Tuesday 23rd March - Stray Bus

I had to get up at 7am to make sure I was on the bus for 7.45am, luckily I went to bed early so this wasnt too much of a problem. Our driver was Sue and like all Stray drivers had a nickname... Dent. We left Auckland for the Bay Of Islands to the north. We drove over the harbour bridge which was pretty cool. I fell asleep most of the way, waking up for our little half an hour stops to take pictures. Firstly at this little suburb outside Auckland beginning with 'O', aparantly house prices have gone up for $25,000 to $250,000 because of how popular its got. The beach was pretty cool to look at but far too cold to go on! Next stop was breakfast in Warkworth about 1 and a half hours outside Auckland. This was a tiny little town but had a gorgeous cafe to eat and drink in. We picked a good cafe as the barista's were amazing and not in the way they made coffee!
We hoped back on the bus and off the main road up to the North and onto gravel tracks through the hills. We stopped at a Kauri tree which was 14m in circumference and thousands of years old which was cool.
Next stop was a small waterfall with nautral spring water pools at the bottom of it.
At the bottom of the waterfall was a small rainbow aswell which was awesome. I can imagine that only the locals could know about this waterfall as the track to it wasnt very used and the entrance wasnt very visible. We hoped back on the bus to go Ruakaka beach. We were supossed to go to a marine reserve but due to a small cyclone off the coast of Fiji the visibiltiy would have been poor. Sue had said that this was her favourite beach but never brings Stray here, so again, another beach most tourists don't know about.
The sand was golden and so soft and the water was so clear aswell. I booted a rugby ball into the water and swam after it only to realise that you can still stand up in
it about 50m into the sea!
Next stop was Whangerei but there wasnt much to do here but grab some food from the cafe. On the way to paihia we got a flat tyre which meant we were stuck in the middle of nowhere for 2 hours twiddling our thumbs but it was a good way to get to know everyone on the bus. There was another brit lad called Chris, 2 Austrian girls I had met already in Fusion Ellie and Cira, 3 Irish girls, a dutch girl and 2 german girls.
We got back under way eventually stopping at Waitangi where the treaty of Waitangi was signed and New Zealand was born. We trundled into Paihia, checked in and got some kip before the nights activities. The Hostel is surrounded by sub-tropical trees with other buildings just popping up between them. We had a pub quiz that evening and we split into 2 teams...
'Fat Kids Are Harder To Kidnap' and 'Chris's Cocksuckers' good classic pub quiz names. We all ended up getting abit too drunk that night and getting back to our rooms about half 4 even though we knew we were up at 7am for our bus.