Picture this: three girls in a camper van full of surfboards, crisscrossing the North Island of New Zealand in search of waves. This is where my friends Robbie, Maria, and I began our one-month "surf adventure." You may have noticed the quotes—that's because the waves were almost as elusive as the warm weather, but we were determined to find them both as we spent our week exploring the island.
We had planned our adventure in November, which would have been the summer in New Zealand (or so we thought). We found out it was really their spring, which means blustery winds, rain, and a lot of blown-out surf. We began in Auckland where, despite the cold wind and rains, we found a sweet city with amazing restaurants. We met some friendly surf shop employees who checked online and advised us to head southeast towards Gisborne to find waves.
We picked up our mode of transportation, a camper van. Did you know that three girls and four boards (two of them longboards) take up all the room in a six-person camper? None of us had ever traveled this way before and we were all a little apprehensive about driving this lumbering vehicle on the wrong side of the road. And to make things even more complicated, you needed to change gears with your left hand (oh yeah, it was manual). Luckily our intrepid surfer girl Robbie was up to the task. We made it out of Auckland and onto the open road with only a few stalls and a handful of incidents that involved turning on the windshield wipers instead of the blinkers.
Gisborne was almost seven hours away, so we decided to stop at the Bay of Plenty at an absolutely beautiful beach in Waihi. While we did find some sunshine and enjoyed a spectacular hike to Orakawa Bay, there was absolutely no surf. Since we were on a surf trip, gosh darn it, we drove a bit further to get a couple more miles, or kilometers. We were only half-way to our destination when it began to get dark, so we parked our van and settled in for the night right there on the side of the road.
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