I flew to Auckland on Tuesday evening and had yet another kind offer to stay at my friend Kitty's house on my first night. It was really really great to see her again, and so funny at the same time considering our friendship is only a few months old but has grown over three continents. She picked me up from the airport and on Wednesday, showed me around her town. Auckland is a big one, by New Zealand standards anyway. It's a sprawling city that houses one third of the people in this country. It's nestled close to the waters of Freemans Bay and contains fantastic view of the surrounding islands. It's a little more hectic than what I'm looking for at this time, so I made my visit brief with promises to return on my way back south.
On Thursday morning, I hopped on a northbound bus and officially became a backpacker again. After three hours of gorgeous countryside scenery, I got off the bus in the town of Whangarei. Whangarei is a well known area for the Poor Knights Islands that reside just off the coast. Jacques Cousteau named the waters around these protruding rocks one of the top ten best dive sites in the world. With my spanking new open water certification, you all know I was on the phone with dive companies the second I got into town. Before having my gear unpacked at the camp, I was booked on the boat leaving for the islands early the next morning.
Now, I talked to a lot of people as I was getting my certification in Colombia and told them my intention of diving in New Zealand. Most just gave me this look; this cold water, scary marine life look...and then wished me a sarcastic good luck. Everyone knows what I'm scared of in the water, and I won't mention them in the blog as I think it's bad luck. But yes, there are a lot of them in the cold waters off the coast down here. Of course, I won't let that fear stop me from taking the plunge. I'll just cross my fingers, hold onto my mask and hope for the best. The only way to conquer a fear is to take it head on. I'm so glad I did, as yesterday I had a Discovery Channel experience underwater that I will not soon forget.
No, i did not run into any large objects in the ocean, if that's what you're wondering. We went to a dive site called Blue Maomao, which took us around a huge rock, through an underwater hole and then spit us out into a sea of thousands of fish gleaming in the sunlight that was penetrating the water. The visibility was 18 meters in this sea of deep blue. The sun came through and played tricks with us on the rock cliffs as kelp floated up at us from the bottom. We saw thousands of curious fish, one very large stingray and an array of rocky, underwater landscapes that blew what I saw in Colombia away. Our second dive took us into the depths of a crack in the rock and down a cliff with only the open water of the Pacific on our other side. This dive was not as memorable, but was beautiful just the same. The water was quite a bit colder than the Caribbean, but an extra thick wetsuit and a whole lot of adrenaline kept me nice and warm.
Back at the campsite, before my underwater adventures, I had met a nice Englishman that was heading in the same direction. We made plans for him to wait for my dives to end and we'd both go north together in his van, sharing the expense of petrol. It's tough to get around New Zealand purely by bus, and I knew that hitching a ride was somewhere in my future, I was just lucky to have all of that taken care of so early in the game. Billy and I took off yesterday afternoon for Pahia, a small town full of hotels and summer homes sitting on Kororareka Bay. We found a hostel quickly and decided to settle here for a couple of nights before starting the journey up to the very north of the island, Cape Reinga.
Last night we dug a bucket of clams out of the sea and made a nice pasta dish in the hostel kitchen. I'm pretty impressed with the amount of cooking I've been doing here as there's a kitchen in every hostel or campground that I stay in. I will admit that I'm already getting sick of pasta and canned tuna though, so the next trip to the grocery store is going to get a little more creative I think. This morning was spent sea kayaking (free kayaks at the hostel, what?!) in the turquoise waters of the bay and it's been a lazy afternoon watching the Australian Open.
I've lined up another dive trip for tomorrow and I've had to study the PADI book yet again. There is a shipwreck dive not far from here that requires my deep diver certificate to get to. The Greenpeace boat, the Rainbow Warrior, went down in 1985 and has become a spectacle for divers in the past few years and I intend to see it. The problem I realized while booking is that the hull sits at 27 meters, whereas my certification only allows me to 18. So tomorrow is a day of tests and dives and it should be incredible. The positive side to all of this is that these dives will count towards my advanced certification, if that is something I choose to do (in a less expensive place, like Thailand). What possessed me to choose such an expensive hobby at a time when I am without a job is beyond me! So tomorrow brings another day on the water and some more excitement! After my dives, we will set our course for further north, hopefully seeing the Tasman Sea and the Pacific collide off the Cape within the next few days.
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