A visit from the Easter Bunny!

Easter morning rainbow.

Afternoon family walk along the coast.

Pretty trail.

Of course, easter dinner and carrot cake for dessert.

Mount Taranaki is a beautiful volcano on the Central West shore of the North Island.  The boys surfed this very rocky break in the shadow of the volcano.  Look closely and you can see all of the rock “boils” in this video.

Rocky surf break.

http://youtu.be/l8X8g9az3r4

The Three Sisters and the Elephant

We pulled over to stretch our legs and just happened to be at these large rock formations along the North Taranaki Coast.

Do you see the Elephant?

Two of the sisters.

Lots of caves.

One of the sisters.

The brother.

Hundertwasser Toilets

One of the things I loved about New Zealand were all of the public toilets.  Unlike the US, there are public bathrooms every where and they are clean and sometimes quite stylish.  Of course, the most famous is the Hundertwasser Toilets – designed by internationally renowned artist, ecologist and architect, Friedensreich Hundertwasser

More cool public bathrooms

Glow Worm Caves

I remember watching the The Land Before Time, an animated movie about dinosaurs when the kids were little.  There were these caves lit up with glow worms.  I never knew they really existed.  We couldn’t pass it up.  Unfortunately they do not allow any photographing in the caves, but this picture is very similar to what we saw.

After sand surfing we headed to Tauranga Bay, on the east coast.  This was one of my favorite little campsites.

When the waves weren’t good, we tried our hand at surfing the sand.

It was a long hard paddle out,

http://youtu.be/55HDxnawjy8

but there was no one in the line up.

The surfing wasn’t so great,

http://youtu.be/Lx_ApriKRYw

but the boogie boarding rocked!

http://youtu.be/KUbqMWHW74o

Cape Reinga

Cape Reinga is the northern most tip of the Aupouri Peninsula, North Island, where the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea meet.  We raced to get there before the sun set.  As you can see, we made it and it was spectacular!

Rarawa

The silica white sands and green waters of Rarawa beach on the east coast of Northland.

We flew into New Zealand on March 17^th and hurriedly proceeded to the Telecom counter to pick up a mobile WiFi device.  The kids needed Internet for their school and Willie for his work.  We knew without a portable WiFi device this might get tricky.  What we didn’t know was that 80% of New Zealand doesn’t have cell phone service and the mobile WiFi would be useless.  While Willie dealt with setting up our plan, I used the courtesy phone to call the hotel for their free shuttle service.  With the exception of our issues with Air New Zealand in Tahiti, things had actually been running quite smoothly.  That was until we showed up at the hotel and were informed that they had no record of our hotel reservation.  After a ridiculous conversation with the receptionist, we concluded that Expedia had not made the necessary changes to our itinerary and although I had a confirmation number for this hotel on this day, they did not have our reservation.  I finally did get it worked out with the reservation counter the next day, but it was not a good way to end a 12 hour day of travel. 

After getting a few hours of sleep, we woke to an all you can eat breakfast buffet and endless cup of coffee that made up for the previous long day of travel.  We stuffed ourselves with waffles topped with raspberry preserves, scrambled eggs, sausage, fruit, and croissants.  The carbo-loading and caffeine helped fuel us for the long day ahead. 

We were all exhausted but excited to start our new adventures on the 6^th Island of our South Pacific tour.  We sat at the RV rental desk, filled out the necessary waivers, and rental agreements, got a 10 minute tour of the how-to’s of our camper van and we were off – driving a huge ass campervan on the left hand side of the road, with manual shift on the left side of the steering wheel that was on the right hand side of the vehicle. Already being somewhat spatially challenged in addition to the lack of sleep, I willingly handed the keys over to Willie.

We hadn’t done a whole lot of research on New Zealand.  We knew of a few key places on the North Island that were iconic surf destinations, but that was about it.  We had a few maps and a tourism radio that came with the vehicle.  It is a GPS tool that plays music through your radio but alerts you to all the tourist attractions.  I must say, it came in quite handy for ill prepared tourists like our selves. 

We first headed North to the Pak and Save for provisions and continued North of Auckland on Hwy 1to a town called Orewa, where we stopped in the local surf shop for some beta and a wet suit for Willie.  It was time to suit up for some colder water.  With that checked off our to do list, we decided to continue on to our final destination of Ahipara to a surf break called Shipwrecks. All went well until we missed the turn for HWY 1 and ended up about 1 and half hours out of our way in the native bush.  Twelve hours later, we had reached our destination, pulled over on the side of the road and called it home for the night. 

Shipwrecks surf break is off to the right.  They say when it is “going off” you can ride this left for 1 kilometer. Unfortunately we missed it by a day.

For the next 2 weeks we drove around the countryside and coastline of the North Island…….

On March 17th we said goodbye to Tsing Tsing and boarded the plane for New Zealand.  He promised us “barbeque and native dancers” the next time we came.

None of us wanted to leave.  In just 2 short weeks, we had fallen in love with the islands and the people of Tahiti.

When we reached the Airport in Papeete, Tahiti we approached the ticket counter to check in for our flight to New Zealand.  I had booked our flight TO New Zealand 2 months prior but I had not booked a flight out of the country.  We thought we would leave our plans open so that if we decided to stay longer, we could.  Well, I guessed I missed the section in the guide books about how you can’t enter the country without a ticket to leave.  Apparently,  the six other parties that were frantically buying tickets, missed that little tidbit of information also.  We frantically found a ticket that we could cancel within 24 hours and booked tickets for a flight that we would never take.

Finally leaving on Air New Zealand.