Week Two Adventures!

Week two begins! So I guess I left you off at the Auckland airport where I picked up Lizzy and Richard for the second half of our trip. We drove up from the airport that night to Coromandel town in the Coromandels. The car ride was along the coast the whole time and must have been quite beautiful during the day. Unfortunately we were driving at night and it was quite rainy and very windy, which for me meant major car sickness. As a result I went to bed right away at Anchor Lodge Backpackers and slept through the night.
The next morning we headed up north to see if there was any cool hikes, but the only thing we could find was a 6 hour one-way hike and it was too late in the morning to try that. Instead we cut across the Coromandels peninsula on this small dirt road and found an awesome 2 hour hike straight uphill called Castle Rock. From the top we could see the east and west coast of the Coromandels and we shared an awesome bar of chocolate! We stopped that evening in Hahai Beach to sleep at Tatahi Backpackers which was awesome! There I had my first real dinner in days! After dinner we met up with Sam, Chelsie and Sebastien at this cool place called the hot water beach. The name comes from the thermal activity underneath that causes all the sand to be really warm, so when you dig a hole in the ground and water from the ocean fills it up, the sand naturally heats up the water and it becomes a hot pool! It took a lot of digging to get our pool big enough for 6, but it was well worth it and the stars were amazing! Going at night was a great idea because we got to interact with all the locals instead of the tourists.
The next morning we chilled in bed for a while before deciding to get our butts in gear and take a trip around the area to see all the coves. We stopped at a little-known place called Shakespear's cliff and Lonely beach underneath and it was gorgeous! Just like something out of a movie, the beach was smooth with very soft sand and giant cliffs surrounding a clear blue bay. We played on the beach for quite a while, especially on the rocks and took lots of pictures. After that we went to Cathedral Cove, sight of the second Chronicles of Narnia castle scene. The cove is very beautiful and majestic and we took so many awesome pictures of us being 5 year olds on the beach and playing in the waves. I got completely soaked at one point because I stood on a rock to get an awesome jumping picture and didn't see the large wave coming in behind me. Once the sun went down we drove to Tauranga, where a friend of ours, Zoe, lives. We stayed at her house for the night and had a pretty hilarious evening because she is quite possibly one of the funniest people I have ever met! Plus, hilarity always ensues when I show foreigners the 'I'm on a boat' video.
The next morning we had a lazy breakfast and stopped by her father's shop to buy food and treats before heading to Mount Manganui for some easy hiking. The view from the top was awesome, but it was mostly overlooking the sea and city, which was very different from previous hikes. After that we headed south to Rotorua and stopped at a place called Kiwi 360, where, you guessed it, they harvest and sell kiwi everything! In Rotorua we met up with other Massey students, unintentionally, at the hostel and had another great dinner. That evening we went to the Polynesian Spa and soaked in the thermal hot pools for a couple of hours to relax. There were seven hot pools and each one was filled with minerals to help skin, joints and muscles. When we got back to the hostel we had great conversations with some of the other travelers, especially about the south island and it got me so excited for traveling after exams!
The next day we headed up north of Rotorua to do some zorbing! Zorbing is a fun random sport that is kiwi-invented and involves rolling downhill in a giant bubble ball! I did the hydrozorb which is filled with water and then rolled down in a zigzag. Even though you are not going very fast (10 k/h) I couldn't stand up or even realize where I was in relation to the ground because I was too busy being flipped every which way! After zorbing we went luging down a really big hill a couple of times, which reminded me so much of my days go karting. From there, we spent the rest of the day driving up and along to coast to the East Cape, where we would spend the night. The cool thing about the Bay of Plenty, which is the route we took to go East, is that there is so much Maori culture because of the land quality and the history (two of the major canoes landed there). I got to see the beach where the Tuinui and Arawa canoes landed, which was a cool tie-in to my class. There are very few town along the way and even fewer cars on the road. When we got to the end of the highway we had to take a small, weaving dirt road to the very point of the cape, which is the furthest point East. We stopped there, near the lighthouse and decided to camp for the night, because our goal was to get up early in the morning and walk up to the lighthouse to see the first sunrise in the world! The weather was really terrible, however, and we had to set up our tent in the wind and rain. We also had to cook in the bathrooms (which didn't function) and eat our meal in the car. This may sound pretty terrible, but it was actually one of the highlights of the trip, because if you have good company it doesn't matter what the circumstances are. We split another chocolate bar and bottle of wine and just relaxed and talked in the car for hours before braving the rest of the night in our little two person tent. I swear I thought the wind was going to flip us over!
In the morning we climbed up to the lighthouse before dawn (which was 750 steps at 5:45) and watched the first light emerge of the new day! Then it started to hail and we decided to leave. We headed back to where we came from and traveled down the East coast stopping when appropriate for pictures, and wound up in Napier. We were exhausted, so we relaxed in a small backpackers in Napier for the evening and went to bed fairly early after a long dinner and many riddles exchanged.
The next day was our last day so we decided to take it easy and just spend the morning visiting Napier, which is a cool little city on the coast filled with Art Deco buildings of the 1930's. We stopped for lunch at a cool cafe called Spaz and ate lunch while listening to the awesome music of a street performer. Once we left Napier we stopped at a chocolate factory and took a tour of the museum, but missed the chocolate shop because it was closed. Guess we should have gone to the store first... We then continued south and stopped at another outlook of the surround farmlands to get one last activity before we headed back to Palmy (Palmerston North). We arrived in Palmerston North completely exhausted and dirty, but very very happy with our adventures of the past week! :)

Two Week Adventure across the Northland (Part 1)

Sorry for not having updated sooner, but I've been supper busy with assignments before the break and then traveling during the mid semester break. I decided to break up the two weeks of traveling into two separate posts to make it easier for everyone to read.

The adventure started on Tuesday morning when I picked up Sam and Chelsie, two other students from the US, on campus with all their stuff and then off we were! We decided to just blaze through the North Island on highway one to get as far north as possible that day. We stopped in Taupo for a quick lunch and continued all the way to half an hour North of Auckland, in a town called Orewa. Nine hours of driving total and this was only the third time I had ever driven on the left! We stayed at a cool tropical-themed backpackers called Marco Polos for the night and then headed up the next morning to Tawharanui Regional Park, a little peninsula that sticks out from the main land, where we did a cool 4 hour hike up and down sheep-filled hills along the coast down to this cool little bay surrounded by rocks called Anchor Bay. We spent a good deal of time playing on the rocks, especially on the water before we left. We were basically walking right through sheep pastures and since it's lambing season there were little lambs everywhere! We stayed in Whangerei for the night and got up at 5:30 the next morning to drive all the way to Kaitaia to catch an 8:30 tour of the 90 mile beach. We took Harrisons Cape Runners and got to drive on the beach at 100 kilometers an hour on a huge bus! We stopped to go sandboarding on the giant dunes and I pretty effectively wiped out and rolled all the way down the dune. Anybody surprised? Then we were driven to a beautiful little beach for lunch and continued on to cape Reinga, which is the furthest point north in New Zealand where you can see the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean collide! It's also an important place in Maori lore because they believe it is the place that the dead go to get to the afterlife. After the cape we stopped at an awesome ice cream place and a place to see 45,000y year old buried Kauri trees. After the whole tour was over we drove t Ahipara to spend the night. There we stayed at the best backpackers called Endless Summer Lodge (perfect name since it was on the beach) and met some other cool people who were traveling. In the morning I went to go blokarting on the beach, but there wasn't enough wind so I rented an ATV and cruised on the beach for a little (75 kilometers/hour!) while Sam and Chelsie relaxed on the beach. We left around noon along with two backpackers who were staying at the hostel and needed a lift to Auckland. Needless to say it was quite packed in the red baron with five people and all our stuff. We drove down to the Waipou forest and saw the largest Kauri tree in the world (called Lord of the Forest). It was so big, if 15 people tried to fit their arms around it, they wouldn't quite reach around it! We took a cool little ferry to get across to the next segment of the Northlands (land North of Auckland) and stopped at a weird backpackers that reminded me a lot of an old persons house. The following day we drove down some more and visited another little Regional Park called Shakespear for lunch and then proceeded to drive to Auckland and drop off the two backpackers and have some awesome sushi for dinner! Driving through Auckland was crazy, but I survived. We spent the night at the same backpackers as the first night north of Auckland, but we decided to camp this time. It was definitely a three person tent, but we managed to squeeze four people in the tent because by this time we had picked up Sebastien from the airport. We had a relaxing evening with some wine and cards and then tried to sleep in the tent, which worked fine until about 3 in the morning when it started to pour. And not having a waterproof tent became a problem...so I spent the next couple of hours curled up on a couch in the lounge. The funny part was that it was absolutely gorgeous the next day. The next day was relatively uneventful with a couple of exceptions. We accidentally managed to lock the only key to the car inside the car and spent an hour trying to break into the car. Hilarious ordeal, since we successfully got the car opened, but a little stressful at the time. We drove back into Auckland where Sam, Chelsie and Sebastian picked up their campervan for the following week. We tried to head to a campervan park but somehow got lost in the suburbs of Auckland for a good little while. We finally figured out a meeting point and I went along with Sebastian back into Auckland to pick up Lizzy and Richard, my traveling buddies for the next week. We had dinner under the skytower and then drove to the Coromandels. I felt like death, since I had little sleep from the night before and extreme carsickness due to the type of windy coastal road we were driving on at night, so I was very relieved to get to the backpackers in Coromandel Town. And thus begins the adventures of week two...