Bay of Islands

After a long and very busy week at work, I decided to take Friday off. I went on the Bay of Islands cruise to The Hole in the Rock. I got on the coach, leaving from Sky City at 7.15am, and we drove for around 4 hours to get to a place called Paihia. We had a running commentary from the bus driver the entire way, and although informative, a little break from his voice would have been nice! Paihia is located on the north-eastern coast, and is apparently a tourist hot spot. It wasn't too busy today as it's autumn now so most of the holiday makers have been and gone. There were still some Japanese tourists though, taking pictures of anything they could find of course! I got off the bus and had a wander round Paihia until the ferry was due to leave. It's pretty small, but has lots of restaurants and souvenir shops to keep the tourists happy. The boat left the harbour at 1.30pm and we travelled a short distance to Russell - a small township across the water from Paihia. It took about 10 mins by boat, but apparently the journey takes over an hour by road.

After picking up a few passengers from Russell, we headed off into the Bay of Islands. It comprises of 144 islands (so the ferry guide says), most of which are either uninhabited or privately owned. We had a look for some dolphins on the way out to the Hole in the Rock, but unfortunately didn't see any. There was some really amazing scenery on the journey, it had clouded over a bit by mid-afternoon, but it didn't detract from the beautiful islands (you can see a little lighthouse on the top of one of them in the picture).

The sea was very calm all the way through the bay, and then we hit the full force of the Pacific Ocean. By the time we reached the Hole in the Rock, the Japanese tourists had replaced their cameras with sick bags, and there were quite a few making regular trips to the toilets! Unfortunately it was too rough to travel through the Hole in the Rock, but we got quite close and took some good photos. This is one of the better ones - it was quite difficult to take with the boat bobbing up and down vigorously!

While at the hole in the rock we heard reports from another boat that they had found some dolphins. We rushed back to where we had been dolphin searching originally, and found a large pod of bottlenose dolphins, They apparently weren't very active as they were about to feed, and were concentrating on herding the fish into a good feeding position. They weren't jumping out of the water like you see on TV, but I got a video of a few of them surfacing every so often. I tried to upload it, but Blogger isn't having any of it for some reason. I'll have to have another go some other time. You'll have to make do with a picture of an interesting ship I saw on the way back to Paihia instead!

After returning to Paihia harbour it was time to get back on the coach to return to Auckland. Another 4 hour journey and we arrived at Sky City. Auckland looked lovely from the Harbour Bridge, it was all lit up, and the Sky Tower was really cool. A definite photo for the future! Despite a lot of sitting down, I am absolutely shattered. It was well worth it though, and something I would certainly do again.