Thames to Helensville

I still haven’t adjusted completely to this time zone so I again woke up at 6 am. I had to climb down from my mountain top of a bed so I turned on the light and woke everyone. Oops. Raven and I got up, got ready and headed out by 8 am, planning to head towards the Rainforest Express, a train ride through the rainforest north. We used Arleigh’s GPS to get us to the Arataki Visitors Centre and in the middle of the freeway it announced that we’d reached our destination. This was in the middle of Auckland. It made NO sense. Of course, it wasn’t the visitor center so we made do on our own. We then tried to find it by first finding Scenic Drive. Only problem is that once we found Scenic Drive, we couldn’t tell if we were going the right direction or not because it was so darn windy that the compass was no help. Finally we guessed right and headed to the visitor centre. We found out that the train ride was sold out. Grr. We walked around the visitor centre, talked to the staff and decided to go get lunch before heading out to Piha and Karekare to stay at a backpacker and explore the trails/beach.

We drove to Piha along a windy, narrow road with limited visibility and cars flying down the roads. A bit frightening. We found the backpacker we’d planned to stay at and it was full. We then went to every other backpacker in town and they were ALL full. That was twice today that our plans didn’t pan out. We decided to stop and walk along the beach anyway and check out the black sand beach. It was so windy there but the sand was definitely black (well, in some spots, other spots it was more brown). There were hundreds of little koru shells all over the beach so Raven and I again beach combed and picked up little koru shells for my incoming students. We then went and explored “The Camel”, a huge mountain rock right on the beach. The base of the rock is filled with mussel shells and lots of tide pools. Raven looked inside the crevice of a rock and saw a handful of really big crabs hiding out. It was really an amazing outcrop of sea life.

After the beach we headed back into the car and called a backpacker in Helensville. Happily, they did have a vacancy so we followed the GPS. Several kilometers into our journey the GPS told us to turn off at this tiny old road. We followed it and the GPS said to turn right. Well, ‘right’ meant crashing into a closed gate to a private road. WTF?! We realized that we hadn’t typed in an address to our hostel. Oops. We did so and luckily we were only off a few minutes.

We made it to the backpacker and it is such a beautiful old building. We are staying in a double room so there won’t be any other visitors. We liked it so much and are so close to the stuff we wanted to do today but couldn’t (Piha and Karekare) that we’re going to stay 2 nights instead. These rooms are $35 a night and that’s NZ dollars. In US dollars it’s about 22 dollars or so and it’s an amazing deal. It even includes breakfast tomorrow. Yay! This is the most expensive accommodation we’ve stayed in since I’ve been here.

We made dinner tonight and since we have access to free wi-fi for the first time on this trip, we’re both online in our rooms typing away. It’s been a great trip so far!