The west coast of Northland was really pretty, nice green hills stretching up north and down south! and beautiful long beaches with a relatively calm sea as it is sheltered from the full might of the Pacific ocean By the coromandel peninsula, so for our first few days in Northland we just traveled up the coast admiring the scenery and stopping for a coffee here and there before we met up with Genevieve an old friend of Teilo’s mum,.

On a beach with genevive and her daughter

Genevieve’s ouse was amazing, it was a little oddly shaped green dome in the middle of the bush, she, and her daughter Rachel made us feel really welcome and fed us gorgeous food every night, they even lent us some sheep skins to comfy up our tent, which was amazing!!!!!!

As we had a base we thought we’d splash out and treat ourselves, and we quickly went and booked ourselves a snorkel cruise out to the poor Kinghts island, it was amazing!! and well worth the money! We snorkeled at a site called blue MauMau arch, named so because of the thousands of brightly coloured blue fish that practically live in the arch, it was brilliant there were so many different types of marine life from jelly fish, to sting ray which Kaley was lucky enough to see 2 of, Teilo didn’t, even tho apparently they swam right underneath him!    

poor knights islands!

After a few days of staying with Genevieve, and meeting her son Max who Teilo knew when he was younger and hadn’t seen for about 9 years they worked out! we had to move on, so we went up to the bay of islands, aptly named as it was in fact a massive bay full o little islands jutting out of the sea all over the place, (very creative with their place names over here!) which was really pretty! so we stopped for a coffee and a wander about some galleries and cool shops! 

We then decided to get going and set of for Cape Reinga the tip of the North Isalnd!