Ich bin dann mal weg - off we go - doei doei

About two hours after having left by ferry around noon the next day, we arrived at Eua port. The island a more elevated than all tge other islands at around 15 metres above sea levels compared to two for the rest of Tonga. Hence vegetation and soil is quite different and beautiful. We stayed at a Hostel called "The Hideaway", basically the only Hostel on Eua, close to the coast and quite well built. After one afternon of relaxing and some chicken-or-fish-dinner (but no fish that day ;-), we had a quiet night with wave-sounds from the nearby beach. The following day was full of adventure with a 4WD Tour across the Island, and this time you really needed that four-wheel drive. We visited wonderful places and had a sunny day. I mention sunny, because the oncoming two days were more of a wet experience. The day after there was heavy rain all day as a small cyclone passed by and the ferry we were supposed to be on never arrived the next day. Hence we had another day relaxing an...

Early morning of the next day Sabine and me went to the Airport again where we returned our rental car, waited quite a while for the rest of us and checked in to Tonga. It was probably the most hilarious flight as one of the crew members was obviously a former comedian. Or have you ever heard a steward say: "Please be careful opening the overhead lockers. We all know: Shit happens...". So we arrived safely, enlighted and early at Tonga Airport on the main island. When we tried to pass customs and immigration, the customs officer just ran away and didn't return until fifteen minutes later. Funny. Finally we made it through, got our bags and met the father of Melana outside. The family structure of a Tongan family is sometimes more complicated than ours back in Europe, but I'll get into that later. We were driven to Longoteme a village in the island center where Nicole was staying and on to Fanga a suburb of the capital Nukualofa where Sabine and me were situated. We...

There we rented a room at the "Verandah's", which is close to the city center and walked into town. There we met with Nicole, a german LLM student and Meleana, Sabines flatmate from Tonga. As expected, both turned out to be really cool and we had quite a nice day in Auckland and later Devenport, only a short ferry trip from Auckland. In the evening we had dinner with some of Meleanas extended family from Auckland at a place called "Valentines". Ist a buffet-style restaurant, very Kiwi I might say, with very good food indeed. Nicole was staying with them, we drove back to our hostel.

Once beeing so close, we decided to drive all the way up to Cape Reinga, the northernmost part of the north island. It is a long drive along 90 mile beach and giant sanddunes, followed by about 20 km of gravel road. Cape Reinga itself is mainly the nice lighthouse and a signpost to some of the major landmarks quite a long way away. After another long drive, we finally arrived at the "Tree House" in Kohukohu. Ist a purpose built backpackers with a large garden and we had our own cabin overlooking a nice pond. No one else was there at this time of year. The day after we took the Hokianga ferry and drove down to Helensville where we stayed another night in a spa-equipped Hostel named "Malolo House" before returning to Auckland the following day.

We had prebooked an Hostel called "Farms Hostel" in Kahoe run by an Italian owner. I'm pretty sure I've been there before but couldn't find my scribbles in the Guestbook. The weather was really bad, when we arrived, so we didn't see much of the surroundings that were said to be beautiful. The special thing in that particular hostel, besides the good pizza the owner made, was the garage. It was full of flags and equipped with sofas and a flatscreen TV. People there slept during daytime and got up at two in the night to watch the first game, then the replay of the second, after that the third game at six and the following replay at eight. We got up as well to watch an Italian game, which turned out to be quite bad, but the enthusiasm of the owner made it interesting. I wonder how watching the final would have been like over there.

After the usual 23 hours in the air, passing Singapore and Sydney, I arrived at Auckland Airport. Sabine had arrived an hour earlier, so she was waiting at the gate. We decided to get a rental car and start driving north instead of staying in Auckland. There were five days to waste, and we covered quite a lot of the area. We started off passing Whangarei and got our first Hostel "Bunkdown Lodge" in that area. On the following day we drove on, passing the Bay of Islands and KeriKeri in beautiful weather.

Hey Everyone, I just hijacked this Blog. And I'll use it to blog about my holiday-before-work holidays. Although Sabine plays an important part in these holidays, it'll be more of my perspective from here on. Apologies to all of Sabine's friends, but she'll be back soon ;-) Cheers, Alexis