North Island of New Zealand – another gorgeous week of adventure!

Still fresh with awe from our time on the South Island, we arrived in Auckland for another busy week of exploring.  We scored with the friendliest shuttle driver from the airport who, on our way into the city, took a detour by Mount Eden to show us the view of the city and its surrounding harbor. 

From up there it looked impressive but when we got to the city it was much less so.  We were only there for a day and a half but we didn’t find much to do and, despite there being numerous restaurants in the area where we stayed, none of them really appealed to us so we wandered around for hours before settling on subpar Asian food.  Alex did, however, get the biggest cup of coffee ever at the café across the street from our YHA.  It literally came in a soup bowl and here you can see how shocked he was with the amount of caffeine he was about to consume… 

By far the lowlight of Auckland, for me, was the gorgeous Tuesday afternoon we wasted indoors watching the Bears lose their Monday Night Football matchup against the San Francisco 49ers.  As if the loss itself wasn’t bad enough, the 49ers are Alex’s team so he cheered against me the whole time then gloated for the rest of the day after they won.  It wasn’t all bad though.  Because football isn’t popular at all over there, and it was like 2 o’clock on a Tuesday, we had an entire room all to ourselves with a massive projection screen that took up like a whole wall – awesome way to watch a game (though not one where your team gets spanked).

The next day we rented a car and headed south to the ‘Shire’.  As many of you probably already know, Lord of the Rings was filmed entirely in New Zealand and, much to my chagrin, Alex bought a book with all the film locations so we could check them out in person.  Unlike some of the other locations, the Shire still had the full set on location (because they just finished filming the first Hobbit movie) and you could go on tours of it.  I was feeling pretty nerdy as we drove down the small country road on our way there but this was one of the few things Alex really wanted to do in NZ so I went with it.  Haha, I had nothing to worry about though because we showed up and there were all kinds of nerds on-hand wearing their LOTR gear, drinking fake Hobbit beer and playing some weird medieval-esque Hobbit games while awaiting their tours.  The tours turned out to be pretty expensive for what it was, basically just a drive onto some farmer’s property (like I’ve never seen a field before?!) where there were two Hobbit doors set up, so we passed and took free photos of the rolling hills on our drive that look like they were straight out of the movie anyway.   

The next stop on our adventure was Rotorua, home to the North Island’s famous hot springs.  The North Island is comprised mostly of volcanoes and the water around Rotorua is so hot it’s literally boiling in the ground.  The whole town smells like sulfur but the natural wonder of the hot springs was incredible.  We walked through the local park and got a glimpse of them but that was nothing compared to our trip to the geothermal park outside of town called Wai-O-Tapu.  First we saw boiling mud pools, then a geyser explosion, and finally colorful, steaming hot springs (the minerals in the water determined the color of the water and there was everything from slime green to bright orange).  We spent half a day there oohing and aaahing everything in sight. 

 

Then we continued our drive south to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand.  The week we were there the Hobbit movie was having its world premiere in Wellington so the city renamed itself the ‘Middle of Middle Earth’ and Hobbit mania was in full swing.  Pretty much every advertisement and store window in the whole town had something to do with the movie, people were rocking Hobbit ears everywhere you looked and there was even a Hobbit Fair downtown. 

Hobbit nerdiness aside, Wellington was awesome.  It was by far the best city in New Zealand, reminding me a lot of San Francisco, and we made the most of our brief time there.  We wandered around checking out the city and its architecture, visited Victoria Lookout for a gorgeous view of the city, spent one whole day at the Te Papa museum, a huge free public wonder right on the bay with five stories of cultural and environmental history of NZ, and of course went to Weta Cave (for those of you non-LOTR fans, Weta is Peter Jackson’s studio where the special effects for movies like LOTR and the Hobbit come to life and I have to admit, it was pretty awesome). 

 

The main outdoor activity we wanted to do on the North Island was hike the Alpine Crossing, an eight hour hike through Tongariro National Park that is hyped as one of the Top Ten day walks in the world.  But, once again, we were foiled by Mother Nature.  As I mentioned, the island is comprised of tons of active volcanoes but none had gone off in like fifteen years so naturally, two days before we were slated to hike the Crossing, Mount Tongariro erupted and they closed the hiking trail for the week.  It was quite disappointing but we’ve become good at rolling with the punches so we hiked to the Tama Lakes in a different area of the park instead.   It was another beautiful day outdoors in New Zealand, our last of the trip, and we were treated to more stunning views and a gorgeous waterfall on our walk.

We flew out the next day but first we had one final adventure planned – cave tubing in Waiotomo!  Waiotomo is famous for its labyrinth of caves and underground waterways and the whole town’s economy is centered around the various ways you can explore them; there’s cave tubing, abseiling, glow worm tours and more.  We booked ourselves on the first cave tubing trip of the day (since we had to leave by 1pm in time to drive back to Auckland to catch our flight) and I really never gave much thought as to what we signed up for.  Bright and early the next morning, dressed in a pretty thick wetsuit sitting underground in the dark listening to our guides warn us about the spiders and bugs we could encounter, I began to have my doubts but it ended up being awesome.  Our safety helmets had lights but we turned them off as we sat in our tubes drifting down the stream in the cave looking at the ceiling aglow like a night sky from the thousands of glow worms.  We looked ridiculous and it was COLD down there but we all just floated along in awe, knowing we’d probably never see anything like it again.

Hah, don’t let this look on Alex’s face fool you, he was geeked out too. 

 

Check out the underground waterslide!

After a long day, and an utterly luxurious flight on Emirates Airline (believe it or not, the cheapest flight we could find), we were back in Sydney with one day to spare before my family’s arrival.  The twelve weeks of non-stop travel since we left Cairns was starting to take its toll and, as excited as I was to see my Mom and cousin, I was equally pumped to get to Melbourne, unpack my backpack and settle into the last leg of our trip.  But first ten days of action-packed family fun time lay ahead of us…  More on that soon!