Last few days in NZ :-(

Hi again. Still in New Zealand at the moment but only for another 6 days before we move on to Australia. This is one place I will be very sad to leave!

Since the last entry, we have been making our way up north slowly. From the glaciers we followed the coast up towards the North Island, stopping at Westport (a weird little place that seemed to have more churches/ religious centres than houses, and no people!), then Kaiteriteri (a cute little beach town where we enjoyed doing nothing for a couple of days) then Nelson (stayed at a hostel here for the first time in NZ, full of pretentious, annoying people half our age, one of who "wanted to live life the way nature intended" - Nature, it seemed, intended for the moron to lounge about in the jacuzzi all day in his fancy Billabong shorts. Needless to say we got the hell out after one night.) then Picton (quite a boring little place, but we needed to be here to catch the inter-island ferry).

We then made the 4 hour ferry crossing over from Picton into Wellington (accompanied by a lorry-load of cows whose smell was overwhelming and didn't do much for my sea-sickness!). We stayed in Wellington for 4 days. It was the first place in New Zealand that really felt like a city, and as cities go, it was a really nice one. It's full of culture and has all the shops, restaurants and everything you'd expect from a city, but it's also very scenic and clean and friendly. I'm sure I could live in Wellington.



But our main reason for visiting was to see an old university friend of mine, Emily. Emily moved over to NZ at around the same time as Mikko and I moved to Finland, and we haven't seen each other since. So it was great to catch up with her, and to finally meet her lovely husband Leigh. The two of them were really great hosts, giving us a personalised tour of the city, and taking us out for meals. We really didn't want to leave but we knew we had to as we still had the rest of the North Island to see.




From Wellington we moved on to Tongariro. Tongariro has a lot of volcanoes and is supposed to have one of the most interesting and scenic day-walks in the country. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the information centre to check the route details they were warning of very severe weather conditions (wind and rain) for the next few days so unfortunately we had to move on as we no longer had enough spare time to wait around for the weather to clear. The next day was indeed the most attrocious weather we had encountered in New Zealand and we felt quite glad to be warm and dry, playing cards in the back of Kylie the van, and not cold and wet and lost in fog in the mountains!

The day before yesterday we arrived in Rotorua which is a nice little place although a little bit touristy. It has a large Maori population, and as a result a lot of Maori tourist attractions. We booked ourselves in on a Maori cultural evening which included some singing, tribal war-dance, a trip through the bush to see some glow worms and a large feast cooked in the traditional Maori way (food is cooked slowly, underground, over hot rocks). It was a delicious meal and a really entertaining show. It was very commercialised, but then, how else were we going to see all these ancient rituals?



Besides the Maori culture, the whole Rotorua area is famous for its geothermal activity; every hotel seems to have thermal pools and spas and the whole place smells eggy! But you do get used to that. We had to check out the huge geysers and the bubbling mud pools in the Te Puia park. Really impressive stuff!



The park also had a Kiwi house (the Kiwi is a native, endangered bird which can't fly) and so after hearing so much about these birds we finally got to see a few of them.

Today we'll be moving on up North to the Coromandel peninsular for a few days before we finish our NZ trip in Auckland. We will also have to return Kylie there, which will not be easy as she's been such a lovely little van. A few of you commented on her in a previous post: you'll be pleased to know that we've been looking after her really well; she developed a squeak at one point but we took her into a garage and the nice mechanic gave her some oil and she was much happier after that! But we did have a small mishap the other day when we accidentally left her lights on and 6 hours later the battery was completely flat. But again, someone came to the rescue with some jump leads and after running her around town for a while she has completely healed! Oh, and Mikko and I are both fit and healthy too :-)