The north island

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I had only one week left on the north island. I came here with the ferry from picton to wellington. After spending one day in the capital of new zealand, nothing really amazing, and yes i did go to the national museum :P i took a bus half way across the island to taupo. taupo is a small town on the shore of lake taupo, nz's biggest lake. I spend the rest of my day walking to the huka falls. The next day i hitch-hiked back south to the tongario national park (volcanoes) as i wanted to do the one day crossing but it was really windy and the top of the mountains were coved in clouds, so I decided not to do it. I ended up doing a small easy walk around lake rotopounamu (in the tongario national park as well), were i saw a lot of wildlife as i was the first one there in the morning. I spend the rest of my day in taupo, doing some indoor climbing.

Anyway i tried again the next morning and the weather was way better. as we got down to the start of the 20km walk we had blue sky but clouds were comming in from the west. As we got to the top, the clouds nearly reached us but weirdly they started to move out again, so we had perfect beautiful day. A lot of people do the walk, but the moon-like scenery with mount ngauruhoe (mount doom in lord of the rings) made definitely up for it. We finished our volcanic day with a bath in a hot stream in taupo. really nice to sit in a stream and the water has 40 degrees lol

yesterday i took a bus from taupo to auckland. daniel and christine who i met at one of my tracks i've done in nz invited me to their house. they live 30 minutes south of the center, so i enjoyed their great hospitality in the last 2 days. today i went into the city center of auckland and met a few people i met on the south island. we had a good time and it was nice to catch up but auckland isn't really that special. I had a little shock this evening when i checked on my flights to asia, as i saw that my flight from sydney to singapore got canceled, due to the volcanic ash cloud over europe. a lot of plains are stuck there so they don't have enough planes on this side of the world. So i called qantas straight away and the luckily booked me on a different flight just half an hr later, so it's all fine. Daniel is a doing triathlon (normally JUST half-iron man but training for an iron man atm) so he always goes swimming at 5am in the morning and can give me a lift to the airport which is near here...

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Photos

it's autum
native trees are green all year around but you find a lot of colourful ones atm too