7 november

Around 09:15 back to Paihia for a boot cruise around the bay of islands. As I once again forgot my sunglasses, I bought another el-cheapo one. This time with polarized glasses which is very useful if you want to look into water because it reduces the blink effect.

The boat leaves around 10:00 and we go on the look out for dolphins. Around 11:00 we get a call that they are spotted and we go out towards the location.

After the dolphins, we went to the 'hole in the rock'. As the weather was good we went through it.

Around 13:00 it is lunchtime. We get to a uninhabited little island (except for some sheep). We were dropped off by a small boat and had to walk the last few meters through the water. The island had a great view that required about 10 minutes of climbing to reach.

After dinner the captain tried if he could find a whale (they sometimes see one) but sadly he didn't. On our way back to the harbor we let ourselves be dropped of at Russell. Lets just say that that was the most boring village I've ever seen.

Went back to Paihia with a small ferry and did some shopping for the breakfast of the next day. My roommate put his photo's on a cd as he was running out of storage space. I had a good laugh as I had about 10 GB of disc space on the mindstor. (The mindstor wasn't perfect though: it was a disaster when running on batteries, but I didn't have the latest firmware at that time). We had dinner with the same group of 5 from Hong Kong (we called ourselves the Hong Kong 5 for some reason) where two of us cooked, they were very good cooks.