Waterfall No 12394

I hopped on a very different kind of Stray bus to get to the Tongariro Crossing (a very beautiful 19km walk up and across Mount Doom.) The group was pretty big with so many mixed nationalities, and everyone got along so well, it resulted in a couple of interesting evenings.





The drive to 'Blue Duck Station', our next hostel, was amazing: there's an active volcano smoking away right on the horizon.














Blue Duck Station is about as far inland as you can get. Tucked between the mountains and a river, you can do kayaking, hunting, horse trekking and other activities.

I went for a nice one-hour walk to the nearby falls with a few others. Despite the humidity and heat of the afternoon, it began to rain, but the dripping leaves and rocks made the waterfall even more beautiful.

And of course, one has to go to the bottom and the top of any sort of falls here.

I even made some friends on the way back. They kept running away and then stopping and waiting for me at the next corner...

They weren't very talkative though.

As the day of the Crossing approached. heavy fog and monsoon-like rains hit the Station and the hike was, surprisingly, cancelled. (And I mean that, they rarely cancel an activity this popular.)

So instead we stayed in this alpine lodge, soaked in the hot tub and did the typical New Zealand pasttime activity: visiting yet another waterfall.

The first was Gollum's Pool.

The second was Taranaki Falls, which required a two hour walk through the volcanic tundra.

All in all, a fun and hike-heavy couple of days.

And then a five hour drive away from the WiFi-less lands into...

Wellington!

More to come... :)

Danger Zone

When our bus driver put on Danger Zone and started talking about the Lake Taupo skydive, a very spontaneous, crazy thought took hold.

12.000 feet, a 20 minute scenic flight, with no video included but a clear view of the North Island above the great Lake Taupo?

Why not?

When they give you your jumpsuit and strap on your harness, that's when the nerves kick in.
And during the flight up, that's when your stomach starts to protest.

And when they push the person in front of you towards the front of the plane, when you see your friends just... fall out sideways and plummet down, and when the instructor strapped to your back proceeds to push you to the plane door...

Let's just say every cell in your body is screaming "what the hell are you doing".

Then your legs dangle at airplane-height with nothing holding you except for the instructor hanging on to the plane...

...and then he lets go.

You free-fall thousands of feet per second and the wind is in your hair and the great wide lake and New Zealand is spread out below you and it's exhilarating. I screamed and screamed and felt the adrenaline pump through my veins...

And then they blow up the parachute and suddenly it's dead quiet. And you're laughing and crying and the instructor swings you around and the only sound is the wind flapping above. I was allowed brief control of the parachute, and let me tell you there's nothing quite as satisfying as swinging through the air, hundreds of feet from the ground, with all the control in your palms.

I still can't get the smile from my face. I would have paid for the video, if it wasn't almost as much as the dive itself.


Here's our faces before:

And here's our faces after:

From Narnia to the Shire

So in the last few days I have seen so many surreal places.

The archway to Narnia (from the sequel), leading up to the white sandy beach, with the sun sparkling on the clear ocean water... Yep, that place is real.

Cathedral Cove is a popular tourist attraction and a wonderfully scenic half hour walk. Exceeeept it's a bit longer if you don't have a hostel and decide to do the hike with 15 kilos worth of luggage strapped to your back.












Worth it though!

After that we dropped by Hot Water Beach, where ancient magma lies under the sand, heating up a spring of water. So boiling water bubbles up underneath the sand, and a huge crowd of people storms onto the beach at low tide to dig like mad until, yes, you have your own natural Jacuzzi.








We met a nice family that let us use their shovel, and even drove us a bit of the way back.












That's when we met even more nice Kiwis, that led us down to their boats where we could crash for the night. No internet, no shower, but a clear star-speckled sky and the sun rising at breakfast.

The next day we traveled to Rotorua, city of geothermal activity and the famous rotten egg smell. I didn't do much there, because it was finally time to catch the (very early) bus to HOBBITON.

One of these really costly tourist attractions that have you wondering if it's really worth the money until you finally just do it and yes, yes it - is. (Notice Bilbo's oak tree at the top, with artificial leaves for that extra green shine.)

The set is beautifully decorated and even though there are quite a lot of tours, they are informative and well-organised so that there are never too many people in one place.

In the Green Dragon I was served a complimentary cider (which, under the New Zealand sun, gave me a very unexpected but no less pleasant afternoon buzz).

The night was spent at Lake Aniwhenua, where the Stray company organised another cultural night with the Maori. I was taught how to weave bracelets out of flax, given the traditional Hangi meal cooked int he ground, tried smoked eel aaaaand took part in a very satisfying experience: Visiting the local school to give our leftovers to the Maori first graders.

One of the kids stole my camera and I now have 100 random photos of EVERYTHING in their classroom.

The kids were so sweet and thankful.

Hippies, glowworms and ceremonies

So much happened in the last few days, so many different places and people, yet everything's blurring together.

After Paihia we spent St. Patrick's Day in Auckland, then cruised down to Raglan and spent two nights there. After that we visited the Waitomo Caves, did an incredible tour to see the glowworms, then traveled south-east to sleep in a Marae (the community houses of the Maori) and learned more about their traditional ways.

But one after the other.

Raglan - Raglan is a cute little surfer town with an amazing bay. Incredibly wide waves. The lodge we stayed in was a wilderness lodge 8 km further into the jungle. Completely secluded. Still, we had glowworms lining the pathways and a deck overlooking the bay.

While the others went surfing, we explored the Bridal Veil Falls, hiked up and down the waterfall, and cooked dinner with some other bus companions back at the lodge.

The next day we booked a different 'hostel': Solscape is an amazing plateau overlooking the ocean and beaches. We slept in a tent with one of the aforementioned companions we met on the Stray bus and met some chill hippies that supplied us with blankets (and life advice: "Raglan's got everything you neeeed, man.")

Our stay in Raglan was rounded up nicely with watching the sun dip into the ocean, while Red Bull helicopters filmed the surfers for one of their ads.

Waitomo - The Waitomo Cave tours were expensive, but worth every penny. A tour guide helped ten other people and us into a little van and drove us far out into the country side, where we walked past some sheep into the cave entrance. 

Every person was given one of those constructor helmets with headlights. It was pitchblack in the cave, but then the guide asked us to turn off our lights and hundreds of glowing dots appeared along the walls. He took us down to a little boat, urged us in, then we slid smoothly along the black water as a Milky Way of glowworms illuminated the cave. Their bluish glow reflected off the water, while the only sound to be heard was the distant rushing of a waterfall.

The second cave we went to held amazing rock formations, stalagmites, stalagtites, flowstones, animal skeletons, and and and.

Like I said, worth every penny!

Mourea - That evening we had a cultural experience night booked with Stray, where we got to meet some very cool Maori that took us into their family. Their values are very simple, they want to make you as homey and comfortable and physically full as they can. That last part was realized at their evening feast (the first homecooked meal in aaages). Roasted chicken, fried veggies, gravy, peas, chocolate-fruit salad, the list goes on...

Afterwards we took part in their evening ceremony and learned to laugh and sing with them. They even performed their traditional intimidation dance for us.

They are so wonderfully proud of their culture, and so happy to show it to visitors.

Jungle Fever

In Paihia you only have to walk for about twenty minutes until you're smack in the middle of the jungle. Strange sounds from animals you can't even pronounce, barely breathable air, fern, vines, palm trees...

After barely a thirty minute walk Sarah and I reached a viewing platform. It certainly hadn't felt like hiking up a steep mountain, but the view told us we'd gone pretty far up:

We had the most stunning view of the Bay of Islands, with the water twinkling in at least ten different shades of light blue.

And what better way to wash off the jungle sweat than by diving into the water as the sun goes down. :)

Hurricane? Please

I'm not talking about the festival.

So that storm I mentioned is actually a hurricane/cyclone. It's been raining nonstop and even though the palm trees look beautiful in the wind, it is actually a bit scary.

Still, we couldn't sit around in the TV lounge all day. Sarah and I met two of the Travelworks girls we came here with in the same hostel, so we all decided to set out in the rain and do the hiking track through the mangroves to Haruru Falls.

After not even thirty minutes of walking we were completely alone in the mangrove forest.

It felt oddly like hiking through a rain forest. Water still dripped down from above but it was warm and humid.












The forest was half suspended in water and after a while we weren't sure how 'normal' this was.

Then we reached the bridge taking us further into the forest and realized, yep, this is definitely flooded.

The water is so blue but it doesn't show in the pictures.

The amazing part came right after. When we walked over a tiny walkway, the water lapping against the sides, with trees reaching down into the depth of the water beneath us.

I would upload more pictures if they even remotely did the beauty of this forest justice.

After literal hours of walking (and dreading the rising water level) we finally reached the falls. We took a less scenic route back along the highway, completely drenched and exhausted but happy.

One more for the road: