Whitianga

The next stop after Auckland was a small town called Whitianga where we stayed at a hostel called Baywatch. The ride up on the bus wasn't too bad as the Kiwi Coaches are nice and big so had plenty of space to stretch out.

After leaving Auckland we stopped off at the top of Maungawhau (Mt Eden) which is onw of the 50 dormant volcanoes in the vicinity and took in the panaramic views of the Aucland region. We then headed east and stopped off Cathedral Cove where there were some nice scenic views, sandstone formations and rock pools at the beach.

Whitianga was quite a small town with not a lot to do so everyone met up in the evening for a few beers and then me, Justin and Chris headed back to our room where we had a good game of scrabble and drank some more beer. The bus was leaving pretty early (8.10) the next day so I set my alarm to get up about 7.15 to give us time to get sorted.

My alarm did go off but I turned it off and went back to sleep as did the others, We were all then awoken by knocking on our door which is when we saw our bus driver walking away seeing as we hadnt responded. We all looked at our watches and it was 8.25 arghh everyone panicked for a second and though we had missed the bus for sure, I quickly put on some clothes and legged it out to the bus in bare feet. Luckily the bus was still there (everyone else was on it) and there was still a pick up to make before we went so we had 5 minutes to get ready before the bus came back to collect us. As you can imagine we got ready as fast as we could and had no time to tidy the room before we left so it looked quite messy. We all managed to ready in a couple of minutes and were out waiting for the bus in no time. We got a bit of an appluase when we got on the bus which was quite funny, we were just really relieved to be getting on the bus as another night would have been a waste.

We stopped off a bit later to get some food and the bus driver asked to have a word with the four of us. Apparently the woman from the hostel had rang up and had a go at the driver saying that she was unable to rent out the room as it was so messy and we had tried to stuff bread down the shower. The room was messy but nothing that couldnt have been cleaned up in 5 - 10 minutes and there may have been bread in the shower as Justin was throwing it at Chris while he was in there but this woman was going completely over the top. Anyway to keep her happy we gave her $50 even though we knew she would be renting it out that night but nevermind!