Pahia is a small town that acts as the home base for many of the tourism activities around the Bay of Islands (literally a bay with many islands), including several companies that offer tours of the bay and dolphin watching. We signed up with one that offers swimming with dolphins. However, you can only swim with dolphins if the sea permits (if it isn’t too rough, which would make getting people back on the boat hard) and only if the dolphins do not have young dolphins in the pod (because then it might be too stressful for the animals). We did manage to see one pod of dolphins but we were not allowed to swim with them. Actually, that was probably fine – the water was cold and murky, so swimming with them may not have been so much fun. But it was certainly a thrill to watch them! It appears that they could tell they were being watched and they seemed to like it. Occasionally, they would put on an acrobatic aerial display that you only think you would see at Sea World. After we had saturated our viewing of the one pod, the boat left to look for another pod. But we didn’t find any others, so the boat anchored in a bay and allowed people to swim. Xavier and Quentin took the opportunity to jump in the still chilly water. Incidentally, on the three-hour drive up in the morning, we stopped in Kawakawa which has a most unusual public bathroom – one made of bottles and tiles, constructed in curvy, odd shapes. It is a tourist attraction in and of itself.
