Week 15 – Dragon Bus Re-union – Break out the dumplings

From Raglan we went up north to Auckland. First stop was a catch up with Shaun, and we spent the day out at Piha with him and his partner. Piha was nice and we had thoughts about staying the night out there, but as we had all travelled out in the van, and had plans for a Chinese meal together we headed back to Green Bay. Happy to say we made it all in one piece even though I managed to totally miss a give way sign at pace – lucky there was no traffic coming. The Chinese we got was a great throwback to the Dragon Bus days. Very authentic, even down to the eating too much bit. Big Chinese dinners don’t sit so good on a 3 pie day. The next day we travelled into Auckland proper. The harbourside area was great, but everything else was quiet as we deliberately picked the Sunday to visit as we were driving Big Bertha into town. We learnt that morning how hard it is to manouver the beast of a thing in traffic when we drove to the Avondale markets. After Auckland, we had a short trip up the eastern coast north to Mangawhei Heads, where we overnighted before heading further north to Pahea. We spent two days here, mostly because they had free wifi and we still hadn’t been able to plan any of our onward journey to the Cook Islands and beyond. We also had an enjoyable day taking the ferry over to Russell, which was the first town settled by Europeans in NZ. On the flip side, we also visited the Maori cultural centre and watched some dancing, singing, playing with the Poi Poi and a performance of the Hake. Jamie is very interested in being a warrior and can do the scary stick out your tongue face so good, he even impressed the locals.