On the road again

We did get a chance to hang out on some great beaches last weekend as we spent a few days driving around and camping north of Auckland. The highlight was definitely our afternoon at Goat Island, which is a Marine Reserve just off the coast. We rented wetsuits, flippers, masks, and snorkels and spent two hours swimming around. The wet suits were buoyant and so it took very little energy to stay afloat. We saw a host of New Zealand fish, along with sea urchins and a stingray.

We camped out that night close to the beach and the next day drove up the coast to Waitangi, which is the sight of the first Treaty signed between the British and many Maori Chiefs. It's one of the countries foudning documents, so it was good to go there even though the museum and displays there were not all that interesting. The day after we drove through a number of Kauri forests. Kauri are a native species of tree that can be very longed lived. The oldest, named Tane Mahuta, is anywhere from 1200-2000 years old(the business of estimating tree age is not very exact). We also visited the Kauri museum which is all about the history of logging in the area and offered quite a different perspective of the trees. After some more camping on the beach we headed back to Auckland for a few more days at Matt's house. We cooked Mexican food for them two nights- black bean burritos and portabello fajitas.

From Auckland we flew back down to Christchurch, spent the night then hitched out south to the town of Oamaru(including a ride from a great guy named Ben, a Maori concrete truck driver who also plays bass guitar). That evening we caught a bus tour to the two local penguin colonies. The first was the yellow-eyed penguin, which is very rare. We saw 4 of them, but they were quite far away. After that a short ride to the blue penguin colony. Blue penguins aer the smallest, only about 8 inches tall. They come ashore each night in 'rafts' of 15-50 penguins at a time. Watching them struggling through the waves and hopping around on the rocks is hilarious. Hopefully today we'll get a chance to see even more. In Oamaru we met up with a German couple and are traveling with them for a few days. We drove to Dunedin this morning and are going out to look for penguins and other wildlife today. Hopefully I'll be able to get a good picture this time(they didn't allow photography at the blue penguin colony).

That's all for now. I'm going to try and keep up to date with more frequent, shorter posts.

Peace