Advertisement
Published: December 12th 2005
Edit Blog Post
Bay of Islands
Very blue water... Hi folks, here goes for a pretty lengthy entry covering my previous 10 days in NZ.
North Island I arrived on 2nd December, early morning, and having picked up a car headed north from Auckland into the Bay of Islands area. The first thing I really noticed about this country is how green it is. A lot of the scenery reminds me of the more rural areas of England, except here it is often more dramatic, and with better weather of course.
In the bay area I had my first go on a jetbike and it was great fun. Nearly came off it a couple of times but made sure I held on 'cos the water wasn't anywhere near as warm as in Australia. Also went quad biking on the same day as you'll see from the attached photo. That was good fun too, but a bit tame compared to the jetbike!
Next day I went diving in the Poor Knights Islands, just a few km's from a tiny village called Tutukaka. The diving here is in much colder water than Australia, as I mentioned, and in fact the water is around 17 degrees rather than the lovely
Quad biking
Not as much fun as a jetbike 28 degrees of Oz. It realistically just means wearing full wetsuits, and you get different underwater scenery, but it's still very cool. We even dived into an underwater cave and when you look back out you get a superb silhoutte of all the fish at the cave entrance.
Next stop on the North island (after an uneventful night in Auckland) was a place called Rotorua, famous as a geothermally active area. I visited a thermal wonderland (that's what they promote it as!) at Wai-O-Tapu and saw lots of thermal pools of mud, sulphur, water, etc. In truth the place absolutely stinks because of the sulphur but once you get used to it, the place is impressive. I've included a photo of the 'devils bath'. Even the photo doesn't do justice to how green the bath was! I also visited the nearby hot spa's which are sourced from a thermal spring, but thankfully without the sulphurous smell.
Last stop before transferring to the South island was in Waitomo, the caving centre. I spent a day underground, abseiling, crawling through tiny caves and potholes and generally getting very grubby and wet. Nice! If I remember correctly we ended up being
Devil's bath
The photo doesn't do it justice! about 80 metres below ground at one stage. It was quite creepy when the guide asked us all to turn off our headlamps - it was truly pitch black!
South Island I flew into Christchurch and stayed overnight before starting the drive across to the west coast and the glacier region. The drive, via Arthurs Pass, is amazing. It takes you into some fantastic wilderness scenery and through and over one of the mountain ranges in that area. A must-do if you're here. The west coast glacier region is stunning - I'm not sure where else in the world you can be 5km from the sea to your west and 5km from a glacier to your east!
Spent the whole next day hiking and climbing on the Franz Josef glacier. That was a lot of fun , especially having to wear ice talons on the bottom of your boots for grip. It was quite surprising how close we got to some very deep crevasses in the ice, and the guide was telling us how some of those crevasses how only appeared a couple of weeks beforehand - the glacier here is changing that often.
Next I
headed down to Wanaka to do my sky dive. It's been on my list of things-to-do for years now so there was no way I was going to miss out doing it over here, with all the fabulous scenery! It was such a buzz I was laughing and grinning for ages after we touched down. I did the highest jump available too, which gives a full minute of freefall!! I've attached a couple of photos I got from the dive organisers. You can see Wanaka in the second photo, on the edge of the lake.
The final bit of my trip has taken me down to Milford sound, part of the Fiordland region of NZ. It's a pain in the backside getting there, as it is only about 40km from Queenstown, but involves a 300km drive around the impassable mountain range. It's worth it though as the drive alone is fabulously scenic, and cruising along the sound is special. Sadly I've not had a chance to get any photos from the last few days put onto CD yet. If you're interested, just drop me an email and I'll send some on!
Finally, I had a go at hang
gliding in Queenstown to finish the trip off on a high, literally. That was great fun too, albeit a little brief as we were only flying for 15 minutes. I flew for about 5 of those though, and I'll definitely be trying that again sometime!
So that might be all from me. I'm heading back to Auckland tomorrow and then start the long journey back to the UK on Wednesday. See you all soon!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.079s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 6; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0433s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb