Leaving Jack Behind

It’s another drive-and-gasp-at-the-beautiful-landscape day.. Wow, this is such a gorgeous country, it’s hard to believe the views are real sometimes. It seems like one gigantic land of Hobbits. You can actually imagine them living here.

Today we’re driving some more on the coast, past many picturesque beaches and towns. We had lunch near Paihia beach, visited Haruru falls, and headed towards Puketi forest from there. We found in our DOC campsites booklet that there should be a basic conservation campsite in this forest and we wanted to see if it was worth the 7$ per person to spend the night there. We arrived at the campsite early in the afternoon and decided quite fast that it wasn’t worth the money, since there was no gate (so no extra safety), the cooking facilities were not to be used because of the fire ban, and so the little facilities that did exist – didn’t seem worth our money. Too bad, it was a nice location, totally concealed in the midst of the forest.

We dug through all our brochures and came up with a place we found in “Jasons Camping and Holiday Parks Guide” (free booklet available at any i-SITE), a campground / hostel called “The Welcome Swallow” in Matauri Bay. We gave them a call and they told us they had plenty of space and warm showers (the magic words!). The price would be 10$ a person, which seemed far more reasonable than the DOC campsite (due to the lack of facilities of the latter) so we headed for that direction. We were planning to go to the Bay of Islands anyways, so it kinda worked out perfectly like this.

The Welcome Swallow was extremely welcoming. We parked our van behind the main building and enjoyed the kitchen facilities, cozy common room and showers throughout. We had a great dinner and relaxed afterwards in the living room. And since we were the only ones there, it kinda felt like it was ‘our’ living room. Was nice to sit up straight for a change.. (no offense Gramps!)