KIA ORA: Welcome back to my blog, after ages of them pretending to fix my computer. I'm glad to have it back as well. Little by little I'll recap you on everything you missed in my time here. We will start with the most recent events and work our way backwards. WARNING: long blog post
So April was our mid-semester break, scheduled for 2 weeks. I had planned and north island and south island excursion. Due for unforeseen circumstances, my break got extended to 3 weeks off of classes and only left me about 1 week of that break for traveling New Zealand. My North-Island road trip. 4 of us rented a car and began our adventure.
Destination #1 Tauranga - Mt. Manganui.
We did a little hike to the top of Mt. Manganui and looked over the town of Tauranga, beautiful isn't it? To get an estimate, this is on the East coast of New Zealand, so my first time being to an east coast beach. The difference between east and west; generally east coast is more white sand beaches while the west is black sand. Both are gorgeous. After the hike we went to Copenhagen Cones to grab some ice cream (was recommended to us & I recommend it to you as well). Ate our ice cream, sat on the beach, and played some Frisbee. Took a walk to this little island area that judged out, watch some surfers and enjoyed the view. Great weather and a great start to our trip.
p.s. don't forget you can click on the images to enlarge them.
Next Stop: Rotorua
The good ole town of Rotorua, known for it's geothermal activity. First thing on the agenda was to find some food then a freedom camp site, both didn't work out how we planned due to most places shutting down early for ANZEC day the next day. But it worked out, eventually found some agreed upon food at Burger Fuel -delicious- and didn't find a free campsite but a decent priced one with showers and facilities so that was a bonus but still woke up freezing (yes it does get cold in New Zealand; especially being fall heading into winter). In the morning we got up to take a short walk through the redwood forests, I mean this was huge, you could take an 8 hour walk through the place if you were really ambitious. Got to experience that and then ZORBING. The one thing that was a "I have to do this before I leave or I will forever hate myself." Let me put this in perspective for you, this is where it originated and I've wanted to go here to zorb for well over 5 years! This is well before I ever knew I was going to come to New Zealand, so I was so stoked to do it; a fat kind in a candy store. So you pick a track you want to go down, go up to the hill, they fill water in the ball and shove you down. It's like a waterslide but 10x better. I would do it a hundred times over again. Then we headed off to witness some geothermal activity, yes it smells like sulfur, yes there are volcanoes and geothermal activity everywhere (if you would like to actually know more here's a link to get you started http://www.rotoruanz.com/visit/explore/geothermal) We've sat in hotsprings before near here, which is part of the same concept - those pictures and content will be on my travel page soon under Tongariro crossing. Pretty cool to just walk around and see in though, they advise us to not go around the paths because where we step we could accidentally create a sink hole~wild. Anyways we drove around for a bit after and ended up in a Maori village with a pretty impressive church, Angelican Church. As well as pretty impressive views of Lake Rotorua. We couldn't go inside the church because they had it blocked off due to geothermal activity that was happening below it. It's crazy that it can occur anywhere at anytime. Moved on to some rose gardens as well as a gorgeous museum, my humble home. Then we were on our way to our next destination, Taupo.
Day 3: Taupo or well Napier
So the night of Rotorua, we sent off a while down the road to set up camp at Reid's Farm in Taupo-which we had camped at previously in the semester. Grabbed pizza @ hell's pizza, parked by the water front and at our pizza looking our at Lake Taupo. Met a cat at our campsite, fed him a muffin, named him muffins. It was a night of card games and vodka cruisers in the tent and a little bit warmer than the first night. Woke up and had planned to do some cruises or something on the lake, but a crappy day decided on our plans differently. So we took a trip to a point not planned on our roadtrip-Napier. A couple hour drive to this cute town to see the aquarium. Saw some kiwis (nocturnal bird), blue something penguins, which are some of the world's smallest penguins, and some sting-ray and shark feeding. Invested in a new hat so that I didn't stick out dramatically wearing my camo one anymore. Then we did lunch behind the aquarium on the waterside, which was a pebble beach. Sounds rather not great, but it was fun having a god time skipping the stones and running from the crashing waves. Next on the list - 4 hour drive to Wellington.
Wellington- after a long drive from Napier to Wellington, the capital of NZ, through very windy roads ( I mean who am I kidding, every drive is exhausting windy roads on the edge of cliffs). Anyways here we had a nice airbnb we booked to settle down in. Our host, Sarah, was so generous, made her house our house. There was even a fur baby, having a dog for a night was amazing. Here we got to settle down, relax, and unwind in actual beds. Even after a few cold nights it was wonderful. The next day consisted of exploring Windy Wellington. I loved this city, the vibes were wonderful. First attraction, Te Papa, the free but wonderful 6 story museum. Explored the marine life, cave life, Maori and Pacific cultures. Toured Cuba street for food and street entertainment. The coast walk was filled with random quotes etched into stone from poets and statues along the way. After adventuring for a bit we headed up to a mountain which the name escapes me right now, to get some views of Wellington. And off on our way to supposed to be Stratford and turned into Hawera, spent the night, not freedom camping but paid camping again in our tent for the night.
The next morning: Our mission today was to wake up, see Cape Egmont lighthouse for Christina and hike Mt. Taranaki. Well we woke up early, caught a glimpse of the largest mountain in the North Island, standing 8,261 feet high. Soon it got covered behind the clouds. We got to the lighthouse and the views were wonderful. If it wasn't cloudy, you could see Mt. Taranaki in the background of it, but we are lucky we got there when we did because otherwise we wouldn't even have been able to see the light house. We drove to Mt. Taranaki to do a small hike, this time not to the summit because 1. it was supposed to snow 2. it was super dangerous and advanced, people died from doing it. Anyways we were in the carpark, on the mountain, and you couldn't even see a sliver of it in front of us. If we wouldn't have known better you would have no idea there was a gigantic mountain in front of you. Well it started down pouring so we did a 15 minute hike instead of any other one. Which, what are you going to do, you can't control the weather and we were blessed with nice weather the beginning of the trip. On our way to Stratford we went, to be quickly relocated back to New Plymouth. A local at the i-site sent us to New Plymouth, out of her town and out of our way to The Forgotten World Highway. Which is okay because the weather was crap anyways. So New Plymouth- 2nd best region in the world to visit (Taranaki).
NEW PLYMOUTH- First mission, find the hostel we booked-turned out to be an expensive mess. Second mission, find the church- Cathedral of St. Mary's. Renovation-oldest stone church in New Zealand, couldn't go in. Found some other nifty churches to look at. Visited an art museum (the mirror building). Did a coastal walk to adventure to a bridge, architecturally designed different. Got some delicious dinner and dessert at a sit down restaurant (we don't do that much if ever in Auckland) in the city centre and found a nice last minute motel to crash the night in. We didn't camp because it was supposed to pour that night, which it did, and we didn't have a rain cover for our tent.
FINAL STRETCH: So our last day of the road trip. Final destination, Raglan-wonderful place to surf. After a few hours driving what seems like Jurassic World, we made it Bridal Veil Falls just right outside of Raglan. Gorgeous. Then into Raglan, where there was supposed to be a bad storm so we couldn't surf and did really nothing there, besides a beach lookout. Headed to Hamilton to check out the gardens, got maybe 1/4 of the way through and then got kicked out cause they were closing early.Lovely. Finally it was time to head back home to Auckland after a long week.
--- Thanks for sticking through to the end of this long post--- hopefully videos to come if I can successfully get them to upload on here.
