January 6
Well, things have been interesting the last three days! On the fifth we bit the bullet and rented a car. We hadn't planned to originally but we really wanted to check out Goat Island Marine Reserve and it is located outside this remote little town called Leigh and there is no bus service anywhere near there so we learned (in rather a hurry ) how to drive on the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the road, in "construction season" in heavy traffic. Thank goodness :Miles drove from the airport out of the city. Once you wrap your head around how to manoeuvre the turns it's not so difficult. So anyway, we drove North of Auckland and the scenery is amazing. Everything is green and lush and despite hearing so much about sheep, so far we've seen more cows!
Anyway, we made the drive to a little campground on the east coast right across from the marine reserve of goat island. The campground was basically an open terraced grass field where you just pick :a spot and park your car and pitch your tent. Sounds simple enough right? Wrong. We thought to go to the far side to catch a great view and be away from the main path and beach traffic. Turns out that spot was a hidden mud hole and our teensy weensy little car sunk to the hubcaps. We had to be pulled out by the owner. So about an hour and a half later we finally got the car out, picked a spot (on higher ground ) and went about setting up camp. It was about 15 minutes later as we were pulling out the parts to the tent that we realized we left something VERY important behind in Canada ...the TENT! So we had the poles, the fly, the footprint, but no tent. Well we had a moment of panic before we figured out we could put the poles into the footprint and still use the fly. So it may not be critter proof but it keeps the wet and the worst of the wind off. We never did snorkel Thursday thanks to all that.
Friday morning we were up and had rented snorkel gear and were in the water by eight thirty. Wow. I don't have words, so we will post photos as soon as we can.
After hours of snorkeling and sunning ourselves (and burning) we drove on up the coast to matakare to check out a Kauri museum. At the moment I'm running out of internet time so I'll finish up this story for now.
Until next time!
Miles and Bri
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