Back in NZ - Days 109-150
So…. What have I been up to lately?? ….. good question! Apparently “Fiji Time” really affected me as when I flew back into Auckland (just can’t stay away from NZ!). I ended up chilling out for a whole month and a half with Stu – doing absolutely nothing! We got into Auckland and I faced up to the truth and bought myself a new camera. Auckland is just another city so we wanted to head out as soon as we could but we did managed to catch a Chinese new year festival in the park and enjoyed a couple picnics before we caught the ferry across to the Coromandel. Our first stop was Coromandel Town where we spent a couple days just hanging out and watching movies and several episodes of The Office. Then we set off towards Whitianga on our first ever adventure hitchhiking. We got a lift out of town with the woman who ran the hostel and within ten minutes we had our first lift in the back of a work truck with a super nice Maori guy who even took us sightseeing along the way and offered to stop for pictures. He also took us to his place for some coffee then decided he had nothing better to do and drove us all the way to our destination. Pretty good luck for our first hitch!
We spent the next five days hanging out in Whitianga body boarding in the ocean, going for walks and watching as many movies as we could. People would shake their heads at us while we sat inside on a sunny afternoon just watching movies. The one day we hitched down to Hot Water Beach – probably the only place in the world where you can hitchhike holding a shovel and no one bats an eyelash. Hot Water Beach has thermal pockets where you can dig a hole in the sand at low tide and make yourself a little hot tub. You have to be careful though as the water is so hot you can burn yourself. There were a lot of people on the beach and not enough space to make our own little hot tub so we just stood in the hot water and enjoyed the sunny day then hitched back to Whitianga later that afternoon.
Our next stop was Taupo – almost 400km away. We had to wait an hour to get picked up (our longest wait while hitchhiking) but we lucked out and got a guy who was headed all the way down to Tauraunga, a major portion of the distance we had to cover. We also got treated to lunch on his business card which was really cool. My first time trying a kebab in New Zealand! He also stopped at a gold mine and a couple scenic views along the way so we could grab some pictures –Kiwi’s have the most generous hearts! We caught a ride with two girls to Rotorua, with another woman through the city and then one more girl dropped us about 20km out of town. We then got picked up by a mom with two teenage girls and they were one of my favourites to hitchhike with. The girls were so excited to pick up two strangers as I guess their mom never stops to get hitchhikers. One last car (an air conditioning van) dropped us at Stu’s friends place in Taupo where we stayed 2 nights.
We ended up staying in Taupo for an entire week, moving to a hostel just outside of town and we hung out watching movies again. In all fairness, the weather was pretty shoddy outside so there wasn’t much more we could do. We hit up the botanical gardens and enjoyed a sunny afternoon one day. This is also where we started a several week long junk food binge. Nothing better than gross candy [thanks Anna ;)], chocolate, chips, honey roasted peanuts, and apple juice.
After Taupo we headed back down to Raglan where I had spent an entire week right before Christmas. We wanted to do some surfing together and had two perfect days to do it (minus the fact that the waves really weren’t that great). We got a lift to Hamilton with a really nice couple headed down to Christchurch to help with the earthquake relief and lucked out again and had them shout us lunch at a very nice and expensive café. We got dropped off at our hostel by another driver and spent the evening going for a walk and chilling in the hostels hot tub. The next day we grabbed some boards and spent the entire afternoon surfing in the beautiful weather. I also managed to catch up with my Portuguese friend Diogo who had moved to Raglan. The next day the waves were terrible but we decided to go out anyway and just goofed around in the water, doing press ups on the surfboards, and laughing the afternoon away. Not a good day for surfing but we made the best of it.
Our next day was spent hitching all the way back up to Auckland as we were catching a flight down to the South Island for the remainder of my stay in NZ. We had a great flight down to Queenstown and walked out of the airport to hitch down to Wanaka for the next four days. We spent four nights in Wanaka and lucked out and got our room upgraded for free. We had a TV in it with a movie channel and may have spent more than a day or two chilling out watching every movie that came on and eating more junk food. Such an active, healthy lifestyle! Even though it was the equivalent to September in NZ we still had some nice weather and I managed to snag a sunburn on the lake front. We headed back to Queenstown after Wanaka but only spent a day or two there running errands and chilling out. We did get really motivated and actually baked some brownies in the hostel kitchen though – I’m sure we made everyone jealous!
Next stop for us was Dunedin – finally somewhere I hadn’t been before. We hitched all the way to Cromwell before we realized it was Saturday night with a rugby match in town in Dunedin and we couldn’t find an available hostel anywhere. So we decided to stay in Cromwell (nice town, not nice accommodation) where we napped the afternoon away and played trivial pursuit in the evening. The next day we got out of town as soon as we could and caught a ride all the way to Dunedin with a really cool guy who works for World Vision in areas where natural disasters or crises have occurred. He had some really cool stories to tell and also bought us lunch (for the third time!!) at a great outdoor café. Dunedin is a cool little college town and we had managed to snag some cheap coupons online for the Cadbury chocolate factory (an actual factory tour) and a big kids playground place. We spent one afternoon at Speight’s brewery drinking as much free beer as we could in 30 minutes and then spent the rest of the afternoon eating junk food, hot tubbing, and playing scrabble. The next day we switched hostels and did the chocolate factory tour which was really cool. We watched them dump 1 tonne of melted chocolate down a silo and we got tonnes of free chocolate! We shopped the rest of the afternoon and watched more movies in the evening (I wasn’t kidding when I said we didn’t do much). The next day we headed down to a place called Bigups where Stu and I got to wrestle each other in sumo suits, battle gladiator style, box with giant boxing gloves, and climb an inflatable rock wall. Definitely a big kids playground! We spent the evening playing scrabble and went for a long walk the next day to the world’s steepest street. I don’t know what this means but they say the gradient at the steepest point is 1 in 2.86.
The next day we hitched back to Queenstown and checked in at Base for the next (and my last) seven nights in NZ. We spent the rest of our time hanging out at the water front, going out a couple nights (I completed my first centurion: drinking 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes), playing Frisbee golf, going for walks, having picnics, watching movies, and hiking up to the top of the hill overlooking Queenstown. It was a great last week and we celebrated my last night and our time together with a bottle of wine and a couple of movies. New Zealand is such an amazing country and it made me extremely sad to leave to head back to Australia for the final leg of this amazing journey and adventure I am on.
