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!