Bay of Islands, Auckland and Waitomo Caves

The Bay of Islands is well known as the beach resort area for New Zealand so we booked a nice little apartment right on the beach and headed up for a look. It’s now late autumn here so the weather is a bit cooler and changes almost constantly. When we headed out on our inter island cruise the sun was shining but a few minutes later a rain shower would come across, soon be replaced with more sunshine and great rainbows. This one was interesting in that it was a sideways rainbow and I caught it while a sailboat was coming across in front.

We didn’t find the pot of gold at either end but we had a pleasant cruise through the islands, listening to their history (Captain Cook came through here and mapped the area on his second voyage) and the weather turned sunny again as we approached the “Hole in the Wall” at the furthest point from the harbour during the cruise.

The next two days were spent in Auckland, which is by far the largest city in New Zealand at 1.2 million people. It is even more cosmopolitan than Toronto with many Polynesian and Asian immigrants along with a large Maori population. Auckland also has a smaller version of the CN tower, which you can see in this picture.

What really makes Auckland special is that it has two large harbours, one on the west side of the island and one on the east side and more pleasure craft (over 135,000) than any other city in the world such that it is called the city of a thousand sails. Here is a view across one of the boat harbours and you can see what they mean.

We also made a trip out to the Waitomo caves so see the famous (?) glow worms which were well know to the Maori but only discovered by the European settlers about 100 years ago. While in the cave we walked more than 1.5 kilometres underground including several chambers with different types of crystal formations, like these stalactites perched over our heads.

The highlight of the tour are the glow worms, which are actually fly larvae, so they should really be called glow maggots but that didn’t really seem to attract many tourists so they stuck with glow worms. They are about the size of a matchstick with the head of the match being the part that glows and it is used to attack other flies and bugs towards they. The worms attach themselves to the roof of the cave and drop sticky web filaments down to trap the bugs which they then haul up and eat. It’s really hard to get a good picture due to the dark conditions but you should be able to see the webs hanging down in the bottom of the picture and the blue dots at the top are the glow worms. In the main cavern there were thousands of them so that it looked like the stars out on a clear night sky at the cottage.

We are now on the Celebrity cruise ship the Millennium, headed back towards Hawaii with a few stops in between.

Here is a picture of us as we sailed out of the Auckland harbour at night with the lights of the city behind us.
It will take about two weeks to get back to Hawaii with several stops at some of the Polynesian Islands along the way. Here I am taking over for Captain Stubbing and taking the ship out for a spin. How hard can it be to find one little island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Well if the blog ends here, you’ll know why!