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Bay of Plenty, East Coast and Wellington
We are currently sat on the Interislander Ferry crossing over from Wellington to Picton in the South Island, which is a little bit choppy but hopefully will be ok. Sorry this is a long blog!
Since the last blog we have travelled north from Rotorua and then along the East Coast all the way down to Wellington. In the morning before leaving Rotorua we visited the Skyline and Skyride complex where we spent the morning speeding down tracks on a luge! From there we drove north in the Bay of Plenty region to Whitianga where we briefly stopped before driving onto Ohiwa Harbour. We spent the night near the beach and enjoyed a shell spotting walk along the windy beach and a jump on our second jumping pillow!
From Ohiwa we headed east through the gorge road towards Gisborne where we walked around the seafront visiting numerous Captain Cook statues and ended up at a Cidery! We had a walk around a platform to view the production line then tried some of NZ’s finest cider while discussing the comparison to British cider with the lady serving us! We stayed the night in a campground on a showground which smelt of farm animals, lovely!
The next day we drove down the coast entering Hawkes Bay, one of the New Zealand’s biggest wine regions, before reaching Napier. We had a couple of days around Napier, looking around the Art Deco city and sampling wine at one of the many Vineyards in the area. We also managed to find a free campsite there which was great!
The second day there we headed out towards Cape Kidnappers which is famous for its resident Gannet colony out on the cliffs. It’s quite difficult to get to with no road access but we decided to decline all the expensive day-trip options and opted for a free walk! Luckily the day we chose was a lovely sunny one which made the 13mile round trip a little easier! It took us 5 hours in total but was well worth it and the birds were very smelly but pretty!
At the end of our walk I (Laura) rang around a few campsites in the area to see if any had Sky TV as the all important Wales v All Blacks game was on at some unearthly hour the next morning! We found a camp with sky which turned out to be nice, cheap and had a very cute resident kitten! We got up at 6 am, filled ourselves with coffee and watched the game with a nice Maori man while the kitten crawled all over us, which was all very nice just a shame about the score! We then set off on a long driving day going south to wellington.
On route to wellington we made a stop off at Palmeston North where mum and dad (Harrison) lived for a year. We had some lunch there and then made a visit to the New Zealand Rugby Museum which was brilliant, especially as the man working there was from Cardiff and put the welsh anthem on full volume for us! Stani didn’t seem to mind as he wandered round looking at hundreds of historic rugby memorabilia! We eventually made it to Wellington where we stayed just outside the city in a camp with Pete & Rachel, a couple from Bristol that we met in Fiji. We got a bus into town where we went out for a few drinks to get out of the vans!
Finally, the past few days have been spent in Wellington where we have mostly been visiting people and eating lots of tea and biscuits, much to Stani’s delight! We spent the first day wandering round Te Papa, Wellingtons Museum and battling the wind, it lives up to its name as windy Welly! We then met Denise- a nurse who we met in Africa and had a lovely Malaysian meal and sipped local wine while reminiscing over our time in Africa. We stayed the night at Denise’s and had our first night in a proper bed for 3 weeks which was lovely.
The next day we wandered around Zealandia- a wildlife reserve and then said our goodbyes to Denise and headed out to stay with Judy & Trevor- friends of mum & dad from their NZ days. We had a lovely couple of days with them, being made to feel very at home, fed lots of nice food and had a nice comfy bed to sleep in. On our last day in Welly we crossed the city to meet up with Janeen, a friend from Exeter rugby and her adorable son Lachlan, but unfortunately Dave, (who was previously fitness coach at Exeter) was not there as we was off with the Wellington Hurricanes who he now works for. We had a lovely afternoon reminiscing about old Exeter days, being entertained by Lachlan and drinking tea!
We are now off to south island where we start the second leg of out NZ trip with lots more to look forward to. Will add more photos soon.
Hope all are well,
Love Laura and Stani xx
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