Megan & Vince's Excellent Adventure: Whangerie & Bay of Islands

The Road to Whangerie

When we left Auckland, we drove 2 and a half hours north to a town on the east coast of NZ – Whangerie. It actually took us 5 hours because we keep stopping to walk on the beaches… This part of our trip may seem to look like Northern Australia (white beaches! Blue water!), but the colors were somehow different…

We found this house, a fun picture frame, and this beautiful lagoon:

We drove over a hill and there was another huge bay on the other side of the hill – camera can hardly do it justice, but it was cool. That strip of darker blue on the horizon isn’t sky, it’s water:

We made another stop, the water was yet a different shade of teal, and those are islands and huge rocks in the ocean:

That’s a Portuguese man-of-war - apparently one of the most painful jellyfish stings out there (aside from Australia’s lethal ones). Glad we weren’t in the water that day.

Whangerie:

We spent the evening wandering around “town” – Here’s a view of the town from Mount Parahaki, a short drive (and shorter hike) from town:

This is the “Town Basin” with shiny boats:

Bay of Islands:

The next day, we took a daytrip further north to explore the Bay of Islands. The drive there was one breathtaking view after another. We stopped at a lot of bays along Old Russell Road.

The colors were unreal at this bay – and there were a couple of rope swings!

Finally, we got to the Bay of Islands – the way that jagged parts of land extend out into the water, a really interesting coastline. It’s hard to explain without hand gestures.

Finally, we arrived in Russell, a tiny idyllic coastal town.

Here’s the police station – yes, it’s really still the police station:

Here’s the Anglican church, built in 1836:

We rented kayaks and set out to explore the bay a bit.

On the way back to Whangerie, we decided to go the “shorter” way back, since Old Russell Road had been so steep & curvy. Little did we know, the “non-major” road on the map was gravel. We decided to give it a go, and test out our old rental Mazda Familia. It sounded like the engine was going to fall out. For all 30 kilometers. Luckly it didn’t.

Once we were back on to paved roads, we came across a delight in the tiny town of Kawakawa – the Hundertwasser public toilets! Hundertwasser was an Austrian architect who we became familiar during a tour of Vienna, we saw a big apartment building there. He built colorful, whimsical places with plants, and sometimes uneven floors.