I told you I was going for a second attempt on the Tongariro Crossing. After all, the hike on Saturday was good for burning calories, nothing more than that. This Wednesday the weather was REALLY fine. It was great. A few clouds coming and going but great visibility. Finally we could see where we were going. So we started the Tongariro crossing again. This time we had 1 hour less because the bus left an hour later, but after we did the whole track in 6 hours the previous time, we thought we had enough time for a side walk - [View Full Entry]

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As you have probably noticed so far, I am doing here in New Zealand things that are VERY different. The last 3 days were probably the most different adventure I have done here. The Whanganui river journey, as it is called, is one of NZ "great walks" as they defined. But it's not a walk - it's a canoe journey. You pack all your stuff in water proof barrels, tie them to the canoe, take paddles (one each and one spare... just in case), put yourself and your partner on the canoe, and off you go. No guide, no group - [View Full Entry]

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The answer to the question might come but first there was Friday, that started in Auckland. Yes we have been in Rotorua the day before and for those familiar with NZ map is sounds awkward probably but we went there for some errands ("sidurim"), and then drove back south all the way to the village of Whakapapa, in Tongariro national park. We had a funny error on the way. We chose some way that looked nice in the map, better than driving just on the highways. We visited a nice waterfall and then continued on a gravel (unsealed) road, nice views, [View Full Entry]

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After the short prologue for the thermal area that we had in "craters of the moon", we continued on Wednesday to some more REAL stuff - smelly and beautiful nature. We left Taupo in the morning to go to a place called "Orakei Korako". The place is full of these thermal things - one geyser that didn't come out for us... but there were amazing silica terraces, which are terraces in beautiful colors, white, yellow, red, and steam coming from the ground everywhere. One area there is called "the artist's palette" because the ground is so colorful. There are also mud [View Full Entry]

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Look at the pictures. Yes, this is me!!!! I was thinking about this ever since I arrived to New Zealand. It's something I can't really explain. I had a husband that's been doing it as a hobby for the last 2 years and I never even wanted to come and see, not to say jump myself. But here, everybody's doing it, everybody's talking about it, and you start to think it's a normal thing to do - jump from an airplane... Since I started traveling with Erez we talked about it but we were both unsure. But as we came to [View Full Entry]

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Another amazing miracule or the amazing luck we have all the time: we are renting a car from a very "cheap company". There aren't much guarantees for what you get. So when we called Saturday morning to say we are coming for the car they only had a small 2-door Suzuki. We have so many things, food etc, how would we manage? We could choose to wait till noon, maybe they'll have more cars but we decided that since there are no guarantees we better take what they have. By the time we reached the agency 1/2 hour later, a bigger [View Full Entry]

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I added also some photos to existing posts - starting from 17/3 (And correted some typos... Horrible to notice how many I have when Word is not here to correct me :-) [View Full Entry]

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That's it! bye bye south island, north island here I come! Yesterday morning we boarded the Interislander ferry for the 3 hours trip from Picton to Wellington. Wellington is not the most beautiful city. There are some nice buildings here but the overall design could have been better. Still there are pubs open late - as we didn't see so far in NZ, and one could have some fun. We did have some beers and even danced to the live music in an Irish pub here. Unfortunately, due to Easter they had to close at midnight, otherwise they are open till [View Full Entry]

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Tuesday was one of these days we don't do much (which doesn't happen so often). We started the day with a pancake breakfast, with chocolate sirup and banana... (and thanks again Sheli for the recipe!), and spent a few hours at Angie and Gordon's to read about the North island and plan ahead. Then we went to the "Gardens of the World" in Hope, a town near Nelson. We found it in the Lonely Planet but it seems that nobody heard of this place, even in the info in Nelson they didn't know what we were talking about... Anyway it was [View Full Entry]

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As you could probably understand already, Abel Tasman park is by the sea. So why not look at it also from the sea? So we took a 2-day group tour. In the first day we kayaked. We started paddling to the Tonga island where they have a seal breeding colony, and again we were amazed by the baby seals that simply love performing in front of us. Then we paddled along the beautiful shore, to Musquito bay beach for lunch (Surprisingly, I got biten by a bee there, not just by musquitoes). They provided pretty good lunch, and long time for [View Full Entry]

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