Space travel to the Bay of Island

Last week we found a really cool car rental company for travelling in New Zealand. They are called Spaceships and hire bright orange camper vans equipped with everything you need on a trip through New Zealand. As we are planning to do a big tour around the south island at the end of my work placement, we decided to do a short trip to find out if the Spaceship really holds up to its promises… And so we (me my boyfriend and two friends) went to have a beautiful weekend trip to the Bay of Islands, with our Spaceship called Jupiter. Starting on early Saturday morning our first stop was at the Perry Kauri Park to look at some impressive 800 year old Kauri trees. The Maoris apparently believe that when you embrace the trees you can hear the ancient soles of their ancestors speaking to you! After that, we made our way to the Goat Island Marine Reserve passing through beautiful landscape with lots of green hills, sheep and cows – just like you imagine New Zealand! In the marine reserve we went for a snorkel around Goat Island, and as we were lucky and the see was relatively calm and clear I spotted at least 7 different kinds of fish and a lot of seaweed – really cool! After a nice shower and some food we turned on our “warp speed” and headed to Pahia in the Bay of Island. Originally, we had planned to sleep in the Spaceship but as we unexpectedly had taken on two more friends (instead of going only the two of us), we hadn’t rented the additional pod that provides two more sleeping places in addition to the comfortable double bed in the back of the car. Sad actually, as the bed looked sooo comfortable… Also, all the other features in the Spaceship seamed to be really well elaborated: You get a fridge – perfect to store beer (or also food, if you want), a gas cooker and you have a big storage under the double bed. So overall a really cool car! Anyways, in the hostel, we had a few beers but went to bed early as we had booked a sailing turn for early next morning. In the end we ended up getting up even earlier as we missed the fact that the clocks had turned back to winter time until the nice lady at the ticket office told us so… well, at least we had time for an extensive breakfast at the pier café  The sailing trip was awesome! Even though we had a few raindrops in the beginning we really had a great and relaxing time lying in the sun on the Catamaran and enjoyed the tour through the hundreds of little islands. For lunch we stopped on one of the uninhabited islands, had a barbeque and a stroll over the beautiful island. Sadly that was already the end of our short trip into the outer space of New Zealand and it seamed like it had passed in speed of light…well, its not as bad, as our trip to the south island will come soon and we definitively gonna take a Spaceship again – see you soon Jupiter!