Bay of Islands- Day 1

Day 39- March 17^th

We drove down to a holiday park near Paihia and checked in, the headed into town. My mom just wanted to wander around town and shop, so we did that for a few hours. We ended up with a watermelon and a box of figs and a couple other trinkets. We then to the Russell Blue ferry to Russell. There was a Russell Blue Ferry and a Russell White (that’s my dad’s name) ferry, but the blue one didn’t charge for kids.

Russell, formerly known as Kororareka, was a quiet, quaint, historical town, but it wasn’t always so. I had read a bit about it in a historical novel I had read, called Kitty. It took place in the 1840s, and Kitty was with her missionary uncle in Paihia. Kororareka was known as the rough and “godless” town by the missionaries in Paihia. The book also gave me some interesting information about the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Later on in the book I found out that it was a romance novel, with some…graphic…scenes, but at least the first part was interesting.

In Russell we hiked up to Flagstaff Hill. There was a flagstaff raised here after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Later rebel Maoris cut it down, but it was replaced…and cut down again. That happened about five times before they finally made peace.

We walked around Russell for a bit longer, then took the boat back to Paihia and drove to our holiday park. Our Holiday Park was right on the Waitangi River and was very beautiful. It also had a pool and a nice playground. There was also a flying fox, or zip-line. This is a perfect example of a major difference between the US and New Zealand. In New Zealand, everyone has accidental medical coverage automatically. That means that safety and liability rules are quite as strict and bureaucratic. Thus holiday parks can have unsupervised, net-less trampolines or unsupervised zip-lines. This zip-line was about 10 meters long and 2 meters at its highest. It had a T-bar hooked to a pulley on a cable. To ride it, you climbed a platform and jumped on. An old tired at the end stopped you from hitting the tree, although if your legs were long your feet would bounce off of it.

We had camped next to a unattached covered porch, so I decided to just sleep there instead of setting up a tent. It was fine until in the middle of the night the wind died down a bit and the bugs got bad. It was also really hot, but I had to be in my sleeping bag to avoid the bugs. It didn’t last for long though and I fell asleep soon.