Huai harbour

Our wpork saty wasn’t anything like we expected, it was a really beautiful place overlooking the mountains where king kong was filmed!!

It was a sad thing to take our hire car back as it had been so good to us for the 2 months that we dragged it over most of new zealand.

The Huia Dell Yurts

We stayed with a really nice family that made us feel really welcome in their home and part of their family from the start, they even lent us their car so that we could have time to explore and see the sites around Huia! There were loads of beaches around, we visited one that had a big cave where there is an old dancefloor buried under 5 metres of sand that the sea has washed in, where people used to come to do ballroom dancing years ago, very strange to think that when we saw it!!

Piha beach

On another day out we visited a beach called Piha, where the annual boat race was being held, the waves and the rip were massive and really strong, and the crazy men and women were racing out to a buoi and back to shore, quite often capsizing and having to be saved by lifeguards on speed boats, with a helecopter filming overhead for the t.v.

Crazy Piha boat races

 Teilo had a go at swimming and body boarding in the massive waves but Kaley wimped out. :s  The beach was separated by a big rock in the middle named lion rock, as it is supposed to look like the giant head of a lion from the side, but it took quite a bit of imagination to see it! We visited Auckland museum which was very big and had lots to see, quite interesting, but we had seen alot of it before.

some of the veggie beds we made

On the work side of things it was really nice, they explained to us what they would like to do, and we did what we could and helped them to do it. We built a chicken run, some compost heaps, cleared out a carparking space from the bush and laid down the gravel, built up a garden and veggie beds, and did a bit of planting until Kaley pulled the live tomato plants out of the ground instead of the dead ones!! :s  We did a bit of painting to the baches (little chalet type buildings) and cleaned out others, and lots more bits and bobs, and by the time it came to leave we’d settled in quite nicely and it was pretty sad having to say goodbye!

Us and the Paton family