Day 1

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At somewhere around 10PST, my trip started. I took off from San Fran to Auckland on a 13 hour flight. There isn't much to say about it, it was flight, it was long, I was happy when it was over.

Once my plane landed, I immediately got my rental car, so I could start my vacation. I rented it from some company called 'Bargain Rental Cars', and... I got exactly what I paid for. A dirt cheap car (Toyota Vita), from possibly the start of the century. Seriously, this thing had nothing automatic except the transmission, tiny, an FM radio that went as high 97MHz, and not much else. The tires on this thing looked like the donuts you have on regular American cars. Regardless, it drove, and I hauled ass on my way to the Northern most point on the North Island, Cape Reinga.

When you drive in New Zealand, the roads all have hairpin turns, large increases/decreases in elevation, and are very narrow. Luckily, I google mapped where I was going before I left for NZ so I knew how long it would take, but driving takes much longer than you might think. All (and I mean all) of their roads move with the land, instead of cutting the straight-most path through it. Attached pictures should showcase how narrow some of the tunnels are, and how some of the roads wind.

New Zealand also reminds you multiple times about driving on the left side of the road. So much that they post stickers in their rental cars, as well as post signs to help drivers. There are blue signs that tell you what side of the road you should be on. The good rule of the thumb is that the driver is always closest to the center line. They also have a lot of one-way bridges. These bridges are trafficked by signs that tell you if you have the right of way to cross or not. A large white arrow in the direction you are driving means you have right of way, a small red arrow, means you don't. In the summer, they do a lot of construction, so you can also guarantee that you will hit some of that as well. From all the previous things I've stated about the roads, there is a mandatory max 100km/hr speed limit on all roads in New Zealand, and they will enforce it, especially on tourists. Luckily, my car literally couldn't do much more than 100km/hr even if I wanted it to.

After about a 6.5hr drive, I finally made it to the Cape. It was one of the most peaceful spots I visited in the whole country. This is likely due to the fact at how hard it is to get there. You can only get to it by driving like I did, and there isn't much of anything else around it. The lighthouse is actually on the UNESCO list to achieve world heritage status. Cape Reinga is considered the dividing point between the Pacific and the Tasman sea. This causes the waves to crash pretty hard in the area. It also lead the Maori to believe this was the leaping off point for souls to heaven.

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