Auckland > Raglan
Got up early to catch the Stray tour bus. When the bus eventually turned up it was going to take a lot to impress us as we were grumpy due to the bus being nearly an hour late and when it did turn up it looked like a second hand prison bus. However Kerry the driver soon had us turned around, from the start he was great craic, full of information and very laid back. Got a good feeling about the trip and started to think that we had indeed made the right choice by booking on a Stray trip. The first stop of the day was at Bridal Veil Falls, a ~55m high waterfall. It was very impressive, though it was tough work trying to fit the whole thing into one photo. We drove on to Raglan, a small town with a reputation among surfers as having the longest left hand point break in the world. We were staying at a hostel with a surf school. We didn’t take a surf lesson but Sophie and Graham rented boogie boards and messed around in the surf. I don’t think the locals felt in any way threatened by the skills on show, but a couple of good waves were caught and Graham went from being a surfing sceptic to now understanding what all the fuss was about.
After a spell in the sauna Sophie cooked a Thai chicken curry for dinner then spent the evening messing around on the Zip line (or Flying Fox as the locals call it) playing basketball up in the games barn and generally getting to know the people on the bus. There were a lot of Glow Worms in the hostel grounds, they look very odd in the daylight, not hard to believe they are actually maggots, but are very impressive at night.