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From Auckland to Russell
And then I made my first big mistake (on this trip). We wanted to go see the area north of Auckland, the Bay of Islands to be more precise. So there were two towns to choose from: Paihia and Russell. If you look at the map, you can see these two places are really very close together. Just a few miles of water between them. So it didn’t seem there was too much difference between them. And they were both about 160 miles away, that should be feasible in a single day, right? I picked Russell, because it looked a bit more interesting: It is situated on a peninsula. In Holland it would not have made a lot of difference which town you pick, but in New Zealand there was a huge difference. A good travel guide could have given the right answer, but I didn’t have one yet…
It all started very well. After packing our bags and checking out of the hotel, we took the SH1 highway to the north. But highways are very rare in New Zealand. Soon the dual carriageway ended and the road continued as a standard two-lane road. In Holland we would call it a “provincial road” and a 50 mph speed limit would apply, but in New Zealand the limit is 60 mph, so we were still making good progress.
We thought we had plenty of time, so when we saw a sign pointing to a historic city, we turned off the road and ended up in Puhoi. Historic? Yes, the history of this village goes back to 1863. On June 29th. 1863 some Czech people settled here in no man’s land and built up their village. It makes you wonder why they went here of all places. Puhoi never grew into a city of any importance. But it does have a library, a church (of course) and a mustard factory. I made some nice photos there:
The “General store” and the library.
In the pub and in the antiques shop we saw lots of funny things. And outside the antiques shop we found an ancient bus, apparently converted into a camper van with a funny bumper sticker in the window…
So much for Puhoi, we had to move on!
But the more we progressed to the north, the more difficult it became to go ahead. Especially when we had to turn off the State Highway onto the “Russell Road”. That name sounds like you are almost there, but the Russell Road is very long and curvy. We could not drive fast any more as we moved from one U-turn to the next along the coast. It was a beautiful drive with lots of nice views. We passed many small bays with and without sandy beaches. But we were running out of time!
The sun was already setting when we reached the village of Russell. And we were in for a bad surprise: There was no boulevard filled with dozens of fancy hotels. There was really only one hotel and that did not have any vacancies… A Bed&Breakfast; maybe? Nowhere to be found… An i-Site? Only open during office hours… One souvenir shop was still open and Julia inquired if there was any possibility to find a room for tonight. Well, yes, they did happen to know an address that might have a room for us. So we went there. There was not a living soul in sight, but there was a telephone we could use to call the owners. But, no, they did not have any vacancies either. They did give us another address: Hananui Lodge on York Street.
We got a very warm reception there. But a room? No, all they had available was a luxury studio at NZ$ 220 a night. 220? That sounds like a lot of money! But still I wanted to take it and I explained to Julia, this was really only 90 Euros. That is not unlike the amount one would pay for a hotel room in Holland. The owner showed us the studio and we were really impressed.
So let’s do it! We decided to rent it for two nights. Now we were not homeless any more! and besides that it had lots of space and luxury and it even featured a view on the bay!
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