By Nora_Wolcott
This weekend I embarked on my first independent trip, on which I would attempt to surmount the entire Northern tip of New Zealand. I began this endeavor, accompanied by three of my closest international friends, at a small run-down rental car agency in Auckland Central. The man at the desk handed us the keys to an old rickety hatchback, in which we would drive the 6 hours up to Cape Reigna, and in which I would get my first taste of the winding roads of the New Zealand bush.
We began our weekend with a trip to the Glowworm Caves of Waipu, which took us up a narrow, precipitous stretch of dirt road that our hatchback was just able to navigate in the dark. When we reached the caves we were the only people visible for miles, and the moments approaching the cave's entrance felt vaguely like the part of the horror movie when the audience is begging the protagonist not to go in. Inside the narrow entrance the cave blossomed into a jumble of stalactites and stalagmites, and as we turned the lights from our phones off a smattering of fluorescent spots revealed themselves. The flecks of blue-green were, of course, Arachnocampa luminosa, thousands of glow worms nestled into the rock. As we made our way deeper into the cave, wading in the watery floor, I was startled to find long gray eels slithering around my feet. This was my introduction to the fauna-filled weekend to come.
Day 2 of our adventure started in the Bay of Islands, home to 144 different islands, almost all of which we would see that day on a 4 hours ferry trip encompassing the length of the Bay. This was by far the most memorable (if pricey) leg of our trip, as a couple hours into the tour we happened upon a pod of bottlenose dolphins. Undulating Bottlenoses jumped through the wake of our ferry, and the crowd of onlookers audibly gasped when a baby dolphin shot several meters into the air behind us. Our captain informed us that his name was Flash, and he was part of the 25-member pod that we had discovered. In the midst of all this excitement, a small fairy penguin surfaced unceremoniously just a few feet ahead of me, and looked back with indifference before diving back into the surf. We rounded out the day with a trip to Rainbow Falls, which proved to be quite a beautiful secluded spot, and that night we fell asleep to the sound of water hitting rock after a 27 meter free fall.
Our final stop on this tour was Cape Reigna which, according to Mauri legend, is the point from which spirits depart into the underworld. The spot is both quaint and grandiose, a narrow stone path leading to the lighthouse that marks the end of the island, framed by the rugged mountainside. We had made it to the Northernmost tip of New Zealand, all sheer rock faces and arching dunes, and stood wind-battered on the cliffs, contemplating the weekend's passing. As I made the winding trip back home, struggling to keep to the left side of the road, I gained a newfound empathy for those students who go abroad and never stop talking about it, and came to the conclusion that I am now doomed to be one of them.