Bay of Islands & Doubtless Bay

Sunday the 4th did some energetic driving (ie no breakfast, stopped for petrol where Alex was allowed to go to the garage shop and get a take out coffee and muffin !). Also helped some poor lady who obviously had never had to pump her own petrol and showed her how it worked - obviously first time in the big city. Got to a tourist office about 70 km from Paihai (Bay of Islands) and nice girl found us somwhere to stay when we got there. Everything very busy because of Waitangi Day on Tuesday - celebration of the birth of New Zealand - and Waitangi is where the Treaty House is where the original Treaty was signed between the British Empire and the Maouri. Neither of us were particularly impressed with Paitai actually - we both thought it was a bit like Blackpool in terms of the feel of the place - smelt of deep fat fryers and had loads of ice-cream shops... Of course the actually bay was stunning. We did decide to book on the Mack Attack for the next morning which is a 1400 horsepower cat that typically goes at about 35km/hr - although it is capable of more. Entire town seemed to go to bed at about 9.30 in the evening which meant we were up bright and early the next morning. After our Mack Attack experience (which was great actually) we headed North to Coopers Bay.

This was in a bay called Doubtless Bay - so called because Cook asked one of his seamen wherther it was a bay or a straight as they passed it to which the young man replied ' Doubtless a bay sir' - hence the name !!

Found a fab place to stay - the 'little touches' were brilliant - eg. reading glasses in case you had forgotten yours, bathrobes decent reading material etc. Location was on the waterfront and all you could hear was the crashing waves at night time - well until it started to rain - which it did about 9.20 that night and didn't stop for a good 48 hours !! We have never seen suck rain - it was kindof amazing in a funny way - and luckily we had intended to have a 2 day laze anyway so it didn;t really bother us. Lots of problems with land slides etc. and the bridge that connected the very nothern tip to the 'mainland' got taken out. Our hosts actually turned up the morning we were supposed to leave and told us the weather was too awful to leave and please stay another night on them !! So we did but we also paid them about 50%.

So we eventually left on Thursday morning when the weather was just perfect again !!

So I got a speeding ticket (yeah - ha ! ha !) for doing 69mph !!

We stayed in Parnell Village in Auckland Thursday night and fly from there to Christchurch on Friday - will try and do an update from here before we leave but it is very pretty - went to Sticky Fingers last night (Bill Wymans restaurant), booked to go on the TranzAlpine on Monday, watched a bride being delivered to her wedding in a punt on the river Avon (which is not names after the English river but the Scottish one !!) And of course tonight we will be watching the rugby the Crusaders are playing somebody - they are the local team !

So finally important Kiwi news - the sheep shearing record was broken last week - it now stands at 721 sheep being sheared in a 9 hour day (think about it - that's faster than 1 per minute)

Weather (apart from our 2 days of rain) is mainly perfect for us - 22ish degrees. UV Index is very high almost constantly 9.4 - 11.6 most days - so lotion slapped on even when there is no sun !

Cemetaries are unbelievably well kept

Feels very safe from a personal security perspective but of course when you ask there are things kept under wraps - that nobody talks about - like domestic violence, kids going to school hungry etc.

Overall road system very good - however they are typically awful drivers - U turns in the middle of major roads are common, sitting in overtaking lanes normal etc.

Well that's all for now - hope everybody well and will try and update by next Thursday when we head off to Queenstown