Mai Tai Bay

Rach and I had grand plans of waking up at 6:00 this morning to see the sunrise, and when the alarm went off, we were actually ready to get up- but it was raining pretty hard. Since that tends to make for poor sunrise watching, we went back to sleep for a couple of hours.

We woke up again at about 8:30 and it was still pretty overcast, though no longer raining. We started packing up the car, figuring that chilly and overcast wouldn’t be a great beach day, so we should just move on. When we were almost ready to go, the sun came out, which made it much warmer. Rachel then really wanted to go to the beach, so she changed into her suit and we went down for a bit.

We walked along Mai Tai Bay for a bit until we reached a little cove where we decided to set our stuff down and walk into the water. We threw the beach rugby ball we bought in Auckland around in the shallow water for a little while, then Rach wanted to swim around a set of rocks to see what was in the next cove over. I chose not to go along, content to read on the beach for a little while.

After maybe 20 minutes, I became a tad concerned that Rachel hadn’t reappeared. I decided to go see what was going on, if I could figure out how. I saw a trail that looked to lead up the hill that separated the beach I was on from the cove Rach was hopefully still in, so I started following it. It was pretty steep and full of brush, but fortunately also pretty short to the peak, where I could see the cove. There I saw some girls snorkeling and what seemed to be their mother talking to someone, but from my angle, I couldn’t see who it was. This meant that either Rachel had gone much further out than she told me, or she was the phantom conversationalist here. I made my way down this part of the hill closer to the cove, and confirmed my suspicion that it was Rachel.

I came down to the cove and sat with them as well. The woman’s name is Jessie, and she had brought her daughters to the cove to go snorkeling; she actually only lived about 5 minutes down the road on another beach, but they had wanted to come here for the morning. After talking for a while, Jessie generously invited us to her house for lunch, which we accepted. We headed back to the campervan, finished packing up, and drove down to her house.

At Jessie’s house we talked with her daughters more, and they showed us around the house and the back yard. One of Jessie’s daughters was wearing a Green Bay Packers hat. She told us that she’s a collector of these kinds of caps, so we suggested that she look into a Cincinnati Bengals hat, mainly because the whole tiger theme looks sweet in a hat.

Another couple Jessie knew from in town came over for lunch, too. One was American and one was Dutch, and they were quite the interesting couple as well. Jessie apologized that the bay across the street from her house wasn’t sunny. We made do.

We ended up staying at Jessie’s until around 16:00 and really enjoyed ourselves, but we unfortunately had to get moving to reach our destination for the night, though we did consider staying in Mai Tai Bay another night so that we could hang out later. We have certainly met some friendly Kiwis, but this has so far been the best example of the hospitality we had heard about sometimes.

Jessie is in the blue on the left in that picture.

We then set out for the Waipuo Forest, where we planned to stay the night. The drive ended up taking a bit longer than we had expected, and on top of it, our gas is very low; we forgot that gas stations close around 19:00 and you can’t get gas after hours like you can back in the States. We pulled into camp at around 20:45, hoping the whole time that the car would not give out on us. Now we just need to hope we can make it back to the main road and to a gas station tomorrow morning.