Kia Ora from Kiwiland!

Kia Ora from Kiwiland! (Hello from New Zealand!)

I have arrived in Middle Earth, and it’s already been quite a whirlwind. I took a Qantas flight here, which made me a bit sad. I wanted to take Air New Zealand, as whenever flying to a foreign land (especially for the first time!) I like to take their national airline. Air New Zealand’s flight prices for the days I wanted were about the same as Qantas, but Air New Zealand’s flight times were utterly horrific, and involved me getting up at 3 in the morning for one flight and getting back to Sydney at 1 in the morning at the end. So I instead flew on the airplane with the giant kangaroo on the tail, which was lovely regardless. I was especially pleased to receive a hot in-flight meal, considering that the flying time from Sydney to Auckland is less than 3 hours! When you fly to Florida from New York, the flight is about the same and you’re lucky to get stale peanuts.

My first snafu was at the airport in Sydney, when I went to go check my bag. It weighed 30 kg. You are only allowed 23 kg of checked baggage. For those of you out there who don’t speak kilograms (hell, I’m one of them), that’s about 15 pounds overweight. And that’s pre-buying any souvenirs or collecting brochures. Ooops! But I’m a crafty one – didn’t go to Cornell for nothing! – and I brought an emergency fold away bag, then dumped about 20 pounds worth of crap into that and took it as my carry on. In the end, the airplane still flew all of my stuff to New Zealand, just in separate compartments of the plane. Dara 1, Qantas 0.

Getting through customs took quite a bit of time. They ask all sorts of detailed questions, and someone even hand inspected my hiking boots to make sure I wasn’t carrying in any unwanted Aussie funk on the bottom of my shoes. I guess I can see why they take it so seriously though, a vast majority of Kiwi (that means New Zealand, in case you haven’t picked up on that yet…) plants and animals are unique to the country. But they did let me through eventually, and within a few minutes I had a Kiwi sim card, Vodafone mobile internet, and a ticket for a bus that would drop me off a couple of blocks away from my hostel. Not bad for a few minutes work! I spent my first night at the Auckland City YHA. I liked it quite a bit, no bunk beds and it reminded me of a college dorm, which certainly feels nicer to sleep in than a stinky hostel.

I elected to do New Zealand with a hop-on hop-off bus tour. Not only did that give me a bit of flexibility, but the bus route of the country takes a nice chunk of time to complete, and goes to more places than any of the regular tours that I found. They all gave a max 3 weeks time here, and I wanted at least a month. I ended up buying a pass with a company called Stray Travel. The pass, should I just stay on the bus and not get off to spend any additional time anywhere, takes 35 days to make the loop of the country, all 3 islands. I gave myself 40 days here for a bit of leeway, although the pass is good for one whole year. But for now, I have 40 days to tackle New Zealand. I’ve never attempted to see an entire country in one trip. I’m already stressing out about fitting it all in!

The Stray bus picked me up right on time the following morning at 7:50 am. The first part of my 35 day “Maximus” pass is actually a bit of a branch trip off the main route, going up to “Northland,” which is the area of the country north of Auckland. It was a mini-van with a luggage storage compartment attached as a trailer. Our final destination of the day was Paihia, which is a small tourist town up in the Bay of Islands, but we made a couple of stops along the way. We stopped first to check out some giant kauri trees, which are quite old and ginormous. We then made a stop at a Maori marae & cultural center. The native people of New Zealand are the Maori. Culture and language wise it’s sort of in the same family as the Polynesians. Their artwork sort of looks like something you’d see in Tahiti or Hawaii, and their languages are related as well. New Zealand seems to embrace its Maori heritage (from what I’ve seen thus far) fairly strongly. Lots of places have Maori names, and a lot of Maori words – like the greeting, Kia Ora – have been adopted into the vernacular of people of European heritage as well. Anyway, a marae is a Maori meeting house, so we saw that briefly and went on a little tour of a re-created 17^th century village. The next stop on the way to Pahia was random. It was partially to re-fuel the bus, and partially to see some weird abstract public toilets. Apparently they are quite famous. I’ve seen the toilets on postcards, and you could even grab an information brochure about them after you’ve utilized their services. Random.

Paihia is a tiny tourist town in the Bay of Islands, where lots of the tourist activities have their base. The Bay of Islands is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a bay. With lots of Islands. About 150 of them, mostly undeveloped. It’s beautiful. In fact, the entire drive up to Paihia is amazing. New Zealand is well known for being one of the most, if not the most, beautiful country in the world. My first drive through the countryside certainly didn’t disappoint. The scenery is amazing. It really does look like another world sometimes, I can certainly see why this country was selected to “be” Middle Earth (that’s where Lord of the Rings takes place, for those of you who live under a rock).

Now the pass I bought through Stray includes the bus obviously, and heaps of activities, but no accommodation or food. Basically the accommodation sort of gets scheduled night by night. The driver passes a clipboard around during the day, and at each stopover they have recommended accommodations where they have beds reserved, and we get a slight discount. All you do is write your name down and how many nights you want to stay on for. Pretty easy. For Paihia we were actually given a choice between 2 places, and in an effort to make friends I selected the more “social” of the two options, called the Pipi Patch. I read later in my guidebook that the Pipi Patch is Paihia’s party hostel. Ooops. Not exactly my scene, but in the end it wasn’t too bad. At each stop Stray also has recommended activities, which are extra, but we get discounts if we book them through the driver. I selected a swim with wild dolphins, and saved $10 on that. You can book whatever sorts of activities or stay in whatever hostels you want, but Stray of course only has deals with certain places, so that’s the stuff they offer us on the bus. Fair enough.

I had initially only booked 2 nights at the Pipi Patch, because that’s all my itinerary had me listed as staying for. I was kind of confused by the online booking system, so I just called in and had someone set up the first half of the trip for me over the phone before I left Sydney. But upon further inspection once in Paihia, I realized that the itinerary actually made no sense and didn’t work at all. She had me staying in Paihia one night, and then getting on a bus in Auckland the very next morning. Auckland is 4 hours away. I called again and got someone much smarter to set up an itinerary for me that actually made sense, and then my 2 nights in Paihia became 4 based on the bus schedule. I decided for night 3 I’d ditch the Pipi Patch and go on an overnight boat cruise that sounded pretty interesting, and then stay the 4^th night at the Pipi Patch again before heading back to Auckland to start the main route of the trip.

Are you super bored of my endless descriptions of the logistics of all this yet? I’ll stop now, I promise. OK, let’s talk about cool stuff now. YAY!!!!

Day 1 – This got partially covered in my logistics section. Saw some trees, a Maori cultural center, weird toilets, set myself up at the Pipi Patch. Went to a group BBQ for dinner, which included a glass of wine, for $11. Not too bad.

Day 2 – Cape Reinga day trip, which was included in my Stray pass. We got picked up at 7 am for a day trip up to the top of New Zealand. The Maori consider Cape Reinga to be the spot where dead people’s souls leave the land and start going to wherever it is that they go. We get to the cape by driving along a place called 90 mile beach, which is, shockingly, a really long beach. It also serves as a highway though, and vehicles with 4WD use it as a sort of road as well. That means that the coach bus was kind of unique looking, since it was a 4WD coach. The front of it was basically a mack truck, and it was a tad wider than ordinary coach buses. We drove up 90 mile beach, which was pretty for a bit, but then I fell asleep. I was so exhausted the first few days in New Zealand. I came into the trip tired, and then got even more exhausted. After turning off the beach (and getting stuck in the sand for about 45 minutes) we headed towards some sand dunes to go sand boarding! Basically boggie boarding down a giant sand dune:

Sliding down the hill wasn’t too scary, as you can control your speed by sticking your feet in the sand, but the climb up to the top was torture. I did make it up twice, but my legs were on fire. I’m way out of shape! We then actually drove to Cape Reinga, and walked to the lighthouse. The view was majestic:

Made a couple of other stops, at an old gumdigger village and at a kauri tree showroom, before stopping off to have fish and chips at a famous shop. I had no more water left in my bottle, so I spent $5 on the equivalent of a 20 oz coke. I then realized they had free pitchers of water. Sigh… It was a good day though. I rode in the bus all day listening to my Lord of the Rings soundtrack on my iPod, waiting for Legolas to pop out of the forest J. Yes, I am that big of a dork.

Days 3 & 4 – Dolphins and The Rock. I got on a boat at 8 am to go find dolphins to swim with. Dolphins in the area use the Bay of Islands as a breeding and feeding ground, so there are usually oodles of them around. You can get into the water with them, provided that there are no babies. Dolphins are super playful and smart, and they are thoroughly amused by watching us try and entertain them in the water. So amused, that if we’re around, the babies tend to forget about nursing. Baby dolphins need to nurse every 2-3 minutes not only to feed, but to keep warm. When they’re young they don’t have enough blubber on them yet, and if they get distracted by something super fun, like a tourist doing somersaults underwater, then they may forget about nursing and can get hypothermia and die. So we can totally play with them, but not if there are wee ones around. We did find dolphins pretty quickly, and they are so cool. They come up to the boat and ride the bow and they jump out of the water and show off:

I love them, they’re just the best. We were all getting ready with masks and fins and snorkels to jump in and play, when another boat in the area who was out there for the same purpose claimed to have spotted a baby, so that was the end of that. Everyone say back down and we rode off. Drove around for a bit longer before finding another pod, but this one obviously had babies in it, you could see them right away. So no go again. We hung around and watched them though, but then the captain received word that based on communicating with other boats in the area, all the other dolphin pods in the Bay of Islands had currently joined up and were hanging out together, which meant there was no group out there without babies. !@#$!@$#@! I was so disappointed. I really, really wanted to do this. The first thing I did when I got off the boat was to research if I would have any other opportunities in New Zealand to swim with dolphins. There will be, in a place called Kaikoura. Hopefully no babies will be around then!

At 5 pm that day I headed back to the wharf for my overnight boat trip. It was kind of crappy weather, and the weather would stay bad throughout the boat trip. The weather here is nuts. It swings quite randomly. It’ll be raining and gloomy in the morning, sunny and gorgeous in the afternoon, and then rainy and gloomy again in the evening. We had to take a little shuttle dinghy out to the houseboat, which was a bit scary since the boat had a very low waterline and the water was a bit choppy. I decided to take my computer with me to the boat, since the Pipi Patch’s luggage storage is less than secure. You basically throw your stuff in a giant room, and pray no one else takes it. Mickey the Macbook was not spending the night there. Instead I took him in a dinghy in rough seas. Much better plan. Although the weather was junk, I did have a good time though. There were maybe 30 people on the boat, and it had a pool table, mini library, piano, bar, guitar, fireplace, and tons of board games. The first activity was target shooting for a free drink at the bar. They attached a plastic duck by a string and tossed it off the end of the boat. We had to hit it with a paintball gun. I missed all 3 shots, but I came kinda close to it. Everyone went fishing a bit after, although I don’t think anything was caught that was big enough to keep. Dinner was next, which was a very nice bbq with salads and pastas. After dinner they took us out in small groups for a little night kayak. Never kayaked in the dark before! Got to see some bioluminescence in the water though, which was cool. I had wanted to make a s’more by the fireplace afterwards, but I was so damn tired that I just went to bed. I had a 6-share cabin, but I had a bottom bunk so it was nice and cozy! Had breakfast the next morning at about 8:15, then after riding around for a bit we went snorkeling. The aim of the snorkel was to collect sea urchins. This would be the first test of my underwater camera case as well. I hadn’t had time to test it somewhere safe, like a bathtub or something, so I said a small prayer and jumped off the back of the boat with it in tow. It worked! Haha, yeah, that would have been a major disaster otherwise. The water was freezing though, and my wetsuit was kind of big so it didn’t hold in much heat. I snorkeled for a bit, but I didn’t dive down for urchins. My mask was too foggy to see anything, and I was too damn cold to dive down, where it was even colder.

After everyone was back on the boat and changed, we rode around and then apparently the rest of the group kayaked over to a local beach. I was up in the cabin with one of the roommates, chatting away and waiting for the rain to stop so I could go downstairs to the bathroom. One of the crew interrupted us and informed us that the entire boat had left kayaking. We decided to stay on though, instead of going kayaking in the rain after we’d just dried off. Had some tea instead and chatted downstairs, where we had the whole boat to ourselves. She was a very cool chick. Her name is Sarah, and she’s a backpacker from Germany who we discovered later is a whole 3 days older than I am. She’s a real adventurous traveler though, she gets around sometimes by hitchhiking, and saves money on hostels by couch surfing. Very interesting girl, and very smart. We got along quite well and made dinner plans for after we got off the boat. Once the kayakers came back we sort of slowly made our way back to the Paihia harbor, and the rain started to pick up. They gave us raincoats to wear on the dinghy back to the wharf, and there was a tarp to cover our bags, but the rain was everywhere, and the seawater was splashing in. Once we got off I immediately checked on the state of the macbook. The outer case was wet, but the computer was still dry. Whew! Repacked my back under an awning to surround the computer with as many layers as possible before heading to the nearby information center so that Sarah could book her own Cape Reinga trip. Took care of that, and then waited about 45 minutes to an hour for the rain to at least let up. As soon as it did we made a mad dash to the grocery store to buy ingredients for dinner. Sarah likes to cook for other people, which sounded good to me. Of course upon leaving the grocery store the rain picked up and it started pouring. There was no cover, so I just walked as fast as I could. The computer survived, but about 6 of the 7 layers I’d wrapped it up with were wet to some degree.

We (I helped with the noodles!) cooked vegetable curry for dinner, and one of the boat crew who works at the Pipi Patch in exchange for accommodation when he’s not on the boat joined us as well. Had a nice dinner and conversation with a bottle of wine. I was proud of the wine, not because I selected it, but because I charmed the hostel receptionists into allowing us to break their rules by drinking it. Axel, the boat crew guy, was going to a jam session at a nearby bar after dinner, so Sarah and I ended up going to that as well. I even had a tequila shot at the jam session. It smelled like gasoline, although it didn’t taste too awful. Not sure why people like drinking it though. After the jam session everyone at the bar headed over to the Pipi Patch bar, where I had some fun dancing for a bit before heading off to bed. Axel called me a Grandma for my attitude towards requiring a good night’s rest, but I can’t help it, I’m old! I need beauty rest.

Day 5 – Russell & back to Auckland. I checked out of the hostel as late as they would allow, and then took a ferry over to Russell, which was New Zealand’s first European settlement. It’s a cute town, and was a nice way to spend the early afternoon. Hung out with Axel back at the Pipi Patch until 4, when the bus came to take me back to Auckland. Got to the City YHA around 8, showered, and went to sleep.

Day 6 – Hahei. This was my first day on the main circuit of the bus route. The bus was a half hour late, which made me a tad nervous, and kind of sucked because I could have slept a lot longer then. The driver goes by the name Whales, and instead of a minivan it’s a full fledged bus, which was much easier for me to shove my heavy ass suitcase into. The drive to Hahei, which is on the Coromandel Peninsula, popular with people on vacation from Auckland (think Auckland’s Hamptons or Jersey shore), took a few hours, but we stopped a couple of times along the way, once at a supermarket where I stocked up on bread and ramen noodles. Yeah. This isn’t going to be a healthy trip. But if I’m going to be doing all these adventure activities, than one must cut costs somewhere!

Hahei is a small town, and we stayed at a backpacker hostel/campground on the beach. Got in around 2, and after dropping off my stuff I went on a hike over to a place called Cathedral Cove. The hike itself was just amazing. Here’s some scenery:

After the hike we all had a group bbq dinner, and then around 8:45 we headed over to a place called Hot Water Beach. Basically, the magma in the earth’s crust comes up pretty high around there, so during low tide you can literally dig yourself a sauna in the sand. We only had a few shovels, so a few people worked on digging us some walls for the sauna while the rest of us stood around and took pictures:

It was a bit of a funny sight, a bunch of tourists digging in the sand in the dark, taking endless pictures of it all. It got even funnier when it started to pour. We all braved the downpour for the sake of watching the sauna get completed until a bit of a rogue wave came up on shore and washed the whole thing away. At that point everyone gave up, and back to the bus we went.

Day 7 – Raglan. We left Hahei at 7 am, and then slowly made our way over towards Raglan, which is New Zealand’s best surfing beach. Seeing as how I just did a whole surf camp, I selected to conserve funds and skip the surf lessons offered. Just sort of spent the afternoon hanging out instead, which was nice. The place we stayed at is actually a surf camp itself out in the bush, maybe a 30-minute walk from the beach. It’s on a hill though, so the views of the water are amazing. I chatted with a few other people, and then spent the remainder of my afternoon catching up on my journal and writing THIS.

So that’s been the first week or so in New Zealand! Finding time to write this was actually quite a challenge, it’s very much a go-go-go pace, but I suppose that’s what needed when you’re trying to tackle an entire country in 40 days!

I do need to make a shout out to Jake though, for being the best person ever. See? I didn’t forget you.

Stay tuned for more interesting stuff guys, the next entry might have even more entertaining tales to tell!