CN Travels

After our time at Abel Tasman, we made our way to Glenhope to stay for the night. The hostel had a great warm fire and even a record player. The next day we headed out to our destination. While driving towards Greymouth, we stopped and took a picture of the the Buller Gorge Swingbridge which is 110 meters long. See picture below. The drive to Greymouth was very scenic as we drove through the edge of the Kahurangi National Park which had some great views of the mountains. While in Greymouth, we stayed at a hostel for a week and worked for our accommodation. It was a pretty sweet deal as we got lots of cool perks. Duties included tidying up the hostel and reception duties. The manager left the hostel in our hands while he ... read more

Driving back from Mangawhai After our great time in Mangawhai, I (Carla) drove back to Auckland via the fast way. We bypassed a toll road which took us through a beautiful little town called Oneroa. Nick then drove through Auckland and surprisingly enough I managed to navigate him through the big city all on my own to Kumeu, where we took in a car show for the weekend. Avatar 3-D IMAX Once the car show ended on Sunday, we decided to hit up the Avatar movie in downtown Auckland at the Sky City Cinemas3D Imax experience. Luckily we got in but we had to sit in the front row. Did you know some Avatar 3-D graphics were developed in Wellywood (Wellington) and that the costumes and language featured in the film are all inspired by ... read more

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year Hello! Hope you all had a great Christmas and kept warm! We certainly enjoyed ourselves in the sun! It was very different celebrating Christmas without any snow!! Christmas for us consisted of eating pancakes, bacon (kiwi style) eggs and fried shrimp in the morning- It was most delicious! In the afternoon, we basked in the sun with our hostel friends and chilled out. In the evening, our hostel had a potluck dinner which was very delicious and we brought surprise spread and it went over well. Although they didn't have seafood sauce we substituted it with salsa. Our hostel "mom" baked a traditional kiwi style dessert called pavlova roll with fresh fruit along with peanut clusters (we know them as "haystacks") . Later in the evening, we jammed with ... read more

Heading Out We had been talking about heading out for a few weeks, since we had been in Tauranga looking for work for nearly three weeks, some other people had left, and Carla got a job with the city that started in two and a half weeks. Just as we were preparing to leave the next day, we got a call from one of the employment services agencies to work a night shift at the fish factory. We went, we worked, we left the next day. We drove straight from Tauranga to Napier, having gone to Taupo before we made really good time til after we passed Taupo and found some new scenery. The road crossed several mountain ranges and you could see bright green mountain grazing pastures stretching out as far as you could see ... read more

A Sneak Peak From our Hostel Hello All! As promised, this entry shows where we have been hanging out and how we have been getting around. As you can see this is where we sleep- thanks to Jeremy & M for lending their tent to us. Basically, its big enough for just the two of us. Its very cozy ! As you can see there are pictures of what our hostel looks like. Our wheels Here is a picture of our wheels. This car is a '91 Nissan Primera. It took us awhile to get used to driving on the other side of the road but we both feel comfortable with it now. At the beginning one of us would turn the wipers on at least once when we started driving as the signal button ... read more