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London??
I'm so far away every step that I take is on my way home.Well, its a bit late - we are now nearly a couple of weeks into OZ - but here it is.....
Hey guys,
Well its been a whirlwind of a month in New Zealand. After staying with friends in Auckland for a few days (many thanks Don and Olwyn) we hopped on the Kiwi Experience bus for a quick tour of the country. It has been very fast and busy but excellent. There ain't no way that you are going to stay awake long enough to hear about everything we did so I'll just rattle off a few of the highlights for ye.
The North Island of New Zealand is incredibly volcanic. I'm only really telling you this because I didn't realise it...
Auckland itself is built on quite a few volcanoes and this provides a pretty cool landscape for the city. North of it you can find Piha beach - a great west coast surfing beach with black volcanic sand. Really cool.
Rotorua and Taupo are at the volcanic heart of the country. Steam rises up from the ground all over the place, lakes boil, geysers shoot out of the ground and the entire
place stinks of rotten eggs. (That will be the Sulphur then). Its a really amazing place. Rotorua is built on top of huge active volcanoes which cause earthquakes, small as they are, every day (and they call the Irish stupid). Just a short distance from Lake Taupo, which is a huge lake formed inside a collapsed volcano, is the 17Km Tongariro crossing. This is supposed to be one of the best one day walks in the world. It starts by going up the side of Mount Ruapehu, known as Mount Doom to all you Lord of the Rings fans, and then countinues over several volcanoes to the Red Crater, which is, not altogether suprisingly, red. It also passes the Emerald Lakes, turned bright green by minerals in the water. Really beautiful.
I had a chance to go Blackwater Rafting in the Waitomo caves. This involves a little bit of caving and then gently floating through endless pitch black caves hundreds of metres below ground, filled with beautiful waterfalls, rick formations and glow-worms - an absolutely unique experience.
Another unique experience was watching an Angola rabbit being streteched out and shaved. Hey, its pretty self explanatory - look
at the photo.
Then it was on to River Valley for a bit of Whitewater rafting. Five grade 5 sets of rapids - wow!!!!
Wellington is a nice city. They had a Lord of the Rings Exhibition on in the Museum so know I know even more useless facts.
Right, I'm going to have to shorten this down a bit now.
Franz Josef Glacier - 14km long glacier - the fastest moving and steepest in the world. Goes from the top of the mountain down to temperate rainforest. In places the ice is 400 metres thick and colours range from white to blue and even purple. Its unbelievable !!!! There are loads of holes, caves, cravasses. I'll never be able to explain this. You gotta go....
Wanaka was possibly the HIGHlight of the trip. I was taken 12,000 ft up in a very small plane and then dragged out the door. After about 45 seconds the parachute opened so that was all right. Wahey !!!!! Travelling at 180 feet per second straight down is a wee bit of a rush. Pretty excellent.
Even Barbara had her adrenalin quota when she jumped off a
Rabbit Shearing
Hands up who thought I was joking! mountain in Queenstown. Her parachute, however was already open and she paraglided down to the ground (very, very safely, for the benefit of Barbaras family).
I also tried my hand at River surfing which is basically Whitewater Rafting with a bodyboard...but thats a whole different story and you have put up with well enough of my ramblings.
Lets get on with the photos.
After a lovely weekend in Christchurch (thanks to Micheal and Jane for making us so welcome in their home) it is off to Australia in a couple of hours - Sweet As !!!
Sam and Babs
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