North Island

---

I'm horrible at updating this. Internet time is at a premium in New Zealand! In any case, I'm making an update now. We really didn't give ourselves a lot of time to explore the North Island, but thats turning out to be ok since the weather is rainy and miserable. The north island has a lot of beaches and outdoorsy stuff to do, but that stuff isn't so fun in the rain!

In Wellington the weather wasn't so bad yet so we spent quite a bit of time wandering about the city, checking out the harbour and parks and perusing the shops. We went to the theatre one night, and were surprised at how behind NZ is in their movies. Most of the movies playing I had seen months ago at home. We decided to see Street Kings as neither of us had seen it and we both are madly in love with Keanu Reeves. (Really who isn't?) Not to worry we did some cultural stuff too. We went to the museum and the art gallery, both of which were impressive. But really, NZ isn't the place to see museums and art. That is much better experienced in Europe. Although, you wouldn't see any of the Mauri stuff thats displayed here.

After Wellington we headed to Tongariro National Park. This is where the mount Doom scenes in LOTR was filmed. It was pretty cool to see it in person. We had the option of hiking across the volcano, but its an eight hour hike and Jacq was not keen on it. We decided to do a four hour hike in the bush out to a waterfall instead. What an adventure that turned out to be! The path was only finished to about a quarter of the way and the rest of the path was quite a challenge! It had rained the night before so it was muddy and slippery and pretty steep in some places! In one spot a tree had fallen over and its roots had taken out a huge chunk of the path. It happened to be on a slope as well so it seemed like we wouldn't get any further. But, being so close to the end I was determined to get to the destination! Jacq flat out refused to try and get around this obstacle, so I scrambled up the side and managed to make it to the other side. After seeing me make it, she decided to give it a go rather than get left behind but she wasn't too happy about it! In the end the view over the canyon was spectacular and totally worth the sweat and effort. And we made it back over the gap in the path with no injuries too. Job Done!

From Tongariro we bused our way to Waitomo for some guided adventure. Since it was rainy and cold we opted out of the black water rafting and did a dry cave tour instead. We went through three different caves and went about 70m underground. The formations were spectacular! I love caves, its like being in a different world. Our guide through the first cave was awesome. He had helped with clearing the cave for public viewing and was one of the people who had explored it for use. He was a pretty happy guy and genuinely seemed to like his job. It just made it that much more fun. A lot of tour guides hate tourists, but he was awesome. The second cave was not as spectacular as the first, but still pretty cool. The third cave is the one that most of the tourists go see. This was kind of disappointing because the group was huge and we were just kind of herded through like cattle. The highlight of this cave was when we were boated through the glow worm cavern. When you looked up there were thousands of glow worms on the ceiling of the cavern. It was like looking up into a crystal clear night sky, but with blue stars instead of yellow. The caves were definitely a memorable experience.

From Waitomo we headed to Rotorua. Rotarua is thermal spa central. There is a lot of geo thermal activity in the area, and so there are also a lot of spas in the area. We didn't actually go to any of the spas because as a backpacker we really couldn't afford such luxuries. We settled for Starbucks instead. We did go to the towns thermal reserve area though. That was pretty neat. Seeing steam coming out from the rocks is pretty interesting to someone from small town saskatchewan. The bubbling mud and boiling lakes made me feel like I was in some sort of fantasy novel. I half expected to come across a witch's cottage. We stayed at a hostel run by a mauri couple and they were fantastic. It was more like staying in someones home than staying in a hostel. It was a good stop all around!

We are now in Auckland, but I am out of internet time so I will have to wait to update about here.

---