The seasons are backwards here

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So during all of the "rainy season" in the areas it was supposed to be raining we had near-perfect weather throughout our trip here but this last week has been in the supposedly most-sunny areas of New Zealand and we are officially in summer here and we have gotten the most rain of the trip. We decided to cancel our boat trip which was a bummer but a good idea with the weather. We got to see a lot of movies while in Paihia (the hostel had a good selection of dvd's) and then we headed across to the other coast.

There we stayed at a hostel in a small town with absolutely nothing going on in it. In good weather it is famous for enourmous sand dunes which you can "sand-board" down. This is essentially riding a boogey-board over the sand and out onto the water at the bottom. Sounded fun, but it was not raining off-and-on and not very warm. We met a guy who was the only guest in the hostel and he had no car and no idea what to do so he's been tagging along with us ever since. He's tall, blonde, has a goatee, just finished getting his psychology degree, and is really into indie-rock music. Seems fitting, eh? He's from Holland. We did some hiking in that area around a penninsula overlooking the ocean and the harbor and we went into the forest and waded through the deepest mud we've hiked in. My feet never made it completely under mud but it came to within about 1 inch of the tops of my boots. Good fun but now we have some shoe cleaning to do.

Today we came down the coast to another town about half-way to Auckland (our last stop) and stopped a few times on the way down. The Kauri trees are the biggest kind of trees in New Zealand and the biggest of the Kauris were in the forest we came through on our drive today so we stopped and did a few walks around the forest. For the most part the forest was nice and pretty simple but then you would walk around a bend in the path and there would be a giant tree just dominating an area. The biggest trees were over 50 feet in circumference and about 70 or 80 feet tall. The largest ones now are about 2,000 years old but about 100 years ago there were some that were thought to be up to 4,000 years old and likely the biggest trees in the world if measuring by volume of wood. Well, I let one of the girls we were hanging out with a few days ago use my camera cord and didn't get it back - I didn't worry about that much at the time because I still had the cord from my old camera which I thought would work but it doesn't so I'm gonna have to go get another cord before you get to see pictures. Ah, the hassels of bringing technology with me. Oh well. Seeya

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