Matamata and the Far North

One of main locations from Lord of the Rings we wanted to visit was where the filming for The Shire & Hobbiton took place. We made it to Matamata with one minute to spare before the tour left. We managed to actually get inside the Bag End hobbit hole, where Bilbo & Frodo lived, and explore all around Hobbiton.

We finished off our Advanced Diving course by diving Poor Knights Island. It is supposed to be another of the "world's top 10 dive sites" offering sub tropical diving. As usual we picked a bad time to go, with 2 and a half metre waves on the journey out. We were both seasick but Steve suffered the most, shaking between the dives. The dives were not that succesful either: Helen's camera conked out on her Photography Dive: we only found one invertebrate, insead of 5 on the Underwater Naturalist Dive: we were all over the place in surge and kelp on the Navigation Dive; Steve even managed to pop up to the surface whilst looking at his compass! We still managed to pass! Recently a diver saw four killer whales eating short tailed stingrays there.

Finally we made it up to the far north- well to Bay of Islands. We went sailing for a day but again the weather was quite dodgy-luckily the seas were quite sheltered and we weren't seasick. It was still a nice day and we saw the third species of penguin to be found in NZ, the little blue penguin. We had the best fish and chips we have ever tasted at a shop in Paihia called The Twilight Zone. On the way back to Auckland we visited the Kauri trees that once covered the Northland. One, called Te Matua Ngahere, has a trunk measuring 16.41 metres around.