New Zealand 13 (or .... last day - boo hoo)

14-April-2011

Well, it's the last day...

Started in Taupo today, and planning on driving north through Rotorua and then work our way over to Aukland. Lake Taupo is the big lake sort of right in the middle of the North Island. Your fun fact for the day is that Lake Taupo is about the size of the nation of Singapore... and yet Singapore has a larger population that ALL of New Zealand. One more reason not to move to Singapore, I suppose.

Just north of Taupo is Huka Falls. It's a spot where the Waikato River that flows from Lake Taupo goes through a very narrow channel. It's not really a big vertical falls, but a massive rapids. There's no way to describe the volume of water that flows through there; it's insane. Again, you'll have to go check it out.... the pictures just don't do it justice. There's a little footbridge that goes over the middle of the channel so you can get right up close.

Two hundred thousand (200,000!) liters plunge over the falls every second. That's enough to fill five olympic swimming pools every minute. Uhhh ... um.... other than THAT, of course, there's no way to describe the volume of water that flows through there.

Looking upstream...


Looking downstream...


The actual 'falls' part at the end of the downstream...

Not a very good picture to give you the scale. Maybe a little video...



Huh? Huh? Didn't I tell you? Pretty impressive eh? You try to describe it without the swimming pools or liters-per-second stuff.

After we left Huka Falls, we went further north on Highway 1 towards Rotorua, and stopped at Wai-O-Tapu, Thermal Wonderland. It reminds me of Yellowstone which is a native American word meaning "Picnic Baskets'.

There is even a daily geyser, but we got there a little late to see it go off.

Lots of steaming pools and the smell of sulphur... ahhhhh.


Sediment flats that look cooler and cooler the closer up you get....

See? Cool!

Crazy colored rock walls....


Hey wait a minute... I may have been wrong about "Picnic Baskets" back there....


Cute little steam vents....



Even cuter women ...

(And that's saying something, because that was an awfully cute steam vent up there)

The BIG pool near the end of the hike...


Here's the edge of the big pool that Lynne is standing next to in the above picture...


We even found out where they make those fluorescent yellow jackets that cyclists wear... after manufacturing them out of white windproof material, they ship them here, and just dip them in the pool behind us...

Really. (And by 'really', I of course mean 'not really'.) This was really strange, though. The pool was sooo yellow. Much more yellow in my memory than this picture shows. Probably just because of the contrast to its surroundings, and the fact that in person it just looked so fake.

We left our thermal wonderland, and drove into Rotorua where we had originally been planning to spend a couple days and do some mountain bike rides, but we had to settle on just visiting a really big bike shop, and talking to the owner for about an hour. Pretty cool.... I need to get back down there and spend a week riding in the area...

And the last thing we really did before checking into our dismal (but friendly!) hotel was stopped at Waihi Beach for a bit of a leg stretch.

This - no doubt strangely for some of my friends - was the first place we actually saw surf and surfers. Nelson is a great town, but it's about the only place in all of New Zealand that doesn't have surf. So it was cool to see some good rides, and walk in the sand for a bit.

And after this.... we got back in our car and drove into the sunset....

A great time. But not enough of it. Need to get back there when I can spend more time on bikes and in the ocean!

New Zealand 12 (or ... Wellington and beyond)

13-April-2011

We rented a car in Wellington to drive to the airport in Aukland, but we couldn't pick up the car until noon. We were a little disappointed in that, but it ended up working out really well, because we got to walk around Wellington some before leaving.

We walked around downtown and saw the Parliament building, which is cool in a funky way, but I have to say that ...
... it doesn't really do it for me aesthetically. Personally anyway. It looks like a big robot head sticking up out of the landscape. And I'm a boy, you'd think that sort of thing would really appeal to me!

We went up a cable car tram funicular thingy to the botanical gardens that overlook the city. It's a pretty cool cable car, and it gets you a great view of the city.

You can see the cable car rails there, and, strangely, we don't have a single good photo of one of the cars going up and down. It's not just a tourist attraction, either. There's a stop mid-way up the hill that lets out to Victoria University. But still... it's mostly touristy.

Once at the top, we wandered around the cable car museum, and then around the botanic gardens. Here are some pictures of things I can't identify, but really liked the look of.

Oh wait, I like the look of that one, and I CAN identify it. No, not the Pongas... Lynne!


As I implied, this section is not devoted to the biologist in me, as I cannot name one of these plants, or tell you anything about them... I just thought they looked cool and different. Well, I could ... this one's Frank, and it's in the Botanic Garden in Wellington...


A closer view of Frank...

And here's a funky, knobby, bubbly tree. Again... I dunno nuthin' bout it...



And here's a plant that I really liked the leaf pattern. I saw one of these on the bike ride in Nelson (in the wild!), and took a picture of it, but it was nowhere near the size of this one.


And then we left the botanic garden, and scurried down the mountain and through town to pick up our rental car and head north...

After just leaving Wellington, it feels like we're way out in the countryside.

In the countryside on the wrong side of the road of course, but in the countryside. The hardest thing about driving on the left for me was using my left hand to shift the manual transmission. And occasionally turning on the wipers when you wanted to use your turn signal. But other than that... not too bad.

It was even harder to shift with your left hand when you were using it to hold the camera up behind the passenger's head and take a picture of the road, the car, and how everything was backwards. Um.... luckily, I would never do this, and, .... um, ... we had picked up a hitchhiker, yeah, a hitchhiker, and he agreed to take a couple pictures for us.

Beautiful countryside, and sheep. Where are you? Yes, New Zealand!


Lot's and lots of beautiful countryside and sheep....


I could go on with that line of writing, but I shant. Just know that if you can't think of anywhere that you can find an abundance of sheep and beautiful countryside, you can always find that in New Zealand.


We continued north, and after driving for so long through...... beautiful countryside and sheep, it was very odd that the road went through a very desert-y area sort of the middle-south of the north island. And off to our left was a peak breaking through the clouds.

You can see that the terrain is totally different, and the mountain is there, but it just doesn't do it justice (do pictures ever?). It was really spectacular. A closer view of the peak ....

I think it's either Mount Tongariro or Mount Ruapehu. Just south of Lake Taupo.

And then it was starting to get late, and we needed a place to stay, but we had to stop and check out the sunset over the lake. Complete with black swans.


Umm... hungry black swans I might add....

We ran. And we only lost one finger between the two of us.

Not really, of course.

We got a motel room in Taupo for the night, and prepared for the final push to Aukland, and our last day on vacation. Waaahhh...

New Zealand 11 (or .... Leaving the South Island)

Well, a little too much time has elapsed here, hasn't it?

12-April-2011

The time has come to leave the south island. Paul B got up early to take us to Picton where we would catch the ferry across the Cook Straight which separates the north and south islands. You can sort of see in this picture the dotted line that is the route the ferry takes from the south island (which is to the west), and the north island (which is to the east). (But that's just in this picture... they really are north and south which I'm sure you remember from the earlier post...)
It was really foggy in Picton, and for the first part of the ferry ride, so we didn't see nearly as much of the scenery leaving Picton as we would have liked, but it finally cleared up just before we entered the Strait. The ferry dropped us in Wellington about four hours later, and we quickly checked into our motel, and went for a walk.

And made it as far as a pub that was sitting right on the water. No more work... time to relax and have a beer in the middle of the day. I finally felt like I was REALLY on vacation. All the other stuff was cool, but I kept thinking about the buoy, and how we'd deploy it, and such. But now... not so much.
It was a great little place called the Bayside, or the Wharfside, or the Harborside, or something like that, and they had their own hats that they handed out to everyone who sat in the sun so that you wouldn't get burnt. It was very bright out, and I'm glad to have had mine. Warm sun and cold beer go very well together when you don't have to think about buoys......

After our beer, we went to Te Papa or the national museum. I can't remember which. No, wait Te Papa *IS* the national museum. And well, we didn't get any really good pictures there. You couldn't use flash, and it was just too ... inside to have good lighting. But it was free, and it was very cool. Natural history, art, industry, culture etc. Here's the website, but you'll just have to go see for yourself, because there really aren't a lot of pictures posted there.