Monday, November 3, 2008

Bay of Islands and NORTH



The winterless north is what they call this place but we have not been blessed with such weather. These are my last days though so instead of worrying I got out for a bit of adventure. One thing lead to the next and without much thought I booked myself on a scenic flight around the northern tip of the north island on a 12 seater plane. God was on our side and the weather broke to make for a beautiful day. I had a grin plastered on my face and I was sure as soon as I layed eyes on that plane that this could very well be the best thing I've done in NZ. Don't know what it is about being in the air but it works for me and add water to the mix and my soul is dancing with delight. Seated comfortably on big fat leather seats and equipped with headphones and microphones we were set to take off down the grass runway. Smooth take-off and we settled in @ 10,000ft.

Flying high, we got a bit of story to go along with the ride which is definitely the norm here. You see there is always the Maori legend and then the European story. The Maori's still own a great deal of the land here and are respected all over the country. The islands and streams are typically known to be God's or Goddesses with stories of love and war. If you were to ask me, I'd say it definitely looks to me to be a land that spirits would dwell upon.

From the air you could see the rolling hills scattered with kiwifruit bushes, vineyards, avocado orchards, citrus farms, dairy and beef cattle farms and pine forests. We started up the west coast to check out 90mile beach which is considered a State Highway and you could see cars getting on there way racing the coming tide. There are only 3 entry/exit points so there sort of is always a sense of adrenaline when you're using this route. Not much else to choose from though for this part of the world is certainly rugged and the local people still live by hunting and gathering. We made our way all the way to the northern most part to Cape Reigna where the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea meet. A spot that gets winds of around 90 knots on a typical day so we obviously landed prior and were on a bus for this section. Next came massive sand dunes and sand boarding (see video below) which was a riot and comes highly recommended by me:) To get there though we needed to take another State Highway which was actually by my perspective a stream. As we cruised down it at higher than normal speeds for our bus, we were told that it was actually considered to be quicksand!! Yea so if we were to actually park the van then it would disappear in 4-5 hours. Ha...I thought that was pretty cool.

Back to the plane and I made friends with just the right person b/c as we approached the pilot I overheard him ask if I could go ahead and be co-pilot. So my smile grew to astronomical proportion as I geared myself up sitting next to the pilot surrounded by all sorts of controls, levers, buttons and screens. A bazillion pictures were captured and I was surely ready to land the plane after 50 minutes of taking in the prompts.

No, not quite but I did enjoy a smooth landing and a content smile for the remainder of the day.

Thanks so much to all the great people that blessed me in my travels and financially supported me to enable such great things to come into my day.

:)

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