We took an early bus from Auckland to Paiha, the place where all tourists to Northland get dumped :) As my guide book says, the town itself isn't much of a destination, but it's a convenient base to explore locations around from. When we arrived around noon, we were met by the owners of our B&B, Decks of Paiha, who nicely came to pick us up and drove us up the hill to their place. From there, we went for our boat tour of the neighbouring islands. As part of the trip, we got dropped off an island where we hiked a bit for views:

the bus ride was pretty comfortable

the locally famous hole in the rock

we got lucky to see some wild dolphins on the way back

To be honest, the boat trip is probably what people do there, but not what we enjoyed the most. At the end of the trip, the boat dropped us off at Russell across from Paiha, and we hiked to the flagstaff and the beach by Takeka Point. Ironically that was actually free and fun ;)

passion fruit, but not quite ripe yet

After our hike at the beach, we got back to the ocean front for dinner and took the ferry back to Paiha to our BnB:

The next morning, we had great trip with Salt Air. They flew us to the north tip of the island. I put the flight on my flight blog. Thanks to that flight, we got to the north of northland to see its tip in a van driven expertly by our pilot:

checking out tide pools :)

The last but most fun part of that excursion was going to sand dunes and doing dune boarding:

Jennifer struggled a bit with directional control :)

After another great flight back, we went to Waitangi Treaty Grounds and learned about how the british went to New Zealand and actually treated the Maori with more respect than they have of any other country they tried to invade. From what I can tell, it's actually because the Maori were bad ass: all the tribes were unified against the british if needed, and they were scary warriors. The british likely feared them which is understandable considering how they look when they do their dances. All this to say, I have much respect for the Maori and I'm happy that it's probably the only native people to a land who stayed ahead and didn't get crushed like most others (Australian Aborigines, US Indians, and so forth).
(but rest assured the british of course still did their best to screw the Maori later, but only managed to do it so much)

huge boat

where the treaty was signed with the Maori

The Maori gave us a very nice show:

The treaty grounds are also quite nice to visit:

The 3rd day, we had a nice breakfast at our B&B before heading out with a rental car. We then went to Kawiti Glow Worm caves:

you can see the glow worms if you look carefully

Next, we went to the parrot place, which was quite fun:

yeah, scratch me right here :)

friends :)

very small baby quail

On the way out, we went to see the oldest house in New Zealand, the brick house and rainbow falls:

We finished with a couple of wineries for Jennifer:

From there, we returned our rental car, took a bus to Whangarei and a minivan to Tutukaka where we slept before going to our diving boat the next morning