Kerikeri camping
On Christmas Day we set out to finally explore New Zealand from top to bottom and put our new camping equipment to good use at our first stop in Kerikeri at the Bay of Islands, which is famous for it’s orange orchards. Struppi and Paule were quite exited about the camping adventure as well and our campground neighbours included a noisy family of kingfishers and some very cheeky duckies 🙂
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Cape Reinga
From Kerikeri it was another three hour drive up to Cape Reinga on the northern tip of New Zealand, where the waters of the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet. The lighthouse was certainly cute, but the absolute highlight of this daytrip was sand boarding the dunes at North Head: exhausting, sandy, kind of stupid and soooooo much fun !!! I still have to figure how to upload the videos of us racing downhill head first :-O
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Ninety Mile Beach
On the way back we made it just in time to famous 90 mile beach (which in fact is only 55 miles or 90 km long) for a sundowner with fish and chips. Too bad our car is not allowed to drive on the beach otherwise it would have been an interesting drive along the beach.
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Waipoua Kauri Forrest
Driven away by pouring rain we decided three days is quite enough for Northland and returned back to Auckland. We just stopped long enough on the way to marvel at Tane Mahuta, the largest kauri tree alive standing 51m tall, test our rain jackets and eat a smoked fish in the car …
Gone walkabout 
nice…