Auckland

Auckland was alot more fun than I expected. The day after I arrived I got a message from Daniel and Teddy. It turns out they were in Auckland and leaving the day after me. We hung out quite alot, just having a look at the city (a suprisingly large amount of homeless people) and walking around the lovely parks.

The 2 Sweedish girls I met in Taupo were also in Auckland, flying out the same day as me. So the 5 of us hung out together. Due to it being easter, quite alot of stuff in Auckland was shut which limited what we could do. But we all had a nice time just hanging out. We decided to go to a restaurant for our final night and found a really nice mexican restaurant that was quite cheap and really cool!

The girls were leaving at 4am, so we stayed up until then messing around. Luckily a few bars were open. But Daniel and Teddys hostel had giant jenga which was good fun.

On our final evening there was a beautiful sunset, which was a really nice send off and a great end to a fantastic journey through the country.

The Coramandel Peninsula

The hitch up the Coramandel was nice and easy. I was with Adam, a guy from my last hostel. We got 4 hitches. The most interesting being from a crazy lady who owns a herbal remedy business. She was telling us all these crazy stories about how she's been lost in the bush 5 times. We stopped and she showed us this massive gold mine, still in use today.

We eventually arrived at Whititanga which is the biggest town on the peninsula. The hostel was really nice and everyone in it was very friendly, although the hostel was quite empty due to it being the end of summer now! Adam and I caught the passenger ferry accross to go and have a look at Lonely Bay and Cooks beach. It was a lovely end to the day.

The next day I hitched to Hot Water Beach. There's a hot spring underneath the beach and at low tide, you can feel it coming up in patches. I hung out there until low tide, and it really does get hot! In some places too much to stand. I met up with James, a guy who I worked with. We'd been trying to arrange a place we could possibly meet up and it actually worked! He's been in Australia for 5 weeks and doesn't have much time in NZ so is on a Kiwi Experience bus. Which is actually was useful for me as James asked him if I could ride to Cathedral Cove with them and I did, for free! We had a look around the Cove and surrounding bays whoch were beautiful. Just a shame they're so popular! We were going to go snorkelling because there's some coral in Gemstone Bay however the wind was too strong so we thought better of it. Was still a nice walk.

Tauranga

I got my number 1 hitch to date, I got a lift almost immediately from a guy who lives and works in Tauranga as a driller (machinery stuff). He was so kind and invited me to the builders yard for a cup of coffee. I spent maybe half and hour/ an hour with him and then decided to get to my hostel. I was stopped on the way by this man who proceeded to tell me to ensure I was out of Europe by the 27th of November 2016 at 1pm (NZ time) to avoid nuclear annihilation. He gave me a map of Angor Wat which "proves this is true" but only if someone tries to blow up the pope in Buenos Aires plus some other warning signs. So watch out people!

I went to Mt Manganui, a small dormant volcano right on the seafront which provided amazing views of the Bay of Plenty. Lucky the poor weather stopped and the clouds cleared enough to give me a fantastic view from the top.

I met a guy in my room in the hostel from Yorkshire, so now we're both going to hitch up the coramandel peninsula together. 

Rotorua

A pretty cool place and a mountainbiking mecca! Rotorua has alot of geothermal activity which is very much apparent. There are vents in local parks and open spaces. They even have geothermally powered foot spas in public places! 

I hired a mountain bike and went cycling in the Redwoods of Rotorua, I spent my whole day there it was fantastic. Some really crazy stuff there but I just stuck to cross-country riding.

Sorry if the blog seems a bit thin, I would explain but I don't have to!

Hamilton

It was an easy hitch to Hamilton. I was stood out on the road for about 2 minutes before I got picked up. I got a lift from a lovely guy who was driving up for a birthday party the next day. He was in no particular rush so dropped me right outside where I was staying (at Brian and Eileen's house, friends of Dad) Eileen was suprised to see me there as where they live is about 10km outside Hamilton. I really enjoyed my time in Hamilton. I went to Raglan for the day with Eileen and her brother Martin, it's a lovely place and a prime surfing spot. The sand on the beaces is volcanic and so it's grey.

I borrowed Brians mountainbike and spent 2 days riding around mountain bike parks in the area. Some really good trails and it was great fun. 

Brian took me to a place called Maungatautari. It's a nature reserve with a predator proof fence, meaning it's exactly how the New Zealand bush would have looked everywhere before Europeans introduced mammals and rodents to the country. Brian volunteers, setting food stations to monitor wether there's been a breach in the reserves security. So we went around collecting the monitoring strips.

Brian also showed me where they have Tuatara, large reptiles that look like something out of Jurrasic Park. They're pretty well camouflaged.

Hamilton has so incredible botanical gardens. I give you one photo as a teaser.

 

Taupo

By the time I arrived in Taupo I was fairly tired as I had just done the Tongariro Crossing. So I had an early night. The next day I spent in and around Taupo. The lake is massive. I mistook it for the sea when I was on Mt Tongariro. It's about the size of Singapore! The coolest thing about the lake is that it's a crater formed by a huge eruption of the volcano that is still active underneath the lake. The guy who gave me a hitch to Taupo said that if you go to the middle of the lake you can see water bubbling due to the volcano.

I hired a bike from my hostel and spent the whole next day mountain-biking in the Craters of the Moon MTB Park. To get there, I cycled past Huka Falls which were pretty impressive. The mountain-biking was pretty good. It was more cross-country riding which is more what I'm used to but totally different to what I did in Queenstown. There was also many more trails including some tricky XC riding like bombholes. They had some good names for trails.

Tongariro Alpine Crossing

The crossing is a 20km hike up and over 2 of New Zealands volcanoes. It's one way, and as I wanted to continue straight from when I finished I had to carry my whole pack which as I got a bit excited at Pak n Save (NZ's costco) my bag was weighing around 20kg so uphill was fun! I managed to get a bed in a hut at the beginning of the hike. I met some really nice Germans in the hut and did most of the hike with them. We hiked up to red crater, which is a volcanic crater 1880m above sea level. The route up to the crater was quite cloudy in the morning. We walked through the cloud until we managed to get above it. Which if anything made the view even more spectacular.

Red crater is incredible. And the view even better. There were gusts of 75km/h but it wasn't actually too bad.
It was amazing, the landscape so alien it felt like I could have been on mars. 

There were these lakes called the Emerald Lakes. Which look amazing but smelt like rotten eggs. Another hilight of my trip without a doubt.

When I finished, I got a hitch from a guy who runs a shuttle bus company. He said that I was lucky, as normally the route is heaving but the wind had put alot of people off doing it. He drove me to Taupo where I found a bed. I was quite tired so it was nice to not be camping.

Wellington

After 2 months travelling, It's been quite nice to be in the same place for more than 3 days! I've been sleeping in my cousin Andy's living room for the past week. It's given me some time to relax and not have to think about what I'm doing tomorrow constantly. I've been able to sleep in without getting woken up and not have to be out of the kitchen for cleaning. I used this as an opportunity to sort out a few things for university as I have reliable internet and a laptop available.

I've been able to take a much more leisurely approach to seeing Wellington. It's a small city with a population of 380,000 but after spending 2 months on the South Island where the population of the whole island is just 1 million it seems pretty big! There are so many beautiful butterfly's flying around.

I spent quite alot of time walking around the city, aimlessly wandering which I quite enjoyed. Being the capital, New Zealand's national museum Te Papa is here. It's quite big and I spent 4 hours or so looking around it and still didn't see everything. They have the only complete Colossal Squid in the world on display and it is quite colossal.

Wellington is a city with a fair amount of hills. So however nice, walking around is quite tiring. I went up to the botanical gardens which were beautiful.

I also hung out with Andy which was nice as we don't see each other often. I coincidentally am here the same time as the Wellington Fringe Festival so we went to the theatre to watch a show called "perhaps, perhaps... quizas" by Gabriela Muñoz which was fantastic and I'd recommend it to anyone. It was about a woman's attempt to find a husband and despite her bad luck wouldn't give up. She spent the whole show dressed as a bride and through audience participation found a husband in cousin Andy (I narrowly escaped, phew!). He played along but was understandably fairly embarrassed by the whole affair.

On my last night I got a call from Zak (from Takaka) who's now at uni with Wellington. I went out with him and his uni friends. It was so busy! I wasn't quite expecting it. But was great fun however tired I was in the morning.

The Big Hitch - Wanaka to Picton

I've actually come from Queenstown, however I drove with Teddy and Daniel to Wanaka so I'm not counting that as part of the hitch. Basically what I'm doing is hitching up to Picton to catch the ferry to the North island. Seems pretty simple. 887km over 3 days.

Day 1 - Wanaka to Fox Glacier

I had to wait about 30 minutes for a hitch out of Wanaka, I got picked up by a German girl who was also a keen surfer. We drove to Haast and then decided to drive down to Jackson Bay so she could check it out as a surf spot. 40km down the road, in the middle of nowhere we discovered that the road was closed due to a slip so, we didn't even make it to the bay! She very kindly decided not to leave me in the middle of nowhere and dropped me back on the state highway. I was then picked up by an Israeli couple and got a ride with them from Haast to Fox Glacier. Being roughly in the middle of Wanaka and Westport, plus I knew of a really nice hostel, I decided to call it a day and stay the night there.

Day 2 - Fox Glacier to Westport

Over dinner I got to talking to a retired Australian couple who ended up giving me a hitch to Ross the following morning. They were really nice but quiet which I enjoyed (it gets tiring talking about the same old thing all the time). After they dropped me, I got a hitch from a Kiwi who lived in the UK for most of her childhood. She was a dairy worker and so gave me some insight into the dairy industry and John Key (Prime Minister). She dropped me in Hokitika where I got a ride from a very interesting man who owned a sawmill, specifically dealing with windswept kauri trees (trees that have been blown over by the wind). His company takes aerial photographs of native bush to see how many of these trees have fallen over, then he applies for a permit to remove the trees from the the Department of Conservation. DOC then allows him to remove 50% of the trees whilst the rest is left to decompose and stay as part of the ecosystem. He then airlifts the wood out via helicopter and mills it. This is the kind of sustainable environmental management that I really admire NZ for. He really had a passion and a respect for the environment that allows him to make a living as I have found with lots of people out here. He dropped me just outside of Greymouth where I got a ride from a farmer then a chef. I even had time to have a look at the Pancake Rocks in Punakaki which were pretty cool. My final hitch of the day came from a Scottish electrician. He lived in South Africa for 20 years but had to leave when it got really dangerous. He said if you were going to live there at the time you couldn't do so without a gun and a guard dog. he dropped me in Westport where I was picked up by Brian, a family friend who was staying with one of his friends shortly before a tramping (hiking) trip. I stayed at his friends house where there were also 2 Dutch couchsurfers.

Day 3 -Westport to Picton (Wellington really)
Brian dropped me in Murchison on his way to drop off a car for his tramping trip. I waited for a hitch, ended up getting one to Nelson from a lady and her daughter on their way back from seeing Cirque Du Soleil in Christchurch. She was  interested in hearing about energy engineering and I tried to explain nuclear fusion to her. I hope I did a good job! I got a hitch from Nelson to about 10km down the road from a couple who owned a christian retreat. Then I got a ride in a campervan which was exciting because they never give you a ride! I don't have any slack for the drivers of certain campervans as I now know that some have more that 3 seats! No excuses for not giving hitches now. They dropped me in Havelock where I got a ride from a guy in a very sporty Audi who liked to drive fast, very fast. Which I don't mind, however I do mind when you're overtaking 6 cars and a lorry around a corner at 150km/h (speed limit 100km/h). My final hitch of the day came from a farmer on the way to pick his wife up from the ferry terminal at Picton. He was great, I asked him why New Zealand meat is supposedly the best meat in the world. His response was "it's all in the grass". He also asked me if I was part Italian or maybe Turkish because I definitely "don't look like a straight POME" (Prisoner Of Mother England, I've been called it lots out here). He made it his mission to get me to the ferry terminal on time and he did, I managed to buy a ticket for the last ferry of the day about 2 minutes before boarding started. So I managed to get across to Wellington on the North Island and was met at the ferry terminal by Cousin Andy. The big hitch was certainly a success! 

Queenstown - awesome, but not for your bank account!

We got 1 hitch from Te Anau to Queenstown from the old American guy we met on the Kepler Track. He was such a nice man and dropped us right at our hostel despite the fact he wasn't even going to Queenstown! We went skydiving which was totally incredible, my favourite moment so far. My tandem master was really cool and he did some flips as we jumped out the plane and let me fly the parachute. It's so hard to describe the feeling of a skydive. Later, Yannick and I met up with Teddy and his friend Daniel (who went to the same cycling club as me). We went to a couple bars as Queenstown is one of the few places where things are open after 11pm. Met some Brits and some guys from the North Island who reccomended some places up there.

Daniel and I hired some awesome downhill mountain bikes and a lift pass then spent the next 5 hours riding some really awesome trails. I didn't fall off properly which is always a plus. We were both totally knackered by the end of it but it was worth every second, and every dollar. We rewarded ourselves with a Fergburger which is a world famous burger shop (apparently).

Sorry about the lack of photos on this post, I've just been having too much fun. Anyone who objects to this can talk to the complaints department... Which doesn't exist so if you end up getting through to them then you should probably see a doctor or something