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Published: April 13th 2008
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Hello everyone!
We're off to Fiji tomorrow night so this signifies the end of our tour of New Zealand and what a great time we've had in this country! We had a wonderful time in the south island and this continued throughout the north island!
We arrived in Wellington in the the north island by the interisland ferry from Picton and this passed through the Marlborough Sounds. In Wellington we explored the city centre and then drove up so we could view the magnifcent views across the Wellington area. Next stop was at the other side of the country, on the east coast, in Napier. I'd managed to plan the trip brilliantly and in town were the English cricket team; now playing the Test Series against the Blackcaps. Unlike the previous game, this time we won the match and the series and enjoyed being part of the famous English Barmy Army!!! We continued up this coast and onto the most eastern part of New Zealand; East Cape. Along this coast there are many beautiful beaches and scenery. At the top of the East Cape is the Coromandel Peninsula, and a place called Hot Water Beach. At low tide, hundreds
of people hire out spades and dig holes along the beach in order to sit in their own hot water spa. Some distance under the sand are thermal waters and this water makes its way to the surface and is very, very hot! In some places it can reach temperatures upto 65 degrees C. However, just our look, was that low tide never seemed to arrive and as fast as I started to dig a hole (yes me not Kate!), the waves came in and flooded the hole so we had to be content with just standing in the water and keeping warm that way!!!
We continued around the coast of the Coromandel Peninsula and visited places such as Cook's Beach, Cathedral Cove, Owharoa Falls and many other wonderful places and then made our way south to the very thermal and very, very, very smelly city of Rotorua. The surface of Rotorua is very thin compared to other places in the world and is one of the worlds major geothermal hot spots. This can be seen by the numerous spots were steam just flows out of the ground. However along with the steam is the lovely aroma of sulphur
which can be smelt throughout the city. We decided to visit one of the local thermal resorts to witness the many thermal hot spots, geysers and boiling hot mud pools. The pools consist of many different colours and these are due to the many different mineral elements within them. The smell was even more intense than in the city but we survived, just!!! We also discovered the history of Rotorua, viewed other active thermal area's and went swimming in a river where the water was nice and warm; Keresene Creek! Rotorua is also a major Maori area so we decided to witness a traditional Maori cultural evening. We had all our food cooked in the ground called a hangi which was very nice. We also watched a traditional cultural performance, learning about the tattoo art, carvings, dances and battles that are all tradtionally maori. The haka was the finale to the night and was performed brilliantly.
Just south of Rotorua, is Lake Taupo (New Zealand's largest lake). It is also a very thermal area but its more famous for being the cheapest place to skydive in New Zealand. So of course we had to take advantage of this amazing
Te Apiti Wind Farm
only about a 5th of the site it was massive! offer!!! All we can say is wow!!! We jumped from 12,000ft which gave us 45 seconds of freefall and what a feeling it is! Its just too difficult to describe the rush but it just goes too quickly. The views are amazing and its definately something i'd do again. However the same might not be said for kate. Kate keeps saying that she couldn't breathe and thought she might die not the fact that she might splat on the ground, just that no oxygen was getting into her lungs, but overall she loved it! We went for the full package of photo's and dvd so we've got loads of pictures of us looking really, really stupid with the nice, wobbly cheek effect so we'll show you when we get back!!! Next stop was Hamilton, where once again we had problems with our camera but on the bright side they had the wonderful Hamilton gardens and the zoo (kate was in heaven!!!). Hamilton zoo is only a smallish zoo but they have on show both the giraffe and the tapir. I think we spent 4hrs in the zoo and half of this was watching these two enclosures! Once again we got
Moon Light over Clifton beach
Luke loves taking his night shots now!!! to hand feed the giraffes carrots so as you can imagine, Kate was extremely excited and like a small child! The only down point was that we have no photos because of the broken camera.
Finishing off with the north island, we only had the area above Auckland to explore. This started off at the Kauri forests. These forests contain the immense Kauri trees; some upto 4,000 years old and one is 14 metres in diameter; the Te Matua Ngahere (meaning the father of the forest). We continued along the coast, past huge big sand dunes and beautiful beaches and coastal scenery. One place that especially so was the Bay of Islands. These are a group of many islands and supposedly the area with the second bluest sky in the world behind Rio but our look was out and we had dark grey sky. We took a jet boat ride around these islands and riding the swell through the "hole in the rock" on the island of Mutukokakao. This bit we got a bit wet and our stomachs were jumping about but the rest of the time the water was calm and the islands were beautiful with white sandy
beaches and clear blue sea. The north island has quite a few beautiful caves to explore so we decided to go and do our own trip armed with one headtorch and one dimly lit torch requiring new batteries. We saw some beautiful cave formations but we don't yet know the difference between stalagmites and staglagtites!!! We also saw lots of glow worms. The last day before the campervan had to be back we went to a thermal water park, with all pool temperatures ranging between 28-48 degrees. I managed to keep my foot in the 48 degrees for about a second before I had to jump back into much cooler pool! One pool was had loads of nice seats in it, was really warm and had a huge screen up showing movies all day. The best bit of this park were the slides they had 11 different ones, and they were made from this really shiny metal and all really steep and were the fastest ones i have ever been down. One even had a 3 meter drop at the end, we definately had a good time on these.
So we got to Auckland our last destination, where we
had four days to explore, seeing lots of different places in the city. We did a harbour cruise and ferry trips across to Devonport and explored the Americas Cup villiage.
Now we set of for 2 weeks of chilling out on the beach of Fiji hopefully!!!
Hope you are all well, take care and keep in touch
love Katie and Luke xxxxx
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claire
non-member comment
wicked photos! enjoy your chillin out time in fiji.... lovely!