Rotorua / Waitomo

Finally the sun came out!!!

By day 4 in NZ we have seen/driven through more than half of the north island. The drive is always breathtaking with rolling hills of green lush, wild growing hydrangeas of all shades, sheep graising on hills, and perfectly black and white spotted cows. Everything seems to be straight out of a movie. Most of the land is farmland, a lot like the drives through most of TX, but a lot more forested like Pennsylvania. If I could compare this part of NZ to one place in the world I would say it looks a lot like Scotland, but who am I to know… I’ve never been! Today we started in Rotorua (the rotten egg smell is not as bad as expected but still noticeable). We drove 20 min south and ended up at waiotaupo geothermal wonderland. It was pretty spectacular! For my geology friends- it was definitely the most amazing geological thing I’ve ever experienced… I just wish I knew a little more prehistory before I went. We sat around with a crowd around 10:15 am waiting for the Lady Knox Geyser to erupt… we kept waiting and waiting. Finally, a man came out and stood right next to the geyser with a microphone. I was so scared for his life because I assume this water to be extremely hot and I thought it was going to erupt any minute now! Well, he begins to tell us this story about these prisoners in the early 1900s that would come out into the rotorua area to build roads and highways… a very dangerous job back then. They came across these hot streams and would start taking hot baths in them everyday. Then they found this hole that had steaming water and decided to wash their clothes with soap in the water, well little did they know that the SOAP would be the one to set off the geyser. They built up these rock around the geyser to add more pressure to it, so they could shoot the water up higher and higher each time. So now to this day, the park has set off the geyser every day for the past 80+ years by a bar of soap. Who would have known…

Our next stop was a 2 hour drive west to waitomo glowworm caves. I had read about black water rafting in these caves, which sounded awesome! Well, it was pretty cool, but I think they should call it black water floating. The water was very cold, so everyone wore wet suits. We climbed through the cave probably half as much as we tubed, which wasn’t really expected but it was still well worth it. Once we finally started floating, everyone turned off their headlamps and watched the twinkling neon green glowworms, it looked like a million stars.  The total trip took 3 hours and then we headed to Taupo immediately after, had dinner and made plans for the rest of our trip. I guess you’ll have to wait and see what those plans are, huh? I promise they won’t disappoint!

champagne lake--rotorua

Hahei

Ever since I saw the second Chronicles of Narnia where they walked out of the train station into the huge cave on a beach, I knew I wanted to see it in person! Now I can finally say that I did :) We left Auckland at 8 am and arrived in Hahei around 10ish, from there we walked to Cathedral Cave, which was about a 45-50 minute hike that definitely got your blood pumping several times. I took a million photos and I videotaped the whole walk back on my gopro (soon to come!). 

About 15 minutes south of Hahie is Hot Water Beach, where my mom and I attempted multiple times to dig us a nice warm hot tub on the beach. We joined the huge crowd of people digging on the beach, unfortunately the tide kept wiping away everything we had done, so we decided to relocate, not really knowing when the heat would come. Turns out, there’s a very specific place to dig and you have to figure all of that out BEFORE you start digging. Under the beach is a sort of hot spot, where seeps of steam or whatever is making it hot is coming up to the sand in certain areas. Once we figured out that you can’t just dig anywhere, we started digging our feet in the sand until they were almost burnt. So the digging began again, waves were getting stronger, we relocated again, and waves came again and again. At one point I heard a huge wave break so I stood up from the warm sand seeing how powerful it was going to be…my mom was behind me not noticing, so when the wave crashed into everyone’s holes my mom was nowhere to be seen. I thought maybe she just decided to duck under the water, so I started searching, but saw nothing. I looked around and around and finally about 15 to 20 feet behind me I find her and 3 other people basically piled on top of each other. Very entertaining! We pretty much gave up after that- it was 2:30 and low tide was at 2:45, but we didn’t really feel like digging a hole all over again. As of now, we are driving to Rotorua, a geothermal wonder! That supposedly reeks of rotten eggs…. fun! The drives up in the corromendal peninsula has been absolutely breath taking! We’ve been driving through what seems to be a tropical jungle most of the way, over cliffs and beaches. Still waiting for the fact that I’m finally here to kick in… not sure if that’ll ever happen!

Cathedral Cave Lookout--Hahei

Auckland

The flight from L.A. to Auckland was around 12 hours. It was an awesome plane, but a pretty uncomfortable ride. During the flight, I met some new friends going to the uni in Dunedin. The security wasn’t too bad, it was just early in the morning and I was already exhausted. As soon as my mom and I got to Auckland, we knew we had 2 things on the list: get a phone, buy a car and we managed to that all in one day.  We got a pretty decent car, it’s a Toyota Caldina, which is a station wagon. Almost every other car in NZ seems to be a station wagon… its weird but when you think about it, gas is pretty high so SUVs probably aren’t that high in demand as they are in the US. Our first day in NZ was very hectic to say the least… first off the weather hasn’t been the best :/ It feels great, 60-70s, but it has rained for the past few days with tiny pockets of sunshine.  Secondly, learning how to drive on the opposite side of the road is very very confusing! During our two days in Auckland we walked up and down Queens St. and High St. (both of which remind me of New York City because of the shopping, architecture and around almost every corner is a mini china town), we road a ferry to an island called Devonport with two inactive volcanoes, and we tried the cuisine (one was absolutely horrible and the other time was fairly decent).  Auckland was a really beautiful city, but it was very westernized and I didn’t come here to see cities that look the exact same as every other city in the US. The city centre for the most part was walkable. Most of the tourists here seem to be European.

For those of you who thought that nz may not compare to the US in what they have to offer, you’d be quite surprised. NZ has a walmart called the warehouse and an heb/central market/whole foods called the countdown and a krogers called pak’n’save and plenty of department stores and gas stations in every larger town we’ve driven through. There’s a Mcdonalds and burger king around every corner too.

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