Far, far north …

From there we went to Oponone on the West Coast for more serious sunshine but also the Kauri forest, which has some BIG big trees that survived the logging boom – possibly because the people looked at them and just said “$%!* that, it’d take days to saw through that one.” The forests were amazingly serene, and one of my overriding memories of New Zealand will be the colours – the dark brown of the wood and trunks and the deep jade green of ferns and leaves. The trees in question were incredibly wide, not tall, but enormously wide. You couldn’t get as close as you could to the sequoias, but it was very impressive nonetheless.

We then zipped back across the island to Paihia (which took all of an hour!) to use our free voucher to try once again to see, and maybe even swim, with dolphins. Well, this time we had much more luck. After an hour or so of jetting around the near islands, the crew found us a pod of some ten bottlenose dolphins. What amazed me was how big these guys are! You think of Orca and whales as big, but I always imagined cute little dolphins a bit bigger than a sealion. These ones however are about 3 metres long and their size is a little intimidating. I imagined swimming with dolphins in crystal clear waters, preferably shallow ones, nice and warm and a very calm experience. However we soon learnt it is far more of a military and endurance exercise than that. Only strong adult swimmers were allowed as we were way out in deep water, and the dolphins were moving incredibly fast. They weren’t hanging around to play, but the strong adult swimmers – Joe included – did at least have a rare chance to get in the ocean with them. The laws governing this are strict and for good reason: if there are any young dolphins there, you can’t swim. This is because you might distract the babies who need to suckle every three minutes to keep their body temperature above hypothermic, as they have no body fat. Two missed feeds is all it takes to kill a dolphin, and there is a 50% mortality rate anyway. So, the brave swimmers had this one chance, and Joe grabbed it. Following the crews instructions and shouts, he struck out in a fast crawl straight towards the travelling pod … but from the boat it was all too clear what a challenge they all faced. Joe had two big dolphins swim past him, but the majority were about ½ a mile away before you could blink. They didn’t want to stay and communicate. They were probably off to do a spot of fishing. Now, swimming with dolphins is one of my dreams, and I still really want to do it, but I was not tempted to get a bit hypothermic myself, nor to brave the deep and choppy ocean. All under the loud and forceful instruction of the crew, yelling “that way! Fast! Crawl! Make lots of noise!” Joe didn’t find it nearly so satisfying as his chance encounter with the sealions in Galapagos either, but maybe he was only saying that to cheer me up for having bottled doing it myself! The thing is, you can’t come to expect this type of amazing experience all the time, nor is it always going to be what you imagined. It’s a huge privelege just to be out in the ocean with these wild animals swimming around you, even if the dreamt of swim doesn’t happen or isn’t as you’d imagined.

After this quick return to Paihia it was time to start wending our way back down to Auckland, and we let Rowan do the deciding for the last two days. And a fab job, she did too! First port of call was Dargaville, then Helensville. She chose great places to stay (having, strangely enough, spa pools and playgrounds or games rooms!) and it was very nice for us not to have to do the organising for a change.

What did we like about the North? The beaches and the weather, the dolphins and islands, the ferns and the forests. Its very easy and strange after South and Central America to be able to watch Blackadder, Ab Fab and other endless BBC exports and to speak and read English everywhere. Its all very familiar, but then you do have palm trees, and rolling fields lead down to white sand beaches. This bit of New Zealand does lack the SPECTACULAR, and there are times when you blushingly find yourself saying how “nice” it all is … we’ve also felt a bit inert at other times. But tomorrow is campervan day and our chance to really get out into the wild, and to see the amazing diversity New Zealand has to offer. We head south, for hot water beaches and geysers, the southern alps and the rainforests, glaciers and mud pools. Hey, and we might even try and swim with some more dolphins!