It's already two weeks ago but I'd still like to share some pictures and words about our trip to Great Barrier Island - which was quite an adventure in expected and unexpected ways... We booked a seat in a ten seater plane (five rows for two people each, that includes the pilot!) which started from Auckland International Airport - being in such a small plane just next to the big jets is quite an interesting impression ;)

The flight itself was quite scenic and loud - propellers make quite some noise - and we ended up on a tiny airstrip on Great Barrier Island. The plane left right away, the other passengers knew some locals who took them from there before we realised it we were left alone in no man's land - there's not many people living on that island and at that time hardly any tourists either. There's a campsite between the airstrip and the beach where we stayed overnight, and we were the only guests! It even had (cold) showers, what a luxury ;)

Saturday and Sunday were hiking days, we explored the walks across this untouched island with stunning views across the little islands around Great Barrier. Untouched at least for the last 50 years, before that they were cutting all the big Kauri trees for timber - one of the photos shows a gigantic dam that they built to log down the mighty Kauri trees.

The weather was quite poor on Sunday and we were looking forward to fly home in the afternoon. However our flight was cancelled due to the bad conditions and rescheduled for the next day - from a different airport in the southern part of the island! So had to hitchhike down south close to the airport and were camping wild in a forest. Luckily we did stop at a small cafe earlier that day to have some cake after two days of hiking. That's where we met a nice guy who gave us a giant zucchini from his garden - we were running out of food and all shops in those small villages were closed, so we had zucchini soup for dinner..

Monday we mostly waited for our flight back, which got again delayed due to the weather (which was bad in Auckland this time). Luckily we got the last plane for the day that took us back to Auckland. There were thick clouds and we mostly couldn't see anything during the flight, and the weather was particularly bad in Auckland. The pilot had to work really hard to land the plane, with heavy winds, rain and really bad sight. She was doing a great job and everybody was relieved to be safely back on the ground!