Well, we got our camper van two days ago - our home for the next 40 days or so while we tour around the rest of New Zealand. We said a sad goodbye to Hastings and our excellent hosts Martin, Catherine, Sam and Bodhi (the dog), aswell as my parents (hi guys!), and heading off to Auckland to pick up the cheapest camper van we could find. We decided to give the van a name as it's supposed to be good luck and seems to be the done thing these days (we need all the luck we can get with this van, that's for sure). Anyway, we decided on the name Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet), a) because it's a Toyota HIACE (hence HIACE-cinth) and Bucket because it's a heap of junk with something like 350,000 miles on the clock. It seems to work fairly well though so fingers crossed.
We drove northwards from Auckland to Takapuna beach for our first night. Takapuna beach is near lake Pupuke (I'm not making these names up) and Pupuke is not pronounced Poo Puke (as in crap and vomit) as we found out. The campsite was right by the beach and quite relaxing but not mad exciting really. The view was nice but the weather was a bit overcast. Anyway, here's a photo of Su sitting outside with Hyacinth:
We stayed two nights in Takapuna to get ourselves sorted with food and essentials for Hyacinth and then drove early this morning to Paihia which is on the Bay of Islands. Poor Hyacinth struggled with some of the hills on the way - scary stuff. We've booked two tours over the next couple of days (one that brings us around some of the islands and lets us go swimming with dolphins and one that brings us along 90 mile beach and we can go sand tobogganing). We plan to take loads of photos over the next few days so I'll update the blog as soon as I can. Cheers!!
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