Black sand beaches and a volcanic island

Yesterday and today were more exciting days, and better weather. Yesterday, a girl that Necha met on the plane picked us up and took us out to a couple of black sand beaches on the West side of Auckland. It was a pretty sweet treat considering buses don't run out there. So, not many tourists get to go out there. First we stopped at Piha Beach. It was so beautiful. The surf was really rough and there weren't many swimmers, but lots of experienced surfers. There were also people training to be lifeguards. It was so windy though. They were going out into the ocean with just little rubber motorized boats and flying over every wave!

Next we headed out to Karekare Beach. It was basically the same except it seemed to go on forever. There was also a huge mountain of trees on the left hand side.

We walked all day long and then Anna brought us out to Piha Waterfall. It was a fair climb of only 1/2 an hour but the top was beautiful. There were lots of people swimming at the bottom of it too. It was kinda cold though. I would compare it to our mountain waters back home.

We were pretty pooped that day and Anna told us that her mom wanted us to go over for supper. She had Canadian Pacific Salmon dip for us, since she just came back from visiting Canada, and then steak, corn on the cob and salad. We had some really good wine too! I'm not too keen on the wine but it was very tasty. I think it was Matau and it was from Hawke's Bay which is in the south of the North Island of NZ. Apparently, Kerry was telling us that is where she grew up so that was really cool.

Today we used one of our superpass tickets to take a boat out to Ringototo Island. It is an active volcanic island about a 1/2 from Auckland. We got to walk up to the summit and see an awesome panaramic view of the city. We met some really cool people on the way up there too. They took lots of pictures of us for us. We also trekked over to some volcanic lava caves. They were really spooky and no one was out there. I guess no one was very interested. But they were awesome.

I will post pictures when I find a computer with better rates. Our hostel right now doesn't have the best of computers and it takes forever for me to download pictures. Then when I'm not paying attention my computer will shut down and I'll loose everything. Irritating.

Ta ta for now,

PS Dave: the toilets really do flush the other direction