Saturday, March 20, 2010

Urupukapuka Island





Urupukapuka is and island in the Bay of Islands an area north of Auckland. We took an overnight camping trip out to the island and enjoyed 2 full days playing on the beaches and running around the hills taking in the views.

Cape Reinga




As north as it gets.....Cape Reinga is just shy of being the northern most part of New Zealand. It is a very sacred place for the Mauri people as they believe it to be the place that the spirits of the dead enter the underworld (Reinga means underworld in Mauri).

Lake Waikareiti






After our New Years trip and beach vacation Charles and I went for a hike at Lake Waikareiti. It was a beautiful day hike with a nice hut right on the lake. We went for a bit of a swim but it was pretty cold and the sun wasn't shinning too much for us. The adventure didn't end after our hike was over....when we returned to our car we noticed a flat tire. Of course, we were in the middle of nowhere but luckily we were told about a guy that lived 30 minutes away who could fix it for us. So we put on the donut and hit the road :)

Our New Apartment








I'm skipping ahead a few months but I thought I'd share our new apartment with everyone. We live on one of the main streets of town so it can be a bit noisy; however, the location couldn't get any better :)

Friday, March 5, 2010

Pukehine





After our rafting trip we all went to Danni's family beach bach in Pukehine. We sort of missed celebrating New Year's because of the rafting trip so we celebrated a few days later.

Laying on the beach was a great way to relax our muscles after 3 days of rowing. We also spent a lot of time fishing with the Kontiki. If you aren't familiar, it is a torpedo that you send out a few kilometers into the ocean from the shore line with about 20 or so hooks with bait. We were extremely unsuccessful all week until finally on our last attempt we caught 3 fish!

Wanganui River







Hi everyone, so sorry we have been such slackers with the blog. We have a lot to catch up on so we'll do our best to get things up as quickly as we can.

We had a great November and December with family and friends before returning to NZ just after Christmas. Our first adventure when we got back was a 3 day canoe trip down the Wanganui River with Team UK (Hayley & Nick) and Team Kiwi (Danni & John).

The girls seemed to do most of the rowing while the boys attempted to play football between boats. If you haven't attempted this before I'll give you a heads up....you do a lot of back peddling :) We also found a few caves along the way and as you saw we were up to our knees in mud!