Day 1 Continued -
Still with the Time Unlimited tour - In addition to Piha and Waitakere areas, we went to Bethell’s Beach, the Gannett colony by Muriwai Beach with thousands of birds currently nesting & where we saw probably the first chick of the season, and had lunch at a Riverfront Tavern which has been there since 1869 and is alongside a river, which made for a quiet peaceful lunch.
Muriwai Beach
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Gannet Colony - each one of those white spots is a bird or a bird pair -
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@Mathmagicland tour ended the day back in Auckland atop Mount Eden, which overlooks the central areas of the city, such pretty views. In these pictures, you can really see how spread out Auckland is. Note the Sky Tower for reference, it is in the CBD not far from our hotel.
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While Halloween is not as big a thing as here in the states, the kids do dress up & do some trick or treating, and a few houses have decorations. In our drive to one beach, we passed a house that was all decorated for Halloween; this had the most of any house we saw. It must have been something as my guide Daniel even took pictures to show his grand-daughter, who had made her own Halloween costume for the evening.
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Grifdog22 and his DW report that they chose poorly for the day and should have booked with
@Mathmagicland. They booked again with Bush and Beach for an afternoon tour of the western rain forest and Piha beach. The guide/company owner that day was not feeling too well, so many stops were made for a short “break.” There was a very long stop at a visitor’s center with nothing to see, and from here the leader discovered he had left someone behind. It took awhile to get the group back together. This brought us to a short thirty-minute slow walk in the “bush” which turned out to be a conservation area park and then cookies and tea from the van. Next stop - the ride to the beach. This was twisty and narrow, which didn’t help out our guide, so it took quite a while to arrive at the beach. Sadly, when we got to the beach, our time was short. We got out of the bus and went to the beach for 15 minutes. We headed into the water and our pants got drenched by a rogue wave. We put our shoes back on and grifdog’s boots started to detach at the soles, perhaps from the soaking in disinfectant (required in areas with Kauri trees to help spread a disease that is attacking a lot of trees) earlier that afternoon. Nevertheless, they were quite late returning, having insisted that they be brought back early. They rated this as a do not do this tour.
The
AbD reception was drinks and hors d’oeuvres, followed by dinner in the adjacent room. Here we learned that we’d only have 15 for our group for the tour. What a nice, small group size! Dinner was served family style, with the servers pointing out specific dishes to avoid for those with any food sensitivities. This was the way for most of our group dinners on the tour, either family style or buffet; I think there were only one or two times where we were asked to choose a specific order for a lunch or dinner ahead of time. The family style worked out very nice, and we always had more than enough food.
In our group, we had both experienced AbD travelers, and a few first-time AbD travelers. We were fortunate as we had a great group of people for our tour.
After a long day, time to get some sleep & prepare for our first full day tomorrow.