beautiful weather, we had a day of ok weather, then the heavens opened for the rest of the week. One day I took the kids on the bus (which was a new experience for them) to the local cinema to see Mr. Popper's Penguins. The cinema was pretty cool. It was old a community cinema with a projector and just a room full of sofas. And I actually liked the film.

As we were cooped up in the house, the kids decided it would be fun to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. EVERY. DAY. There's only so much of musicals I can stand, and I tell you what, I've had my fix now.Ii escaped to a cafe on the last day in Waiheke, reconnected with the outside world using the wifi on my iPod and watched the surfers out in the rain. Crazy people.

Now I'm back in Auckland, ready for another rugby filled weekend and I'm excited to be catching up with friends again.

Hopefully it won't be too long before I write again.

Much love,
Manne x