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Published: March 29th 2010
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Kaikora
Pool on Christophers birthday. Hello friends and family, KIA ORA!?
This is going to be our first entry in English for our new international friends around the world ;-)
We have soon been traveling for 2 months and now the second part of our trip is ending. Since the last time you heard from us we've been traveling around both the south and the north island of New Zealand. Under our 17 days with the van we have seen a lot, traveled over 3000km and enjoyed many new experiences like grade 5 river rafting, skydiving over beautiful lake wanaka, kayaking in abel tasman nationalpark and much more...
Our biggest adventure was probably renting a van together with Charles, Jan and Chris. Charles is a french guy we met in kuala lumpur before arriving to New Zealand. Chris and Jan is two dutch guys we ran into on the airport in Christchurch when we arrived. It was late in the night and we didn't have a reservation for a hostel so we taged along with them. After one night we desided to travel together and we rented an awesome 8 seater toyota van which we named waka (means car in maori, sort of).
Kaikora
Live band We started our trip without Charles (he arrived 3 days later) and went to Kaikora and celebrated Christophers 25th birthday. We went out for a couple of beers, playing pool and ending up in a local bar with great live music. I managed to get the band to sing a special happy birthday song dedicated to Chrisopher! The atmosphere was great and we had a really good evening. Good start in New Zealand.
After that we drove around the south island looking for more adventures. Our first activity was river rafting in rangiata. Two grade 5 (highest grade) runs and much more made river rafting one of the best things we've done on this trip. Shortly after we outdid ourselfs by skydiving 12000 feet over lake wanaka. 30 second of fantastic free fall was amazing. Kayaking in abel tasman for two days was really nice aswell. Going from gold sandy beaches to close encouter with seals and going back in bad conditions made the trip very interesting.
In the south island we also visited a one of the few growing glaciers in the world, Frans Josef Glacier. We even made time to celebratet st pattysday in queenstown.
In the north island we only had 5 days which we spent on watching gejsers and mudpools in rotorua, swimming in hot pools in taupo, looking at surfers in raglan, trying to see mount doom in the tongiraro national park and partying a little in both wellington and auckland. We even tryed our luck in the skycity casino in auckland, altough our luck wasn't with us it was still a good night. I also went solo and bungyjumped 80 meters from a bridge. 2 seconds of pure pleasure >p !
Today we have returned the car and on wednesday we fly to Sidney for the next chapter of our trip, the east coast of Australia!
I'm going to let the pictures fill out the blanks and let your imagination do the rest. Are youee happy? (Standard question by our Guide in the rafting, finishing with paddle HIGH FIVE!)
Untill next time, STAY HAPPY 😊
Cheers!
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