North Island, NZ

Ok, ok. Finally getting this down somewhere. I’ve been saying I would post something for a while now, but I’m actually pretty impressed that I’m doing this. If you know anything about me and how much I love and have an art for procrastination, then you’re likely impressed right now too.

We left Seattle on March 1st, 2018 towards Auckland, New Zealand. Flight was what you expect to be in a long flight across a major ocean: long, but you get through it with an overdose of movies and tv shows. We had a nice but quick layover in Honolulu and ate some sushi with a celebratory tropical cocktail before loading our plane for another 9 hours. Arriving in Auckland should have been exciting news, but really, at that point neither of us had slept in almost 24 hrs and all we could think about was how we needed to catch some Zzzs.

The next day was when things really began for us but we were off to a slow start. We got up early, picked up our rental car and tested out this driving on the left side of the road thing. Wasn’t so bad, but we got a good kick out of how often we turned on our wipers instead of our blinkers (weeks later and still occasionally doing this). After a little trial and error (ex. honking at someone on the correct side of the road for driving on the wrong side of the road even though we were in fact driving on the other side of the road and in no immediate danger…) we managed to make our way up to the Bay of Islands. This is about 3 hours North of Auckland and the drive is BEAUTIFUL. Image lush, green, topical, windy roads with a waterfront view. DREAMY.

The Bay of Islands are definitely a place worth going, but we unfortunately ran into some poor weather and didn’t do any of the water activities most tourists do. This actually worked in our favor because we were still feeling the jet lag. Instead we relaxed at our hostel, did a few small hikes to some waterfalls (when the sun did decide to show her face), walked along the beach and began to get our camping things situated. We would have liked to do some of the boating day trips, but I’m happy with how things worked out. Oh yea, and there were tons of little farms with road side stands. Once we got a bag of avocados for $5NZ (that’s less than $4 USD!!!) and bought some of New Zealand’s famed Manuka honey. We also stopped by a blueberry farm with homemade ice cream and and fresh blueberries freshly blended into a soft served ice cream with cone. Why Capital Hill doesn’t have one of these yet is a mystery to me.

Due to the on and off again down pours, we decided to head south for some nicer weather. Next stop was Waitomo. Again the drive was AMAZING, and I started to get the idea- New Zealand is awesome and beautiful in so many ways.  Waitomo is a hilly area with many deep caverns, and in New Zealand caves they also have these pretty cool glow worms. These are something I’ve been wanting to see for a long time, and I was so glad for this bucket list check. We decided to do a Black Water Rafting tour which is basically tubing through a cave’s underground stream system complete with water falls and these glow worms (actually glow maggots-yuck) that are on the cave ceilings and light up like the night sky. Image floating through darkness and looking up to see the caves stalagmites lightly lit up by blue bioluminescence that looks like the stars. Turns out, they are meant to mimic the stars and they rely on this mechanism and trickery to catch their prey. If you have the chance, do it. Wish I had the pictures for proof, but you have google, you can look it up. Imagine that, but as always, better in person.

What else….. Oh, so after Waitomo we moved on to Rotorua. On the way we stopped at the Hobbiton movie set in Matamata. This is the area you think of when you think of New Zealand. Green rolling hills and a ton of sheep. Robin is a pretty big fan of LTR so it was cool to see what went into making the movies. Turns out Peter Jackson is kinda nuts, but his attention to detail really shows in his movies. This was cool, but I’m more excited to talk about Rotorua.

Rotorua is a geothermal wonderland and the Maori culture’s epicenter. Here we stayed in a weird little airBnB and that was surprisingly cheaper than any hotel, hostel or campsite near town. While in Rotorua we walked among a young California Redwood forest, swam in a geothermal heated creek called Kerosene Creek, visited Wai-O-Tapu geothermal park and visited a geothermal Maori Village. The whole town smelt like sulfur but we especially reeked of it after our swim. Kerosene Creek was an awesome little area where the water was as warm as a hot tub with a beautiful 10 or so ft waterfall. If it didn’t smell like farts, I’d say it was a pretty romantic little spot, unless you’re into that sort of thing. The geothermal park was probably the most impressive place we visited in Rotorua simply because of the water colors. I’ll include some pics for your to see what I’m talking about. The only downside is it felt like we were were being herded like cattle a bit because of the crowds. Then there was the Maori Village. We chose a modest in comparison experience and definitely glad we did. It gave us a sense of how life is today but also a splash of how they’ve been using this area for a long time. Our meal was cooked almost completely by a geothermal pool and they have a pretty impressive geyser we saw letting off some steam. The Moari people have a rich and wonderful culture which I was glad to learn more about, but also saddened and reminded of what British colonization has done to most native cultures.

Moving on to most recently in our trip, visited Wellington which definitely has a cool, funky, hip vibe, but I would say we mostly enjoyed our time outside the city. We visited Zealandia which is a nature conservation park where we saw the famous Kiwi bird, these lizards that are not actually lizards at all called the Tuatara, a giant eel, and tons of other endemic species of birds. You could walk around this place for hours (and we did), but we also chose to do a night tour to see many of NZ’s nocturnal species. Another favorite activity was venturing out to a little beach town where there was a marine nature reserve. We so happened to be there while the tide was out and so we got to do some tide pooling. One of my favorite things! We saw starfish, sea anemone and a bunch of shells including abalone!

All in all, North Island was a great time but I think Robin and I both were ready to leave to the South Island and hit the outdoors for some camping. A little more our speed.

I know this first post has been long and delayed, hopefully we will be able to keep up a bit more in the future.