One island down, one to go...

Good grief! It has been forever since I have last been on this wonderful thing called the internet. So I'll give you a brief update on where I've gone (and haven't gone) since Auckland.

The Bay of Islands... we spent a grand total of 5 hours there. Way too little time. This place deserves it's own couple of days at least. It is near the northern tip of the North Island of New Zealand, approximately 3 hours north of Auckland. We took the slightly overpriced day trip offered by a company called 'Kiwi Experience'. It was fun and somewhat informative, but they bombarded us with expensive activities and sold them really well. Somehow they were able to convince us that the ONLY way to see the best parts of the Bay of Islands is in fast forward on a 2 1/2 hour cruise aboard the EXCITOR. Right so this thing really is fast. It was going around 35-40 knots most of the time so most things blurred by us. We were able to stop and go through the infamous hole in the rock, which our boat just barely fit through. We were strapped in most of the time but could jump to our feet when the boat was idling. Fair enough, the water was full of sharks and we could see pools of pirhana teaming at the water's surface so I wasn't too hot on falling in anyways. On our way back from the impressively large only visible with large amounts of money hole... we ran into a pod of dolphins! They are completely wild and were jumping out of the water and surfacing really regularly. They came so close to the boat we cold almost reach out and touch them!
That was basically the day there. We spent the night trying to plan the rest of our 2 weeks here and ended up talking to a couple of lads from England for a good couple of hours. Funny guys, one was learning french to pass the time!
Ok time's up, I'll post more tomorrow kids.
Booth