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Kaikoura has to be one of the highlights of my trip!! We went swimming with dolphins there which was absolutely amazing!!! We were literally within a couple of feet from them! A whole pod of dolphins swam underneath me at one point! There must have been about 100 dolphins in the same area! What an amazing thing for us to do! I absolutely loved it!
I also went whale watching and got to see two 18m sperm whales! It was awesome! watching them dive down was fantastic! It was incredible to think that I only saw 10% of them because what I saw was still massive! We were so lucky about the weather on this day too because the day before it had been chucking it down with rain but the day we had for it was so sunny with bright blue skies!
We only had one full day in Kailkoura before heading upto wellington in the north island. We have been joined by Bill now, a guy we met in Australia and will be travelling with him until we leave New Zealand.
Wellington was completely different to most of New Zealand. It was pretty small for a capital city but lots bigger than most of the places we have visited so far. It was a wicked city to hang our in for a couple of days. We got to visit the beach there, see the botanical gardens, got an awesome view of the city from Mt victoria lookout, and got to go to a pretty wicked museum (the only one we have gone to since our trip began-cant say any of us our massive fans of them) which had lots of maori stuff in and an old junk shop which told us all about New Zealands history.
After seeing all the sights in Wellington, we headed for Tongariro national park. But I actually made the mistake of thinking it would take only an hour to get to it from Wellington, but found out on the way that it would take a bit longer than that when we saw the sign saying 'Tongariro-450km)..oops!Minor mistake!We also only had less than a quarter left of petrol in Harold and were heading out on a road with very little on it! Thank goodness we did make it to a garage! Lots more driving and a chinese take away later we eventually got to our hostel in the national park by about midnight. We had such a cute little cabin to ourselves...the first double bed I have experienced out here! Very nice!
After only a few hours sleep, we were up at 6am to do apparently New Zealand's best walk...the Tongariro crossing which lasted 7 hours. It was pretty awesome! We walked upto the foot of Mt Doom (from Lord of the Rings) and through 3 different craters. We got to eat our lunch on top of a volcano (which is still active!) where we got to warm our bums on the hotspots! From there, we also had an stunning view across Emerald lakes and blue lake. And finally on the way back we got to see some hot springs! Really enjoyed it!
Next stop was Taupo for our skydive!!!
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