New Zealand - North Island

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The Wine Tour

We took our wine tour in the area of Hawkes bay on the North island. With the help of our guide and driver, aptly named Vince Vine, we visited 5 winneries and sampled about 30 wines. Now this all sounds hunky-dory, basically a sophisticated pub crawl. But, it was actually quite difficult. At the first winnery we sampled about 9 wines and a port, we were already feeling quite pi##ed. We still had another 4 winneries to go. Coupled with the fact that we were gradually getting more and more intoxicated, we were expected to make comments on the wines we tried. I dont think the winemakers were too impressed with the extent of our wine lingo: ´go nice with a bit of cheese´, ´I could drink a bottle of that´ and ´tastes a bit like lambrini´ were just a few (OK, we didn´t really say the last one). By the end though we could successfully distinguish a red from a white and had fully proved the theory ´the more you drink the better they taste´

The Bungeeeee

I don’t know why I decided to do a bungy jump. This was my main thought as I waddled over to the edge of the Taupo bungee (www.taupobungy.co.nz). 47m below me, the crystal clear waters of the Waikato river, was there really any need to attach a giant elastic band to my feet and plunge myself towards them? The one thing I remember is the moment you put your toes over the edge, having to overcome the body’s natural instinct to turn around, head home, make a cup of tea, maybe a few gingernuts and forget it ever happened. I jumped. As I fell my feelings were a mixture of fear, elation and did I remember to take the car keys out of my pocket!

Hot water beach

The Coromandel peninsular had some really nice coastline and beaches. The most interesting of these, hot water beach - so called because of the hot water springs running underneath the sand. We hired ourselves an industrial sized spade and started digging. It took a few attempts, but eventually we found hot water and soon we had ourselves our own hot tub on the beach - amazing. There were plenty of other people doing the same thing and it was quite a spectacle watching everybody dig there holes, trying to make there hot tub bigger and deeper than the next. Other cool places on the peninsular were Cathedral Cove, Karangahake Gorge and New Chums Beach (apparently one of the top ten in the world, it was pretty nice, although it had better have been, it was a chufing nightmare to get to). Also on the Cormandel, we harvested our own green-lipped mussels, similar to the mussels we get in the UK, but about 10 times the size. I cooked these up with some wine in what was going to be a gourmet extravaganza, but they didn’t taste great, maybe they were off, either way a waste of perfectly good wine.

Rotaroua

A place of extraordinary geothermal activity, everywhere you look there is steam coming from the ground, pools of bubbling water and sulphur. Apparently meaning one thing, the place absolutely stinks. Its like being permanently being trapped under the duvet with your worst eggy fart! This does have one key advantage, if you do fart you probably wont smell it and if you do just blame it on the Sulphur. Once out of Rotorua I had to think of other excuses.

We never did find Gandalf of Frodo Baggins on our travels in NZ, I think the recent 3-part documentary on NZ must have been a fake.

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