Arrived at Jamies, we first met all his flatmates, which are apparently 4. All of them were super friendly and welcoming and Jamie invited us to go with some other friends to a bar in the town, what we accepted for sure! 🙂 There is nothing really special about the night life in Whangarei, but it provided us the opportunity to learn a bit more about Jamie and one of his flatmates, Adam.
The next day we visited the beaches and a lookout at Whangarei Heads. Especially the lookout was great, which is a 2 hours hike providing a fantastic view over the bay of Whangarei. We also saw the Ocean Beach with amazing sand dunes. Another nice evening (and kiwi typical roasted beef with vegetables) later, we drove to the Tutukaka Coast the next day. Probably the best beaches we saw in New Zealand, and with Whale Bay one of the officially Top 20 beaches in the world. Just look on the pictures. Some of the other beaches are Sandy Bay and Matapouri Bay.
There was again rain the next day, why we wanted to visit the museum and the caves of Whangarei. Unfortunately the museum was closed for maintenance (only this particular day) and the caves were flooded. Anyway, we saw the really beautiful Whangarei Falls! In addition we had a very important organisational appointment. There were some people interested in buying our car in Auckland, why we were quite optimistic to sell it for a good price. That day, however, three Germans gave as a call as they saw our ad on the notice board. The wanted to have a look on the car and were really interested and we negotiated with them a price of 1200$. Even better they transferred us the money in Euro, so we didn’t have to exchange all this cash! As they already had a bus ticket, we negotiated to meet the next day half way to Auckland in order to finalize the deal. Before we met them we visited the Waipu Caves, where we could see some glow-worms again. Fortunately this time without a tour and entry fees, so definitely the best cave we saw and definitely a highlight after the a bit disappointing tour in the Waitomo Caves.
When we met the Germans, we found out that they had a little problem with their bank account, as the card reader for Online Banking was locked. That‘s why we had to wait until 18:00 for the Bank in Germany to open and unlock the card reader. By the time we drove to Auckland close to our next hosts house, drunk a coffee, made all the paperwork for the car (the change of ownership is done at the Post in NZ 😉 ) and had a good conversation with them. Finally the bank opened and everything else was done within the next 30 minutes and we sold our car after 8000km driving while losing 200$. Quite good isn’t it?
They also drove us to our host with the car, but what weird things went on there is the last chapter of our New Zealand adventure…