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We got up at 07:30 and went out to seek breakfast. We tried Third Wheel Coffee, a place which had the best online reviews and which my wife wanted to try. They didn’t have a full cafe service on the weekend, only take-away coffee and a selection of baked goods. They have some slices, sweet and savoury muffins, banana bread, and an “almond croissant white chocolate blondie”. I tried this last one, which seemed to be a blondie inspired by the marzipan and almond flakes on a croissant. It was dense and sweet with almond paste and chunks of white chocolate. My wife had a slice of the banana bread, which was also very dense and cake-like, with choc chips and walnuts in it.

She also bought a piece of the coffee caramel slice to give to her mother and sister to try. We returned to our room at the motel, where we saw them emerging, and she gave them the slice to try. Then we packed our bags and checked out. We had to wait a little bit for the other two to be ready and check out too, and then loaded up the car.

For our first port of call we drove over to Kerikeri, a town about 20 minutes away, where there was a farmer’s market on in the morning. We got a parking spot very close and explored the market, which was not very big at all, having maybe 20 stalls. One of them was a woman in a caravan selling toasted sandwiches, and one listed in the menu was a Reuben toasty, which sounded good to me as a savoury second breakfast after the almond blondie. So I got one of those while the others explored. my mother-in-law had been craving a banana since yesterday and found a stall selling fresh bananas by the bunch. She asked if she could just buy one, and the man gave her one free of charge!

Having exhausted the market faster than expected, we went looking for a cafe so they could all get coffee. We found Cafe Zest & The Waffle Room, where my sister-in-law also got a blueberry muffin since she hadn’t eaten anything yet except half the caramel slice. As we were leaving, my wife’s younger nephew and his partner arrived. They took our table since they wanted to get spree breakfast too. And as we walked back to the car we passed the older nephew and partner coming towards the cafe too.

Back in the car, we backtracked out of Kerikeri the way we’d come to check out an arts and crafts market that I’d spotted on the way in. It was also right across the road from the Makana Chocolate Factory, which my sister-in-law had wanted to visit as well, so we went for a look in there too. The market was in a large old industrial building of some sort, with internal divisions into workshops, store rooms, and one large cooler room, but now mostly converted into spaces for market stalls. There were a few dozen stalls, as well as a bustling cafe and a butcher and cheesemonger. My wife got an orange and date scone from he cafe and I picked up their “famous Kerikeri cheese scone” for a later snack.

Across the road at the Makana Chocolate Factory we walked into a pleasantly air conditioned display room, which looked into a production room where a couple of workers were hand-finishing chocolate truffles. Another woman gave us free samples of their macadamia butter toffee crunch and an orange fruit jelly. The macadamia crunch was amazingly good, and she said it was their biggest seller by far. My wife bought a box of it as a gift for our friends back home for looking after Scully for us while we are on this trip.

Next we drove out to the old Stone Store, a historic building begun in 1832 and now the oldest stone building in New Zealand. Originally a storehouse, it now houses an antiques and knick-knacks shop. We parked across the river and had to walk across a bridge to reach it. It was a pleasant and scenic walk, with beautiful views up and down the river, flanked by lawns and gardens. On the way back across the river we saw some pūkeko (a.k.a. Australasian swamphens) with young, feeding them. And as we left the car park, we saw our nephews and their partners arriving to go see the Stone Store too.

Next stop for us was Rainbow Falls, another five minutes’ drive away. Here there was a short walk to a series of three lookout spots above the falls. There was also a path down to the river below, but we didn’t bother walking down there as we had another sight to see and were running out of time.

We drove another 20 minutes north-west, down narrower roads ending with a length of dirt road in a heavily forested steep-sided valley. Here was the Puketi Forest Kauri Walk, a short boardwalk track through a stand of enormous kauri trees. As we followed the narrow dirt road down the hillside into the valley, we came across a tour bus ahead of us, and it had to pass another one coming the other way! We’d hoped to have the forest walk to ourselves, but it looked like we might have to share it with a whole bus full of tourists.

Fortunately the bus group took some time to get organised and we took off down the boardwalk ahead of them. We were never among the group, but we could hear the tour leader talking to them all over an amplified loudspeaker the whole time, even when we couldn’t see them through the dense trees. We could also here many birds high in the canopy above us, but never saw any. The forest was dense with ferns and trees, and after walking some way we came across the kauri trees, which were enormous. Huge thick trunks several metres across, towering high into the sky above. They were incredibly impressive, with only the giant Californian redwoods which we’d seen before on a trip to the USA able to compete with them.

Finished with the walk, we returned to the car to set off on the drive back to Auckland. We only backtracked a short way to the nearest intersection and then continued along the dirt road past the paved road we’d come in on. This road continued for several kilometres before eventually becoming paved again. We were headed south on Highway 15, rather than 1 which we had come north most of the way to Paihia on. This route led west around Whangerai instead of through it. It was a slightly longer route, but much more scenic and winding.

We stopped at the first town we came to for lunch, Kaikohe. This was not a big town, and being a Sunday nearly all the shops along the main street were closed. The only place we saw open for food was the Kaikohe Bakehouse, which was doing a roaring trade with people entering and leaving almost non-stop. It boasted an eclectic menu, offering American hot dogs, nachos, butter chicken and another type of Indian curry with rice, Japanese chicken katsu, a range of Chinese stir-fried dishes and fried rice and noodles, and steak, lamb chops, pork roast, and other European style dishes. Oh, and French toast! They also had a range of meat pies, including a butter chicken one which I selected for my lunch. And rows of cabinets full of delicious-looking cakes and slices! My pie was excellent, and I was very tempted by many of the sweets, but decided I’d had plenty of sugar on this trip already so I stayed strong and didn’t get anything.

Hitting the road again, we continued driving on the scenic Highway 15 south until we reached the junction with Highway 1. We stopped near here to fill the car with petrol, at a cost of NZ$82 for about 28 litres. Further along we stopped at the Dome Forest Lookout Walkway, which I thought would have a scenic lookout spot near the car park. But when we looked at the information sign, it said the lookout spot was a 40 minute walk away! We didn’t have time to spare, so we only stay long enough to stretch our legs. But my mother-in-law spotted a New Zealand pigeon in a tree and I spent a few minutes getting a photo.

We arrived back in Auckland just after 18:00. We grabbed a car parking spot in the Wilson car park next door to the hotel we had booked and then checked in. This gave us just enough time to freshen up and change before heading to for dinner, which was booked for 19:00 at Soul Bar & Bistro, on the Auckland Harbour waterfront.

We walked down as a group and found the restaurant facing the picturesque harbour and yacht moorings. The place was decorated all in pink for a special pink theme, with rosé wines featuring on the menu and also some special pink desserts. All the staff were wearing pink as well. We had a very friendly and helpful waitress who cheerfully took our orders. I had the John Dory fillet with Pernod romesco, cherry tomatoes, olives, and almonds, while my wife chose the corn and ricotta tortelli with jalapeño and zucchini. And for dessert I had a Snickers sundae with peanut whipped cream and chewy caramel. The meals were excellent, although honestly I slightly preferred last night’s meal.

After this we returned to our hotel for the night, walking along the beautifully lit main streets of Auckland, to spend our last night of the trip.

We got up just before our alarm at 07:30. I had a very poor sleep, as I often do on the first night of a trip, but my wife slept soundly all night. We wandered down the street to the centre of Paihia to find a cafe for breakfast. We grabbed an outside table at Letz Cafe, which had muesli bowls and also smoothie bowls, which was essentially a muesli bowl with the yoghurt replaced with one of their range of smoothies. I chose that and got a smoothie with blueberry and some other fruits in it as my choice, while my wife had the plain muesli. As we were finishing off, my wife’s mother and sister walked past and we said the food was good, so they joined us and ordered some breakfast too.

After eating we returned to our room to prepare for the day out. Our first meeting point was at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, a historical site just a couple of kilometres north up the coastal road. This is where the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of New Zealand’s history as a modern country, was signed between the native Maori people and the colonial British. We wanted to walk there, but some others took one of the hire cars and we planned to meet there for our guided tour which was booked at 10:00.

On the walk I got a little distracted by spotting several interesting birds, including variable oystercatchers which I tried to get some photos of. We also might have underestimated the walking time, so we ended up arriving with only a couple of minutes to spare. My wife’s eldest nephew checked us in and we joined a large tour group of about fifty or sixty people. The staff gave us earpieces to listen to the tour guide’s commentary, which was good because we ended up a long way from the guide at many points on the tour.

It began with a walk through the gift shop, which I thought was very strange. Then we proceeded outside and down the hill to two large wooden canoes, built in the style of the old Maori canoes, out of kauri wood, and sheltered under a long wooden roof. These canoes seat upwards of a hundred people, and are floated and used for celebrations annually on Waitangi Day, 6 February, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty. The guide explained these are not original historical canoes; because the wood eventually rots they build new ones every few decades.

From here we walked uphill to a grassy area with an expansive view of the Bay of Islands. Here was the Treaty House, the original house occupied by the British Resident minister, James Busby, from 1834. In this in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was drafted and translated into Maori, before it was signed in a nearby tent on 6 February. I went inside the house to see some of the rooms, including the one in which the Treaty was drafted. The house had magnificent gardens with many flowers in bloom.

Nearby is the Te Whara Runanga, a traditional Maori meeting house, built in 1940 facing the Treaty House to symbolise the Maori side of the Treaty. Here the tour group assembled for a Maori cultural display. We removed our shoes before entering the meeting house. Seated inside we were treated to various traditional songs, dances, chants, and weapon displays by a group of five Maori in traditional costume. The performances were really good, and sprinkled with lively and humorous commentary, really making everyone feel welcome. Following this performance we were left to explore the Treaty Grounds at our leisure.

We parted from the rest of the family, and my wife and I took a walk through a densely grown valley, where there were the two oldest camellia trees in New Zealand, planted in 1833. This led us back to the museum, where we browsed briefly to review the history of Waitangi and see various artefacts, Maori and British, and replicas of several of the original copies of the Treaty itself. (The originals are now kept in the National Library of New Zealand, in Wellington.)

After this we walked back into Paihia to get some lunch. After stopping briefly at our motel room, we found the Cafe 10, where my wife chose a vegetable frittata and I had the pumpkin salad.

After eating, we went to the wharf to get tickets on the ferry to Russell, a village on a long peninsula across the Bay of Islands. We had twenty minutes until the ferry left, and my wife spotted a small arts and crafts market across the street so we went there for a very quick look before retiring to the wharf to catch our ferry. The boat was a lot smaller than I expected, with bench seating for about 50 passengers. On the way across the bay we spotted an Australasian gannet flying alongside us about 50 metres up for a few seconds before turning to plummet straight down into the water, presumably to catch a fish. It surfaced and skimmed along just above the waves for a few seconds before veering off. Unfortunately I didn’t have my long lens on my camera and there wasn’t enough time to switch it to capture this bird.

We arrived in Russell after about 20 minutes crossing the Bay. There were several restaurants and bars along the waterfront and a parallel street with a few shops to explore. After looking around we headed on a walk up Flagstaff Hill to the lookout point and historic flagstaff there. This flagstaff has a long and complex history beginning with the Treaty of Waitangi, and was symbolic of subsequent friction between the British and Maori people. Besides the history of the site, the view from here on the hill was magnificent, with 360° views around the Bay and the surrounding lands.

While I was taking this in and changing camera lenses, my wife spotted a large bird walking up the path and yelled out to me to come look. But but the time I had my camera safely reassembled and dashed over, the bird had vanished into the brush down the hillside. She described it and I figured out it was a weka. I was extremely disappointed not to have seen it myself!

We walked back down the hill via the road rather than the foot track we’d walked up on. There was no footpath between the road and the steep hillside so we had to walk on the road and avoid cars coming up the hill towards us. Once back in Russell we walked along the shore back to the centre of the village. We passed my wife’s older nephew and partner who were sitting at the Duke of Marlborough Hotel having a drink on the beautiful verandah. We waved hi and continued on to look at the last few shops that we hadn’t seen. Then we decided to backtrack to the Duke of Marlborough to get a drink ourselves. The others had gone to walk up Flagstaff Hill. I had a local Kororareka Cream ale, while my wife had a glass of local Pinot gris. Later in the evening, the nephew told us that the Duke of Marlborough was the oldest hotel in New Zealand (established in 1827).

It was good to rest our feet after so much walking around. I spotted a tiny black and white bird flitting in a tree nearby and identified it as a tomtit, but it was too hard to get a photo of. After our drinks, we went to a small ice cream shop where I had scoops of hokey pokey; and fig & manuka honey ice cream. Here we met my wife’s mother and sister, who had also just bought cups of ice cream. We ate them as we walked back to catch the next ferry back to Paihia together. The ice cream was really good. On the trip back I had my long lens ready in case I spotted any more gannets, and I did, although they were much further away. I did manage to get a couple of shots at extreme range but the birds were pretty small in the photos.

Back in Paihia, we went back to the motel. I changed and went for a swim in the pool while my wife did some sketching in her sketchbook of scenes from today. After the swim I had a shower and changed for dinner. Tonight was the special birthday dinner for the eldest nephew and his partner (their birthdays are just 10 days apart).

We met up just before 18:30 and walked the short distance to Terra Restaurant. We had a reserve table on the balcony, looking out over the Bay. The setting was lovely, and the food was really excellent. I had a starter of squid and chorizo with chilli caramel and lemon mayonnaise, followed by a main course of pork kassler with harissa fried cauliflower and white bean puree. And for dessert a Black Forest combination of a chocolate marquise with cherries and cherry sorbet. Everything was delicious.

After this magnificent dinner we walked back to our motel room for the night.

We had an alarm set of 03:45 this morning to make sure we got up in time to have a bite to eat and then head to the airport for our flight to Auckland at 07:05. I had a bit of muesli and was ready to go. We walked over to the station and waited for the very first train of the day, due at 04:28. It arrived and took us to Central where we changed for the airport train.

At the airport there was almost nobody around. There were no queues at all to get through security and passport control, so these took only a couple of minutes. Inside the terminal, many of the shops and food places weren’t even open yet, but we found one where my wife got a coffee. While she drank it, I noticed a large group of people clustered around a departure gate near us. Looking up to the indicator board I noticed the flight from that gate, to Denpasar in Bali, was shown as cancelled. There was an announcement over the PA system that all passengers for the flight should assemble at the gate for news regarding their flight, which had been cancelled to to “an ongoing incident in Bali”. When the passengers began to disperse a few minutes later we heard them saying that it was due to a volcanic eruption.

Fortunately this didn’t affect us. We boarded our plane in the last group since we were right near the front. Oddly, the row we were in had no window on our side for some reason, although there was a window on the opposite side. But once the plane had loaded we were happily surprised that nobody had been assigned the “window” seat next to us, so we had three seats for the two of us.

The flight was very short, at just under three hours in the air, plus taxiing time at each end. They served a full breakfast however, and I had a potato frittata with beef sausages. The flight was barely long enough to watch a movie, so I instead chose to start watching episodes of House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel series. I just managed to fit two episodes in and I thought they were fairly good.

We landed in Auckland at 12:05 local time. The airport was not busy at all, and again we had no queues for either passport control or customs, and were out into the arrivals lounge in just a few minutes. However while traversing the terminal we kept hearing a warning over the PA system that we might be instructed to evacuate the area. When we reached the public area, we noticed large groups of people clustered around the escalators up to departures, and staff holding them back. There was an announcement about people not being allowed into the departures area.

My wife got another coffee from a cafe in the terminal and then we walked over to the shuttle bus area to get a lift to our car ire place. Soon a van arrived and the cheerful driver took us out to the car pickup spot. We checked in there and collected our car. The woman saw our Australian driver’s licences and was pretty casual and friendly with us about the whole thing. At the same time another woman at the next counter was serving an American couple and explaining very carefully a lot of things about driving in New Zealand.

We loaded our bags into the car and drove off, heading into central Auckland to pick up my wife’s mother and sister (our recent travelling companions in Japan!) from their hotel, where they’d been staying for a couple of days already. We had some trouble picking them up, because the street their hotel was on was full of parked cars. I tried doing a U-turn to grab a spot on the other side, but as I was in the middle of turning another car on the there side grabbed the spot! So we had continue straight and circle around the block, which took a long time because of some very slow traffic lights. By the time we’d done that there was a spot free where I pulled over so we could load their bags into the car and all climb in.

From there we headed out of Auckland, heading north on highway 1, over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. We proceeded until we’d left the outskirts of Auckland, and then exited the highway at the first town past the toll road section, a small place named Warkworth. It was after 14:00 and my wife and I needed some lunch, since this corresponded to midday in Sydney. We parked near some shops and walked across a small bridge to a larger shopping area. I found a bakery that sold “award winning” pies, so I got a chicken, spinach, and feta pie and also tried one of the delicious looking walnut tarts (which was indeed delicious). My wife didn’t fancy anything they had, so went for a walk to a supermarket she’d spotted to buy something. But she got lost coming out the other side and couldn’t find her way back to the rest of us for several minutes!

We continued north along the highway until we reached Whangerai, the largest place we’d been through since leaving Auckland. Our GPS navigation in the car told me to go a long way around it, but I thought we could just continue on, so I stopped at a tourist information centre to check Google Maps, and also to stretch my legs after well over an hour of driving. The map said we could indeed continue straight through the city, so we did that.

From there it was another hour to Paihia, the small town on the shore of the Bay of Islands where we are staying for the next two nights. We checked into the motel and then went to find my wife’s two nephews (her sister’s sons) and their partners, who had arrived shortly before us, having departed Auckland on the same drive a bit earlier than we did. The reason we’re all over here is to celebrate the 30th birthday of the older nephew, who currently lives in Auckland. They were having a drink at Zane Grey’s Restaurant and Bar, not far from our motel. In fact, everything in this tiny town is not far from our motel!

We’d arrived at 18:30, and the others were about ready for dinner, but my wife and I were still a bit full from our late lunch, so we said we’d walk around a bit and maybe do our own thing for dinner later, while they sat in at Zane Grey’s. So we went for a bit of a walk along the waterfront. We decided we could use a drink after the long drive, before thinking about eating, and that we may as well go back and sit with the family and have a drink while they ate. So we did that. Towards the end of them eating dinner, we decided we were ready for something light, and my wife suggested we split a vegetarian option version of the fish and chips that most of them were having – which was a beer-battered banana blossom with chips. She was intrigued by this and wanted to try it. It was pretty good, I thought.

We broke up after dinner, with the younger four heading to a bar for more drinks, while my in-laws headed back to the motel. My wife and and I went for a stroll through the shops and restaurants and I grabbed a couple of scoops of ice cream from Movenpick. I wanted a New Zealand ice cream, but this was the only ice cream place open.

Then we walked back to the motel for the night. On the way we crossed over the street to the waterside to stare at the stars for a few minutes, which were spectacular, since this area has very little human habitation and light pollution.