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Well it's the last New Zealand blog entry, and we're both starting to really miss everyone and everything and get generally a little homesick. Wonder how long we'll be home for before we want to get back on the road again! Still, we have been having a pretty great time all that aside!
We left Rotorua last week to spend some time in Tongariro National Park, and stopped off on the drive to have a look at an exploding mud pool. Pretty cool, some great photos, right up until a new eruption formed in a few seconds near us and an explosion of mud flew towards Claire and landed on her hood as she turned away. We took this as a sign and left not too keen on having boiling mud land on our skin! So we hit the road for the drive down to Tongariro. This is an amazing place, another World Heritage Area on our travels, and really is something to see. The volcanic centre of the park comprising Mt Tongariro, Mt Ngaurahoe and Mt Ruapehu is still active, and the latter erupted in 1995 and 2007! Didn't even threaten to burp when we were there, which we're both strangely disappointed with. That would've been something to see! In the first 2 days we were in the park though, if the thing had gone off we probably wouldn't have seen it given the amount of cloud sitting between us and the peaks. So obviously, there was no snowboarding to be had in these conditions. The road up to the skifields was closed the first day we were there due to snow and ice which didn't fill us with confidence about making it up there with our driving skills! But we went for it anyway on the 3rd day when the weather eventually cleared and the road opened again. And we made it there, incident free with not even a wobble. If only the same could be said about us boarding! The first day we took the beginners pack which included a 2 hour lesson. And after 2 hours intensive tutoring, we had both vastly improved and could glide down the slopes, come to gracious comfortable stops, and looked like we'd been doing it for years.
OK, who believed that? Seriously admit it, cos you're idiots! Of course we couldn't do it, not at all! Well, a little. It's hard work that, and we only had 2 days doing it and that's just not enough to get the hang of it. Chris had some success in covering about 50 metres of the slope without falling on the first day and Claire couldn't get going at all so threw a strop! Claire almost mastered it the second day, completing several full runs of the slope without falling at all....while Chris threw a strop! It was fantastic fun though, and something well worth trying again if the opportunity comes!
So that was our week really, waiting around to board then falling over most of the time we did! The park was awesome though, and we've got some great photos of us on volcanoes covered in snow. Weird. But great.
After the boarding we headed north towards the village of Waitomo to check out the glowworm caves there. There's loads of crazy things you can do through the caves like abseiling or rafting, but we both had the body of 70 year olds after the snow so we opted for a short, leisurely walk and boat journey through them. With a group of 70 year olds! And short it was. We spent 40 minutes walking around some pretty cool limestone caves, and then about 5 minutes in the dark cave they let you see the worms in! To be fair though, it was pretty amazing, something like taking a boat journey into a planetarium. The cave was pitch black and the worms hung from the ceilings above really looking stars in the night sky. It wasn't bad for what turned out to be an hour long stop off on a drive up to Auckland as we decided everything else we wanted to see was right up north.
We only spent one night in Auckland as we would be returning the following weekend to fly out of the city, then set off next morning for the Bay of Islands. Our intentions up there were to head out on a boat and do some dolphin swimming in amongst some general exploring of the area. We arrived in a little place called Paihia and had a quiet lazy Sunday on our first full day there, just dandering around in the sunshine for the afternoon. Not much else that day so the next morning we got up early and set off on a boat trip to try and trace down some dolphins to go swim with! After about half an hour on the boat we found a pod of dolphins, but, we were pretty gutted cos they had babies with them, and it's illegal to swim with juveniles so we were a bit disappointed. The rest of the trip was pretty crap with us being taken out to see 'the hole in the rock' which was literally a hole in a rock above the water off the coast, literally. And then we got to get off for half an hour to explore one of the islands, which had nothing at all on it. Conditions had also been really unsettled so lots of people on the boat got some seasickness, including Claire, and that didn't help matters! So the trip was a bit of a let down but it was worth the gamble had we been able to get in with the dolphins. That's one experience that got away and will have to wait for another trip maybe!
Once we finished up with the Bay of Islands we decided to take on the drive from there up to Cape Reinga, the very northern tip of New Zealand. It's a very spiritual place for the Maori of the country, seen as the 'jumping off point' for spirits of the dead to head into the next life. So after a 4 hour drive we got there and it was a nice spot. The weather was great, and a path lead down to the lighthouse which looked out over nothing but ocean in your panoramic vision. It's really weird looking out at a very narrow tip of land and knowing that there's nothing but ocean to the north of you! There's also an interesting pool of water where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean creating some cool colliding waves! So it was an interesting enough spot though we only spent under an hour there, and the rest of the day in the car so it took some effort.
That day was the third day in 6 we'd spent over 6 hours in the car so we decided we just wanted to head down to Auckland on Wednesday to get ourselves to our stopping point as we'd done pretty much everything we set out to do in New Zealand. We'd headed up the east coast to get to the Bay of Islands so we decided to check out the west coast on the way back down. The drive was fairly unspectacular compared to the rest of the country, (we think we did the country the wrong way round with the wow factor coming at the start in the south!), though we did stop off to see probably the biggest tree we've ever seen. That is probably until we get to the Californian Redwood forests in a few weeks! It is the biggest Kauri tree in the world, over 50 metres tall and it would take over 15 people holding hands around the bottom to encircle the tree. Pretty big.
The last few days we've just been wandering around the city, checking out the sites and passing the last of our time in New Zealand preparing for the final leg of the trip. We've really enjoyed New Zealand, even more than we did Australia, and we'll definitely be back one day. Photos don't do it justice, you have to see some of it to believe it! Cool place.
So from runway to the road we're rambling on to Fiji on Monday for a week of sun, sea and snorkelling, and with the changing weather the past few weeks here, we're looking forward to some sunshine. We expect to be out of contact in Fiji as we're spending the week on one of the small islands to the Northwest of the mainland. We'll get a wee post on once we're in California, after the 21st of July, when we'll be oh so close (well, 3 weeks..ish..) to getting home to get drunk with you all again!
Hope you're all well and enjoying yourselves.
See ya soon
Chris and Claire xx
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