Travelling the North Island: Wellington to Auckland part 2

Waitomo Caves Blackwater Rafting... these pictures we provided for us at the end of the trip. We paid I think 20 NZD between the 3 of us. Not bad.
Me practicing my waterfall jump above ground. Hahaha
A silly picture
Another silly picture.

When I last left off as we were heading from Rotorua to Hamilton. Our first "stop" on our way to Hamilton was actually really out of the way. We took a sort of off the beaten path road that dipped back down south rather than up north toward Hamilton in order to go to Waitomo for Blackwater Rafting! Blackwater Rafting at the Waitomo Caves, as Chris and I actually found out yesterday, is all over lonely planet (the travel book guide) as a must do travel item, so we felt confident crossing that off our bucket list. Blackwater Rafting is essentially exploring a cave with a underground river flowing through it. The way you do this is by putting on some wetsuits, get some black innertubes, a helmet with a light on it, and go exploring! We had two guides who were very cool named Vashti and Jae. The process of getting fitted for these wetsuits was not fun and slightly awkward. They were still wet from their previous go in the caves and they were quite heavy. So, imagine, putting on a skin tight wet and cold heavy piece of clothing in a changing room with women who are much larger than you. I struggled a little but managed okay and once the wetsuit was on, it warmed a little so it wasn't too bad. However, the other women in the changing room struggled to an extent that one of them almost gave up. I would have offered to help, but I didn't really know how I could have helped.
We were transported (after taking some goofy photos) to the location of the caves. We first made a stop at a little location to practice jumping backwards off a waterfall above ground. We improvised on a dock type thing jumping into a river that actually was flowing in and out of the caves. The water was shockingly cold and made me worry about what it would be like in the caves.
Then they gave us silly instructions on how we would "paddle" and link together to form an "eel" of tubes. Then we climbed down. We did a little team bonding within the cave itself with everyone telling one thing true about themself and one thing false. The best one someone came up with was, "I have three children and this kid sitting next to me is my son." Turns out the kid next to him wasn't his son. Haha. Not as funny on paper, but it was pretty funny to hear when we were sitting in a dark leaky cave about to embark on a crazy undergound adventure.
Then we were told to start walking and exploring. We wandered through the cave, slightly guided by our two fearless leaders and slightly guided by the walls of the cave (as there really weren't many options to wander off to. Our first experience with the cold underground water was floating under a really low lying ceiling.
At this point my feet were extremely cold as were my hands. I was really hoping my body would generate enough heat to keep at least my upper body warm but that too was starting to get cold. We came to our first underground waterfall. I was pretty scared, but when it came my turn I just went into a zone and did it without really thinking about it. After that, I wasn't really afraid of the darkness of the cave or the uncertainty of jumping backwards off a cave waterfall. We walked quite a distance, saw a really high up opening in the cave (with a slight glimmer of light). They made us do silly warming up exercises and then continued to march on. We came to the second waterfall and sat down for a little before jumping. Vashti showed me a cave eel, which was pretty cool. They asked us to tell a joke or an embarassing story. Everyone was awkwardly silent and of course Brian spoke up. He explained that when he was little he saw a documentary about bungee jumping. He wanted to try it so he got a regular rope (as most people know, you need a special cord), tied it to his playground set and to his pants and jumped. Needless to say, it didn't work. Haha.
The second waterfall was much higher up and came with a bit of a disclaimer. They showed us a pool of water swirling about right near the edge of the waterfall that didn't look particularly remarkable. However, Jae and Vashti had us turn our lights out and Vashti left hers on and she walked toward the pool and into it and suddenly disappeared. We watched as her light vanished and we were cloaked in blackness. Jae shouted for her and far off we hear her response as we see a faint light coming toward us. Once she got back they explained the situation. The pool of water was no pool of water but instead a huge hole type thing that actually dumped a large amount of water down by the waterfall. Terrifying. So we carefully edged around it toward the actual waterfall and jumped.
We were then told to link legs into the "eel" formation. We linked, I think I was somewhere in the middle with Chris behind me and we turned off our lights in order to see glow worms. Vashti pulled us through the river and we saw a pathway of the river lit on the ceiling of the cave by glowworms. Jae joked that we should sing a song so the group together sang "In the Jungle." Once that was done, Jae sang us the Maori national anthem. It was haunting and beautiful and suddenly the experience went for lighthearted to deep and mournful almost.
After that there was a small bit more of treking through the cave until we got to the end. Jae stood in front of us and instructed us that we would find out way our without our headlights, floating on our innertubes. So we all turned out our lights and started "paddling", mostly pushing off one another and off cave walls, toward a tiny sliver of light ahead of us. It was really fun, although I'm pretty sure I kicked a man I didn't know in the face. Haha. (Not hard!). We kept moving and kept paddling, but there came a point when it seemed like we weren't moving at all and that the light wasn't coming any closer. We kept hitting our hands on the sharp walls and it felt like we'd never make it out but then the light got brigher and the mouth of the cave opened up to a jungle and we were free! Chris managed to nick his hand on the caves but overall we were cold, wet, and happy.
Overall the trip was a 3 hour excursion with about an hour and 1/2. After the caves we were pretty exhausted and we had originially had plans to stop in Raglan (one of the best surfing spots in NZ) but we instead decided to take a short walk around and saw some natural caves in
the area that we could walk through and then drove to Hamilton.
At Hamilton we stayed at this nice hostel that was on the outskirts of town. It was run by a nice woman and it was more of a house than a hostel. I had a room that was "girls only" but I was the only one in there so it was really nice.
It was Easter so we wanted to eat somewhere fairly nice (whatever was open really) and we were recommended a bar about a 15 minute walk from our hostel. However when we got there they turned us away because we didn't have proper id (we had our drivers licenses but not our passports, which are required in NZ for foreigners ... so stupid.) When we said we wouldn't dirnk we just wanted to eat, they still denied us. SO we were really angry but walked all the way back, got the car and came back because it was really the only nice place in town to eat at.
Once we got back we settled in and then Chris and I spent the night watching "The Running Man" (haha) with a group of Irish girls.

Unfortunately I do not have time to finish this entry, so I will leave you yet again, still not having arrived in Samoa. The next installment should hopefully involve part of my time in Samoa.

Travelling the North Island: Wellington to Auckland part 1

The great adventure begins! This is the first installment of many. This entry is from Wellington to Rotorua.

Chris Driving, the first picture I took of our adventures.
The winding road that Chris drove and Brian and I got really car sick on.
More of the road to Napier.
Mountains, you can make out the snow on top of one of the mountains. I took so many of these pictures it was a little difficult picking just one to put on my blog.
Brian with our trusty car, the Toyota Rav4.

Chris, Brian and I left April 10th, Good Friday, morning. We left around 9:30ish from the car rental place and it was just us, the road, and our mix tapes that Chris grabbed from the car rental place. The first tape really set the tone for us, it was called "Cruisin' Songs" (or something along those lines) and it had all sorts of greats like "Get Around" by the Beach Boys and random songs that I knew the lyrics but not necessarily the artists... I'm sure Chris will remember it better than me. Chris drove the first big chunk of time from Wellington to Napier which was roughly a 4 hour drive. We went through a lot of small and random little towns. EVERYTHING was closed down because it was Good Friday and apparently people are pretty religious here. So, we could barely shop or do too much because all the local shops were closed. We ended up eating lunch in this town called Dannevirke, which for some reason is the little Copenhagen of NZ.

Copenhagen Square in Dannevirke.
The old movie theater in Dannevirke.
More road pictures

Entering Napier...

Napier was beautiful. It's a beach town in the Hawkes Bay area. The beach was on "black sand", made up of lots of black little rocks. We wandered up and down the coast and looked at the town itself. We stopped for some coffee and then spent about an hour lying on the beach. Chris and I cloud watched and Brian played in the water.

The beach

The town
Brian and Chris walking on the beach
Chris and I cloud watching, Brian playing in the water.

For the next half, I drove to Taupo which was only an hour and a half drive. Taupo is a town located around one of the largest lakes in NZ. We got to stay there because we have a friend, Kaylene, who lives there. On our way there I made us stop for a picture of the sunset and we tried to buy Kaylenes parents a bottle of wine as a thank you gift but all liquor shops were closed and we were all starting to get grumpy from too much travelling.
We arrived around 7:30 and went out to dinner with Kaylene. We then spent the rest of the evening hanging out with her parents, watching rugby. It was really cool being in a Kiwi household and just being in a house in general again. They had made up beds for us and we all slept really well.
April 11th, Saturday, in the morning the whole family had left by the time we got up (9 o'clock am on a Saturday!) but they had left coffee and toast out for us for breakfast. After Brian got to watch some golf and Chris shaved (a moustache for a little, haha, which started a theme of sorts throughout the entire trip) We left around 10 and drove to Rotorua. It took us a while because we stopped at Huka Falls (this massively powerful waterful outside of Taupo) and at some thermal hot spots (A place called Moon Craters). The thermal hot spots were really cool but smelled so badly of sulfur. The moon craters took us a good hour of wandering around and created a lot of cool photos, but my cameras battery died in the middle of it.
Taupo Mountains... people love skydiving here because you get a spectacular view of the lake and mountains. It is in Taupo that "Mount Doom" from Lord of the Rings was filmed.
Huka Falls
The river that creates Huka Falls
Taupo
Moon Craters

We arrived in Rotorua midafternoon. It is located, similar to the moon crater place, on hot spots and is just filled with thermal activity. Around the town center there is a huge park full of thermal hot springs smoking with sulfur and mud bubbling. The town itself has become a huge tourist trap with all sorts of touristy activities for people to do. We ended up doing this thing called "Zorbing." Zorbing is essentially rolling down a hill in a huge plastic ball. The popular way is to go into a ball full of water. The other is to be strapped into the ball and roll down (getting extremely sick from all the spinning). Zorbing, as well as some other ridiculous tourist attractions) were all located at this place called the Agrodome. This argodome is like an amusement park that threw up on a farm. It has this weird sheep shearing show, dog herding, and it has cows, miniature ponies, ostriches, emus, alpacas, sheep, ducks, and more sheep. They had a lot of cross country fences all around the park as well so I imagined that it was a local show ground for eventing and such. On that day they had a western horse show, which was cool to see, but boring because I wanted to see some eventing.
Zorbing itself was pretty cool. It took FOREVER to go on because there were so many people waiting on line, but it was worth it. Brian went down on his own in a ball and Chris and I shared one. When you're in it, you have complete loss of what is up or down and you kind of just slide around wildly flipping and knocking into each other. The way you get out is (if you want to imagine it) the way it looks when a baby is born. You slide out of the hole you jumped into with all the water pouring out with you.
After that (it took us about 1 hr and 1/2 of waiting) we didn't have time to do any other activities so we walked around the Argodome area (saw so many asian tourists) and then came back to Rotorua.
We stopped in at the thermal hot springs. They were really cool as well, with lots of sulfur blowing up into our faces and at some points you walked across bridges and couldn't see in front of you because of all the sulfur steam.

The jungle on our way to Rotorua
ZORBING! Brian has pictures of me and Chris in the ball itself, but you get the idea of what it looks like here. The balls are hauled to the top of the hill on that little conveyor belt and you get in on the top of the hill. The way you get in is run at this small hole in the ball and "superman it" in. Then you sit in a pool of hot water (which was kind of gross to me and Chris kept splashing me) and then roll down. We purposely flipped around and stuff but if you lie as still as possible you simply just slide in the water with the ball.
Argodome, so weird.
Cows at the Agrodome, next to these cows (I like the guy with the bangs) there was like an amusement park. So weird.
Rotorua park. This is accompanied by the picture in my previous post.

Afterwards we went to the computers at our hostel called Blarney's Rock Backpackers. Brian wanted to upload pictures so he'd have more room on his camera so Chris and I got dinner on our own at this placed all the "Fat Dog." It was really good, but a bit pricey. I had a fish burger with pineapple and beats and deliciousness and Chris had this mango chicken lasagna type thing. We then joined up with Brian and got dessert. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out in the common room of our hostel. It was full of people from all over the place, mostly asian, and they were watching "Shanghi Noon" haha. Chris wrote in his journal while I read and Brian watched TV.
This was my first experience with a hostel and it was a bit uncomfortable. We had a mixed (unisex) room for 10 and it was full that night. I grabbed a top bunk and Chris and Brian had bottoms. I managed to sleep okay but there was a lot of snoring and movement throughout the whole night because people had different sleep schedules and habits. We woke up early and checked out by 9.

My next post will be of Hamilton to Auckland!! Hopefully I'll complete that by tonight!

Back from Samoa

That's Brian sitting on "our" beach (we had the entire beach to ourselves for the majority of our stay in Savaii) and Chris is in the water snorkling. This was the first full day we spent in Manase, Savaii which also happened to be my 21st birthday.
A poorly lit picture, but it speaks volumes. This was on the 17th, we went to Paia village and went to the Dwarfs Cave. Our guides showed us how to harvest coconuts (gave us fresh coconuts to drink and eat), how to make a Samoan spoon, and taught us different Samoan words (Talofa! - Hello!). The picture goes (from left to right) Me, our guide - Tala, Brian, Chris, John and Tala's friend is in the mouth of the cave.
This was where we stayed in Apia, the main city in Samoa on the smaller island of Upolu. We were only there for 2 nights before taking a ferry ride (which was rocky, stormy, and Chris and Brian got sick) to Savaii. The hut is called a "fale" and we had mosquito nets to use during the night or else we'd get eaten alive.
These are the slidding rocks falls. This was in Apia and we were brought here by a rather sketchy taxi driver. He took us to these falls (which we had to pay 2 tala for and were only accessed through a series of steep steps down) and then he told Brian to SLIDE off the rocks (they were very slippery with algae) into the falls and into a small pool of water. Brian was very trusting and went ahead and did it. Turns out the pool (though not very wide) was very deep and refreshing. This picture is of Chris slidding off the falls into the water.
These pictures are really out of order because this was from our time in NZ. This was in Rotorua, which is more of the most thermally active spots in NZ. It smells like sulfur and it has hundreds of these sulfur pools of bubbling thermal springs. In the center of the city is a park full of them. This picture was taken after we had gone Zorbing (another adventure in itself to describe).

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So I'm back from Samoa and of course because the vacation itself was so wonderful and relaxing, life here in Wellington has already become quite rocky. My computer's harddrive is all full (something I knew was bound to happen but I put off taking care of until now) so I need to buy an external harddrive before I can properly load my pictures from my trip up and everything. Also, when we arrived in Wellington (after pulling an allnighter after landing in Auckland and then taking a 12 hour bus ride) it was rainy and windy and our bus driver dropped us off at a stop without cover. Sadly all of us and our stuff got soaked. So I arrived back in Wellington missing the hot Samoan sunny weather (we never had a rainy day) and wishing like hell that I had never left.


I'll write about my adventures, they're long and detailed so I won't do that tonight, but I've posted these couple photos as teasers.

Stephens pictures

Here's the Samoa crew, Brian, me and Chris. We actually have a 4th person, Jon, joining up a couple days after we arrive in Samoa.
Me and Henry at Mt.Victoria.
Hanging out at the dock, looking at the water.
Starfishing. I refused to touch the little feelers, which is why I'm holding this guy like that. Haha.
Starfishing.
Looking for starfish.
Little guys. I didn't mind holding them. I have the 5, Henry has the 2.
Swinging, bringing back childhood memories.

Pictures from the week.

Another view from the Botanical Gardens - you can see how calm the water is.
Ferns in the Botanical Garden - I'm not posting any others because I've posted so many pictures of the Botanical Gardens already, I don't think it's necessary to post more.
Henry and Stephen playing on some sick NZ playgrounds.
Finding Starfish - I was scared of this starfish because it was so big and scary looking. I don't like their little sucker feet.
Such a nice day.
View from Mt.Victoria of Wellington.
Polhill Reserve. Henry, Ben, and Chris.
Tagging is Illegal... but that's okay.
Chalvin? Henry's tag with spider webs and spray paint and his eyeball.