Jetboating, but no Skydive?

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We moved along the North Island to the Coromandel peninsula. This is on the way to Auckland and has some spectacular beaches. We didn't have that much time here but we managed to stop off to see Cathedral Cove. This is a lovely secluded but well known cove on the East coast. It is a 40min walk to get there but is worth it as you can see from the photos. Being on a weekend it was actually quite busy but this was mostly due to a wedding going on down there. Its a lovely location for a wedding but I wouldn't fancy walking 40mins in a wedding gown on a hot day. We also saw a little blue penguin swimming off the beach.

Further down from Cathedral cove is Hot water beach. This has hot springs under the beach and you can dig yourself a little pit in the sand. Unfortunately you need to get there at the right tide times to do this and we were pushed for time so we had to just dig our feet in for a while.

We didn't stay long in Auckland either. When you've been travelling a while you get to realise that every city is the same no matter where you are. However this is where we picked Adele up again as she flew in from Christchurch. As she was behind us she luckily manged to do the glacier walk so we were a bit envious.

We then met up with Jason's mate Martin (aka Big Tel) and his wife Sarah, who were in Auckland on holiday. This was nice and J liked talking 'job' (some of you will understand this).

We then headed to Lake Taupo where the original plan was for Adele and Jason to do a skydive. However, Jason then couldn't make his mind up so Adele did it on her own whilst we went on the Rapids Jet boat. This is just like the thing we did in Sydney but up/down river going through rapids. As you can see (piccie below) this makes the boat jump. The company have previously sunk three boats (they didn't tell us until afterwards) in these rapids but its still great fun. We picked Adele up still in one piece after her skydive. She loved it and convinced Jason he needed to do it. Jason was also gutted as Adele jumped with loads of gorgous Swedish girls. However there was no time left for him to do it in Taupo a we moved onto Wellington going through the Tongariro national park. This again was used as the setting for Mordor in LotR's. With Mount doom as well.

Whilst in Borneo we met a New Zealand couple (Penny & Kim) on the turtle island who gave us their e-mail address. And through them we got to stay with Penny's sister and husband (Kerry & Dave) in Wellington who we didn't know and hadn't met. They kindly let us stay and cooked us a lovely dinner. Now that says something about Kiwi hospitality!

Just around the corner from Dave and Kerry's is the Karori sanctuary. This is a piece of protected land that has had all non native species of plant and animal removed. This is done by erecting a very long 'predator fence'. This allows for native species to recover and has been successful. It also makes for a lovely walk. We saw the native NZ lizard Tuatara and native parrot the Kaka. It was nice to walked around this but Adele kept moaning that it was too far to walk.

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Photos

Rapids Jet
J and me are in the middle row.