New Zealand 2009 – Out towards Northland

Today we rented our reserved car in Juicy rentals (BTW -very good prices!) and left Auckland. It was a little challenging for my husband to drive – first, on the left side…and second -the car has a manual transmission. To change gear with left hand versus the right is a little inconvenient at first, especially after using only an automatic car at home. But otherwise – the little Japanese red girl is very good, tiny, but spacious inside, very comfortable to sit in.

So we drove through some resort towns North of Auckland and reached the Goat Island marine reserve:

It means that they don’t let to fish there and so the fish are big and tame. I saw blue ones- very bright blue. We snorkeled there by those rocks you can see in the pic. I wanted to swim to the Island, but the wind started blowing and somehow it felt cold and unpleasant. maybe we are not good snorkelers, I guess we really are not :-)…because the main problem we face is the lack of air. I start grasping for air after a little while – the little tube through which you breathe is to narrow for us. So you were right, Adrian, we shouldn’t have brought our snorkeling equipment with us.

A bigger attraction for us was while we ate the tasty kumara chips we got in the famous Fish and Chip place in Leigh on our way to Goat Island. A seagull and several duck appeared to ask for there share. it was not written not to feed them , so I gave them a little. I haven’t seen such a territorial seagull and such brave and needy ducks – they snapped on my toes and jacket, sneaked their heads into our bags looking for food.

Then we drove back to Rt 1, to Warkworth. On the way stopped at a group of big barns – there were restaurants and arto and crafts galleries. The arts there were very good! It was pleasant to mix some arts into your day of nature. Those were the views on our road:

Then we saw a sign to Ruakaka – it is not advertised anywhere, but we saw that there is a beach and wanted to explore it, for curiosity reasons. And that was the best impression! We parked the car under white sandy dunes which looked like in Palanga – my Lithuanian resort city by the Baltic Sea. And we walked to the ses – it was marveluos, very close to my heart! No wind, warm, peacefull and very spaciuos, very soft white sand, beautiful shells, that are my preciuos findings. We Lithuanians are big pickers – we like to pick berries, mushrooms, and shells or amber on sea shores. So that made me really happy!

Except that in Lithuania there are no islands in the horizon of the sea. And the weather is seldom so warm.

On this last pic one can see chimneys -there is a power station on the shore there and it is being dismanteled. For that reason they got workers to here and they rented both motels for them long time rents…So we couldn’t stay, couldn’t listen to the wonderful soothing sounds of the waves more. And therefore we drove to Whangarei and got a motel with Hi-Fi! next time about it.