oh man oh man where do i start????
ok, we woke up pretty early today (as in before 7am!!) to board the bus to cape reinga. our bus-driver-cum-tour-guide was a real interesting fella who never seemed to run out of stories to tell and spoke with a pirate drawl. he's half-irish, half-scottish and just plain crazy. haha.
well, some of the stuff was pretty touristy but i didn't really mind. we were brought to the kauri forest to oooh and aaah at the gigantic kauri trees. i enjoyed listening and reading about how these trees can heal themselves using their own sap, which coincidentally has various uses like fuel and rubber. in fact, almost every part of the tree can be used for one thing or the other. 
it was thus not surprising that the next stop was the kauri shop with all the kauri furniture and what-not. i bought a wooden postcard to send home from the postbox at cape reinga (it's like a must-do thing, haha. after all, cape reinga is the northernmost point of new zealand).finally, we headed off to...no not yet. first we headed off to lunch. lunch was great! but i was so sore that we only had one piece of steak and sausage each! how disappointing!!! ok, now we finally head off to cape reinga.
the drive there was really pleasant and we were introduced to alot of maori culture through the stories of our guide and the various sights we saw on the way. the guide seemed to know everything by heart. like the shop with a huge flip-flop collection placed as an art piece outside, the fence with random bicycles hung on them, the dog on its regular morning walk with its owner...i tuned into my ipod as the rest went to play bridge at the back, lost in my thoughts and my own world. we passed a maori church where "alpha and omega" were written at the top and i thought, how apt, really. just how apt.
cape reinga, the maori believe, is the final place of departure of spirits from the earth. as we approached it, surrounded by views of the ocean from both sides, the guide sang a maori hymm for our loved ones who have departed and i thought of reno and decided i would finally say bye to him there. what better place?? strangely, or not, bavani also lost her grandma that day, god rest her soul. when we reached cape reinga, i posted my wooden postcard and took a slow walk alone to the lighthouse, plugged into my ipod with the most perfect song for the most perfect setting and just let everything wash over me. i sent thoughts of reno to the sky and said goodbye to him. you can't imagine the beauty of the place, really. and i do have a weakness for lighthouses.
didn't take that many photos but i took alot of videos. i really don't know where to aim when i'm in such places. sigh.
next stop was the dunes! reminded me of the time in michigan when auncle jackie's kids and melt and i went running up sand dunes to run down them i.e. TIRING!!! UNTIL CAN DIE!!! haha. i don't know how dias could do it 5 times. by the 2nd time, i thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest really. and the first time i tobogganned down, i think i ate alot of sand, and since then, kept tasting sand in my mouth the whole day. hmmm. it was fun though. glen's specs flew off into the sand and one of the lenses dropped off. amazingly i found a shiny little object just staring up at me from the sand and glen managed to fix everything back in one piece again. now he has a different view on life, so he claims.right after that, we headed to the 90-mile beach, where, yes, the bus really went along the stretch of the beach. we stopped for a while and little-miss-rainbows-and-butterflies-shireen thought everyone was looking for pretty shells to bring home so she started picking her own. and when she went back to join the group, she immediately threw back her shells in embarrassment.
there, my friends, i found bags being filled with live clams...there were soooo many of them. and i questioned the driver about it and you know what he did next? he broke a clam shell right infront of me and poured the contents of the living, squirming clam into his hungry mouth!!! and then, everyone started doing it!!! yours truly joined in too after much resistance and surprisingly, it didn't taste sooo bad! and again, i started feeling sand in my mouth. hmmm...gavin feeding shireen a live clam!! cos she's too chicken to do it herself!!
that was pretty much the gist of the day. when we got back to paihia, we had to leave immediately for aukland to spend the night there before heading off to waitomo the next day. dias was pretty grumpy the next morning about having very little sleep because apparently the walls of the yha were so thin he could hear us having our heart-to-heart talks in the next room and also because leonard's alarm went off at 530am. poor dias.
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