Paihia

At 7:15am the Kiwi Experience bus (which is our chosen method of touring the country) left Auckland to head north towards Paihia. This was our first experience looking at the New Zealand countryside. Rumor had it that NZ was beautiful, but there were no exaggerations! The land is bright green as far as the eye can see with rolling hills in every direction covered in rain forest. There are something like 40 million sheep (as opposed to only 4 million people!) and some of the most productive dairy cows in the world grazing on these hills!

We had a few stops along the way including a stop at Honey Bee Cafe where they make their own honey and you could watch the bees swarm a hive. We arrived to the small beach town, Paihia, around noon and quickly boarded a boat to swim with dolphins... well I honestly didn't care to see any dolphins, but apparently there were Orca Whales in the bay on this particular day (which is pretty rare) feeding on Stingrays. It worked out really well because we didn't see any dolphins so we got some money back, but we saw Orcas surfacing a few times throughout the trip!

Yeah, that's all I got of the Orca's, but they were about 9m long!

Harbour in Paihia

Meagan and I had dinner at Toast, the only "posh" restaurant in the whole town and enjoyed a glass of wine and some pumpkin calzones. We stayed at Pipi Backpackers and made it an early night.