Can we just live here?

Today we woke up headache free and with the prospect of a beautiful day weather wise. From Whangarei there's a popular loop driving route out to the coast and back again which we thought we'd do today. Seeing as we missed the Bay of Islands it seemed a shame to miss any more of the east coast of Northland especially as the weather was looking much nicer. We had a brief stop at Ngunguru marina to see if we could spot any leopard seals because the town had one who decided to make the boating area it's home for a few weeks. Unfortunately it seems to have definitely moved on since then so we carried on and just up the road was our next stop at Tutukaka. Here we went on a beautiful walk from the carpark up to a lighthouse at the very end of the outlet. After passing through gorgeous green grass that was made even stronger in colour by the now powerful sun we descended in to a little secluded bay that is really only passable at low tide. The area was so pretty and we even saw a comorant sat on the beach sunning itself. For some realise Kiwis call them shags and we have no idea why they decided they needed an alternative name for the birds. After crossing the rocky beach we began to climb through the forest up to the lighthouse. If you haven't seen tui birds before this is definitely the forest to visit because we saw hundreds of them. They have the most unusual calling sounds and the whole forest was alive with bird song, fluttering wings and sunlight pouring through the canopy. It was quite a magical walk despite all the mud from the recent rain. At the top the lighthouse was far from impressive but the views were just wonderful. The descent was a little tricky but no where near as bad as the mud we experienced the other day. When we reached the Bay the tide had started to come in and we did meet people who were having to decide to turn back because of this. It just proved that you need to research the conditions of a walk before going there and doing it. We had to wait for a couple of minutes for the tide to go out enough to expose the one rock we could jump onto to cross one section of the bay. A guy offered to help catch me but it was easier waiting for the rock to be exposed than diving across and body slamming him. After making it back to van we took a brief walk along a beach before heading to do our second walk of the day to Whale Bay. From the carpark we headed through lovely forest with many huge impressive trees which bowed across the path. We descending to a beautiful white sand beach with turquoise waters and it was made even better by the fact that we had the place to ourselves. The large trees continued along the beach front and bent over as if they were reaching out towards the sea. It was so nice exploring the bay winding under and over all the tree branches while getting sandy toes. We eventually managed to drag ourselves away from this mini tropical paradise that I so wished we lived near by to and head back on the road. We hadn't really planned too much where we'd end up tonight but we completed our loop road in rather good time so made the decision to try and drive as far south as we could. 3 and a half hours and a McDonald's dinner later we made it to our freedom camping spot on the coast south of Auckland by at least an hour. Navigating the city by night wasn't much fun but we've made it in one piece and are excited to start exploring the Coromandel Peninsula tomorrow.Read more