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Published: February 17th 2010
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Hello Everyone,
Well we are in Buenos Aires now, but i thought i would write a wrap up on New Zealand first, next one will be about south america.
So New Zealand was great. Very relaxing, and was definitely great to see everyone on Haydens side. Camping in Lake Tarawera was brilliant. Its this big massive lake, set into these lovely hills. Very green, very still, very very picturesque. From lake tarawera we loaded up the boat and it was a 15 min drive over to Hot Water Beach. Basically there are hot springs everywhere, and the entire shoreline is hot water. You dig your feet into the sand and it actually burns you. I cant even begin to explain how nice it felt to just swim around in fresh water and not worry about salt in your eyes/mouth, and sharks and all that hahaha. Just this still massive expance of lovely water. Oh and taniwhas that is - lake monsters that can eat you whole, just like lochness ... or so they kept telling me 😊
We did a lot of wakeboarding, and a lot of drinking, and a lot of just sitting around having a yarn.
Definitely a great time. We LOVE drinking on Lake Tarawera!!!! (thats for you Gene) hahaha.
We spent our entire trip on the farm in whakatane but did quite a bit from there. For christmas haydens parents had bought us tickets for the white island tour. I think it is actully the only touristy thing to do in whakatane hehe, but it was awesome. White island is basically a big active volcano, and you can only get there by boat (3 hour return trip) and haydens sister was working as a tour guide for the company. She did a great job (go Michelle!) and it was awesome to see this volcano. Its still belching out crazy smoke and sulfur and hot bubbly mud and everything. We even had those full-on old-school gas masks so that you could breathe with all the sulfur. Very cool tour. And on the way back on the boat we saw a massive pod of dolphins. There would have been over a hundred of them just swimming with the boat and jumping around and stuff. Sooooo pretty.
So on our
finding moko adventure hayden and i woke up one morning and decided we were determined
to see him. We went to the beach area in Ohope and could see him playing with a boat. We swam out, but we were already 200m out, and he was still another 200m away, so we decided to wait and swim back into shore. About 5 minutes later we could see him again, and we thought he must have come in closer, so again we swam out about 200m, but he was still too far out. So we came back into shore again. 5 minutes later we saw him and decided he was definitely closer but way over to the right of us. So we drop our gear and run and swim and finally make it out to him.
He is one HUGE dolphin hey! he swam right by us a few times, but he had caught lunch - a really big kingfish (about 50 cm long) in his mouth and was busy trying to kill it and eat it, so no tricks to be had. We did get a couple of pics though. We wanted to go out another day and swim with him to get some tricks on camera, but we ran out of time.
We also had a massive shed session on the farm. Brians shed (haydens dad) is awesome. It has a projector, surround sound speakers, beer fridge, karaoke machine, drum kit, industrial fan ... the works, you name it, he has it. Our friends from London (hi Tazzy and Morgs) had driven 3.5 hours from Huntley to come see us, and a few of haydens mates came round and we all hopped on it. It was so much fun singing karaoke and trying to play drums haha. Although we had the mother of all hangovers in the morning. Argh. Felt like death.
I also got my ear's pierced again, third set. But then on the shed morning-after i accidentally pulled it out and couldnt get it back in, tazzy and hayden couldnt get it back in either (i almost passed out from all the vicious stabbing of my ear haha) So i had to get it redone. No dramas, thankfully ear piercing doesnt hurt.
We had a lot of dinners catchups with friends/family ... i tell you what you get bloody well fed in new zealand, everyone cooks amazing food, and there is always heaps of it. We reckon we
both put on about 3 kgs each, and we havent even started backpacking yet. Keep an eye out on the increasing chubbiness in our pics to come as the trip progresses hahaha.
Oh special hello's to be said to Niki and Emma the cutest kids ever, and Ari - who is almost 2 years old, barely speaks but can pull the thumbs up sign with both hands and say 'chur' hahaha. Soooo cute.
No injuries, illnesses or anything dramatic to speak of yet, so far so good.
😊
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Col
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no sign of the 3kgs yet...i'll keep my eyes open for the next set of photos! haha x