I bet you're curious to read this now with a title like that!
Up early again for the bus this morning, and it was chilly out. Despite the early start, both of us had slept well due to good beds and big, warm, heavy duvets. Loaded backpacks into the bus storage and off we went. Coming up to Paihia, we had gone from Auckland up the east coast road, but going back we took the west coast road (to mix up the scenery). There were seemingly endless rolling hills with either sheep or rock quarries on them. At one town we stopped to watch an old black and white video about a dolphin the town was named after, called Opo the gay dolphin (gay as in happy). The dolphin showed up in the bay of the sleepy little town in 1958 and thrilled the residents by coming in close to shore and playing with people and even giving kids rides on its back. Tourists flocked in to see Opo and the town boomed, until one night someone tried to fish with dynamite and Opo was killed (only 6 months after he arrived). Continued up a bit to a restaurant for breakfast and to snap some photos of the bay, which the restaurant looked over. Then we continued in the bus down to a giant Kauri tree that is something like 4000 years old and is named the Lord of the Forest. It's a sacred tree for the Maori, who apparently sing to it and such. My photos don't do it justice (just makes it look like a regular tree, when in fact it's like 13 meters across and 51 meters high) and it had the same grand appearance as the massive tree in the movie Avatar. Oh, this morning we picked up two more girls for the bus ride back from a little hostel outside Paihia and they were Canadian (exciting) and one was from Saskatoon! First Saskatonian we've met in our travels (she also went to the U of S and worked at Louis' but we didn't know her...) so we hung out with them on the journey back. After the tree stop we had more driving until a stop for lunch at a quaint little place run by a kindly elderly couple. Fueled up with some soup and sandwiches then back on the road all the way back to Auckland. On the way we each wrote down a trivia question and passed them up and had a trivia contest on the way back. We rigged the questions with very Canadian questions (like ones about hockey and the 2010 Winter Olympics) along with our Canadian comrades and won the contest as a cooperative group of 4.
Back in Auckland we checked back into the same Nomads hostel and got the same room as before (weird) and just chilled out for the evening. B caught up on some tv episodes and I went for a long walk through the region of trendy bars and eateries along the harbour and then over to an arena and checked out a park in between. Even jogged for a bit of it! And also had the best burger of my life tonight at a little portable burger shack called The White Lady (which is listed in Lonely Planet as one of the top things to experience in Auckland). Same type of burger as Rainbow Beach, but even better (deluxe burger with ham, bacon, egg, cheese, pineapple, lettuce, sweet bbq sauce). After walking for quite a long time my legs were really sore, probably due in part to the huge hike the other day to the waterfall compounded by more exercise tonight. Off to Rotorua tomorrow morning early on the Magic bus. Rotorua has a high concentration of sulfur and mud pools, making the city smell like rotten eggs. But besides Queensland, Rotorua has the most adventure activities in the country.
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