Cape Reinga, Ninety Mile Beach, Auckland. Days 20-24 of the trip

February 9 (Day 20). During the night it started raining and the tent was being tossed around. By morning the rain still had not stopped, and I had already started wondering how we would get out of there. Some things inside the tent got wet too, the ones that had been lying in the side pockets. Good thing I had decided the night before to remove all the electronics. After lying there for half an hour, I realized it would not stop and that we would have to pack up in the rain. So I planned a chain of actions for striking the tent as quickly as possible in those conditions. In short, we packed up and left without eating. On the way we found a public toilet with a sink, stopped there, washed up, ate, changed clothes, and drove on. A few hours later we finally reached the northernmost point of New Zealand. In this photo you can see two currents meeting. Waves hit the peninsula from both sides:

The wind was strong that day. In fact, throughout the whole trip we often had to deal with strong wind in New Zealand.

After that we drove to the sand dunes and had a good run around on them:

There was sand everywhere, but the wind blew us away from there too, and we moved on. While driving I found us a hotel in the place we still wanted to visit that day. It is called Ninety Mile Beach, and the 90-kilometer beach begins almost there. There are excursions on special buses with big wheels that can drive on wet sand. It is better not to drive onto that beach in a normal car unless you have four-wheel drive and large tires. Somewhere I had seen photos of cars sucked into the sand up to the roof. The area also has big tides. You can come at one time and find almost no space by the shore because it is all under water. Come back a few hours later and you can walk far out toward the sea, with only occasional waves rolling over the wet sand that has been exposed.

We decided to spend two nights there, because by that point we were comfortably on schedule and did not need too many days in Auckland. The night was beautiful, the sky was full of stars, and for some reason I got the urge to walk to the ocean after dark, when everyone had already gone to sleep. We went there on foot, and on the way back a dog blocked our path. We had to wait for it to leave. I even took my slippers off so it would not hear us walking.

February 10 (Day 21). We woke up and moved to another room that cost the same but was slightly worse than the one we had before. Both were priced accordingly, 4,000 RUB (95 NZD) per night. But this was already a motel, the kind where your car stands right in front of the door. That day we rested and drove a little to the coast on the other side of the peninsula.

We also went to Ninety Mile Beach one more time and then returned to the motel. There we cooked, ate a lot, and prepared for the fact that over the next few days we would probably go hungry because there would be nowhere to cook properly in the big city. Then we went to sleep.

February 11 (Day 22). We got up early and drove toward Auckland. Before checking into the hotel, we stopped at a beautiful beach near Auckland. Parking there was difficult, there were many cars, and we had to circle around before we found a spot.

After walking along the beach, we found a beautiful lagoon:

You could have swum there, but Sveta had not brought a swimsuit because she did not expect us to find such a place or that the water would be decent for swimming.

Then we went to check into a motel in Auckland. It was already less convenient, there was very little parking space, and we had to squeeze the car in. We unloaded and went to the center to see the sights. We parked, as it turned out, in an expensive lot near Sky Tower, went up the tower, and looked at the views from there:

After that we went back to the motel to deal with everything and prepare for moving to another hotel the next day, one closer to the airport.

February 12 (Day 23). We got up a little earlier, but still managed to leave only a few minutes before 10 a.m. In New Zealand, 10:00 is the checkout deadline for hotels, motels, and cabins. We thought about what to do before we could check into the next motel and decided to drive to another beach near Auckland first. The weather was not great, and there was nothing special there:

Then we went to a store, bought food one last time, and picked up a big container of blueberries, which we had been buying and eating throughout the whole trip in New Zealand. After that we headed to the last attraction of the trip there: an extinct volcano in the middle of the city. We left the car in a free parking lot and went for a walk to the volcano. This is what it looks like:

After our walk around the crater, when we came back to the car, we found it broken into and some of our things stolen. I already wrote about that in the "Crime" section. After getting a replacement car, we drove to the new motel. Everything there was first class, but of course it was expensive too, 5,100 RUB per night (119 NZD). On the other hand, it was spacious and had a kitchen, a toilet, and a bath.

After the theft we had only two USB cables left for our phones. I managed to charge the phones because the TV in the room had two USB ports.

In the evening we were cramming all the remaining things that had not been stolen into the one suitcase we still had. We had to pump a lot of air out of the vacuum bags to make everything fit. Since Sveta's backpack had been stolen, she ended up using the cooler bag as carry-on luggage.

February 13 (Day 24). We got up early. We no longer had to carry many things to the car as we had done every day during the trip, because now there was only one heavy packed suitcase. We drove the car back to the rental office and returned it without any problems. Then they took us to the airport. They had new check-in technology there, everything was handled by a machine. You just had to hold your passport to the scanner and it printed all the boarding passes for the flights. We took off at 1 p.m. and 3.5 hours later were already in Sydney. Then came another connection, this time to Abu Dhabi. That flight was 14.5 hours long, and I had heard somewhere that the longest scheduled passenger flights are only about two hours longer than that. It did not pass quickly. Neither Sveta nor I could sleep, so we watched films and ate. By the end of the trip we were sick of airport food. It felt artificial, not like the food I had once had flying with Emirates. Maybe Etihad simply saves money and cannot afford to put anything fresh on board.

Abu Dhabi. The exact same picture I had seen two years earlier on my flight from the Emirates to Moscow. They put us on a bus, then announced that we had to get off. Again they drove us to the arrival area, again we went through security a second time, again we walked back to the departure gate area, and only after that did they put us on a bus and take us to the plane. In the end we took off late, and to make matters worse they told us we would land in Sochi for refueling and only then continue to Moscow. As a result we arrived three hours late.