The first visit was a road trip that took me to both of New Zealand's "mainland" isles, South Island and North Island — the Bay of Islands is on the upper northeastern side of the latter— and most recently I "stopped by" while traveling with friends on a cruise that began in Sydney, Australia.

"To me it was a magical day," Jeff Lawson, an expedition leader for Utah-based Fun for Less Tours and a former teacher, says of our most-recent brief sojourn in the Bay of Islands.

Our giant cruise ship, Royal Caribbean's Rhapsody of the Seas, had to drop anchor early that morning in the bay, away from the too-shallow shore. Fog clung to nearby hills.

During the morning, the ship's tenders — passenger boats — ferried us to a small harbor off historic Waitangi, near a memorial park that includes the Treaty House and Treaty Grounds. Shuttle buses transported us on the short hop to nearby Paihia, a lovely resort village, and there my friends and I, and many others, boarded a Fuller's cruise catamaran for a day of sightseeing.

Lawson has traveled all around the world. "I give few places a description of seeing a little bit of paradise, but the Bay of Islands was a slice of paradise," he says.

He was entranced by the "crystal blue sky and turquoise waters; dolphins frolicking next to our boat; a docking site for Capt. Cook; the place where the founding document (the Treaty of Waitangi) for colonial New Zealand was signed by the English and the Maoris."

The bay day-trip took us past our anchored cruise ship and back out toward the Pacific Ocean and Cape Brett, a stark headland with a lighthouse perched high on its slope.

Just off the cape is steep-sided and wave-battered Piercy Island, famed for a gaping "hole in the rock" arch formation — which the not-small cruise catamaran managed to power through to the other side (a maneuver the crafty captain did not inform us he was going to do, though a small boat had preceded us).

Cook the mapmaker named Cape Brett and Piercy Island — the latter apparently as a pun, in honor of a naval superior but also for that large sea arch.

Along the way we floated briefly beside several of the bay's nearly 150 islands, and stopped for refreshments and lunch on one of them.

Off another we saw a small pod of dolphins, including, some fellow passengers said, a baby. I didn't see it … the boat's angle was not favorable, and there were too many people in front of me. The year before, however, I had seen even more dolphins in midbay, leaping into the air and seemingly racing with the tourist and fishing boats.