At 7AM, Mel bounded out of bed, ready to get an early start on the day.  While typing away on the computer, with Eli’s hacking coughs in the background, she decided that the plan had changed. Instead of setting out early to Abel Tasman to go on an afternoon kayaking tour, we would sleep in, and make our way there slowly. So, she went back to bed until 9:30 when the alarm went off again (we needed to check out by 10).

We started an ambling  course toward Abel Tasman National Park shortly after 10, and were making pretty good time.  After an hour, Eli pulled out the guidebook to find a place for lunch. Within seconds of finding a place, I drove right past it (hadn’t even looked to see where we were yet, and there it was!).

It was a cute place called the Jester House Cafe, which was right off the main road on a piece of property prettily tucked away in the forest. There was a stream running across the front with a little footbridge, and a sign that said “Tame Eels”. We were curious what this meant, and it meant exactly that. The shop sold eel food (some sort of pink paste) that you could feed to the eels on popsicle sticks while standing on the riverbank.  There was a group of young kids and mothers there, feeding the eels and having a good time.

We walked the grounds a bit, then went inside for lunch. We had a delicious bread/cheese/meat platter, where everything was home-made on site, and the most delicious cup of tea I’ve had in a long while. We contemplated carrot cake for dessert, but due to the volume of lunch, decided we were already full.

While on our way out, we picked up a pamphlet full of addresses of local artisan. So we decided to detour (backwards) and visit a few of them.  We went to a wood-turning studio with some lovely bowls, and the pottery studio of Anna Bartlett, who does very unique glazework with a lot of 3D texture.

We continued on our way, and took a short, 10km winding road out to the coast (over a mountain, of course), to get the the national park. The camp is right on the beach, although our cabin doesn’t have an ocean view (we got another cabin so Eli can continue to recouperate!). While Eli napped this afternoon, I went for a swim in the ocean, which wasn’t nearly as cold as I was expecting based on what I’d heard. It’s the temperature of Cape Cod Bay in the summertime.

After a short swim and an ice cream, I came back to find Eli awake, and unable to further snooze. So we decided to have a movie night. First we watched the Dreamworks animated movie Monsters vs. Aliens. It was quite entertaining. Then we got together a bit of supper from leftovers in the camper (more cheese/bread/meat, fruit, quesadillas, and fresh lime soda!), and ate it while watching Disney/Pixar’s movie Up.  This one was really good, and really made us appreciate how lucky we are in life, with so many great friends and family to share it with.  We miss you all, and will see you again in less than 2 more weeks!

Eli has been feeling more under the weather with each passing day, so we’ve been taking it easy. We slept in this morning and caught up on our blogging, then drove out to catch the ferry from the North Island to the South Island. It’s about a 3 hour ferry ride, which ends with over an hour cruising through the beautiful Marlborough Sound. We drove our campervan onto the vehicle deck, then watched the scenery (and snoozed) from the protected deck. It was quite a windy day outside! Eli estimated a 40 knot wind; the ferry was listing quite heavily to the side, and there was quite the swell in addition to the white caps.

After a safe ferry ride of enjoying the teal-blue water, and beautiful coastal mountains, we landed in Picton and drove ourselves off the ferry. We decided to take the scenic, winding route to Nelson, instead of the longer highway route, so spent about an hour admiring the coastline as the road meandered its way around the mountains.

There were parking areas all along the route, where you could stop and admire the scenery. The sound has tongues of land interspersed with long waterways, and most of the land is mountainous. From our travels, we gather that logging is a major industry on this part of the island; we saw not only a giant lumber stash at the port (following picture), but also huge areas of the hillsides that were obviously deforested for lumber harvest. There are also very obvious vegetation patches where logging has occurred in the past. At least they seem to do it sustainably; there were huge monocultures of idential pine trees with pointed canopies, obviously planted in rows years ago, interspersed with the rounded treetops of the native assorted vegetation.

Eli had a grand time driving the curving road; we took some video, but without the g-forces, it fails to capture the curvy nature and fun of driving around here. Plus, you come around a corner, and all of a sudden are treated to a breathtaking view. It was quite lovely.

We got into town and found the campground (despite the best efforts of the GPS to get us lost), and got a lovely ensuite room (with its own bathroom and surprisingly comfortable beds). We had dinner at a fabulous Turkish Kabob place, recommended by the guide, which made incredibly tasty food, and had Coke in glass bottles!

Today we started the morning with the short drive back to Wai-O-Tapu from our campground. This site is famous because of the high concentration of geothermal activity in a relatively small area.

We made it just in time to watch them induce the geyser to do it’s morning show; shooting hot water about 2m into the air. They dump soap into it to lower the surface tension of the water so it’ll perform on command; makes for good tourism, although I wouldn’t classify it as a natural wonder.

So after this we went to the park proper, and did the several kilometer long walk around the park. There were some people around, but no where near the crowds you’d see at a US national park, which was wonderful. Plus, most of them are speaking other languages, so are easy to tune out 🙂

I (Mel) have never been to a volcanic/geothermal area before, and Eli’s only been to volcanic areas, so this was all new stuff for us, and was really amazing. It didn’t smell too bad, so we could take our time and enjoy the sights. Everything was so many colors; orange from antimony, yellow from sulfur (they spell it sulphur here), red/brown from iron oxides, black from carbon, etc. There were geysers, mud pools, hot springs, thermal pools, geothermal lakes, craters… all manner of new things to see. They had great pathways that took you right next to all these things.  We took about a zillion pictures (or rather, I did since Eli was feeling lousy).  Here are just a few.  We also took some great videos of bubbling mud, but they’re too big to upload for now.  We have a 1GB cap for the entire time we’re here, so I’m trying to ration my picture/video uploads (hard job!).

You can’t quite tell, but the lake is green, teal, and yellow in different patches. I can’t remember the name right now (10 minutes to catch the ferry!), but it’s got a bunch of thermal springs and upwelling-type things into it that bring in the colored minerals.

The color doesn’t show up well on our netbook, but this lake is NEON yellow.  Bright, almost blindingly yellow from all the sulfur in it. It was right next to these great yellow sulfur caves.

This is a lame picture of boiling mud. These pits are so cool; huge pits of mud with air bubbling up all through them, making them look like they’re boiling with bits of super-hot mud shooting everywhere. I took some good videos of it that we’ll upload later.

We drove south all the way to Wellington after this, so we could get really good sleep in before catching the ferry. Along the way, we drove past some snow covered mountains, which I think are near Tongariro, where we are going to hike on our way back north.

Today we got up at a sane hour, since Eli’s started to feel under the weather (congested, tired, and achy). It’s a good thing we had a relaxed day planned.

There’s a hotspot under Rotorua, which makes it very geothermally active, and a great place to see all sorts of great geology. Even feeling lousy, Eli enjoyed himself here.

We started with a tour of a modern-day Mauri village, the native people to this area. They lived in these areas originally, cooking their food in the thermal vents, and bathing and cooking in the thermal pools. And treating their skin regularly with the mud from the mud pools!  Below is a picture of them cooking their corn for dinner in one of the pools in their village. The village itself is one of their ancestral villages, and members of the tribe still live there, but it’s been modernized in many ways, so resembles a cross between an ancestral and modern village.

Cooking corn in a thermal pool

After our village tour, we went back to Rotorua to get a tour of the Jade factory, and watch them make Jade pieces. Unfortunately, our tour company got confused, and the jade-maker takes Sundays off, so we had to miss this tour. But we did watch a video on Jade carving, and browsed their shop. Then we wandered around the district a while, and stopped at a craft fair. It was exactly like craft fairs on the Cape, with retired folks selling nice hand-made stuff for prices that were way too low 🙂  Unfortunately, we doubted our ability to get pottery home safely, with 10 more days in NZ and 5 more flights, because they had some beautiful pieces. We also took a walk around a large lake in the area, through a wetland where we saw lots of great birds.

Our final activity of the night was a Maori village demonstration and dinner. This was at a different “village”, which was specially created to mimic the look and layout of their ancestral villages. We got to see the ritual for visiting tribes, and a show of native songs and dances. Then they served us a buffet dinner that was cooked below ground in the traditional manner, which was quite tasty and reminiscent of Thanksgiving dinner (potatoes, sweet potatoes, chicken, lamb, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce…). Then we wandered around the village before heading back. Our tour guide was a hoot, and we did karaoke on the busride back (with lots of Christmas carols).  I (Mel) decided that Maori wood figures are nearly as good as gargoyles, and photographed some. Interestingly, many had their tongues sticking out, which was a sign of something or other… if it was sticking out crooked it was a sign of welcome.

After all this excitement, we drove for a while toward Wai-o-tomo, but it didn’t end up having anywhere to stay! So we drove onward until we found a caravan park, and stayed their for the night.

Since today was supposed to be a gloomy day, we decided it would be the perfect day to visit the glow-worm caves in Waitomo. They are completely tourist-ized, but as such are a quite safe way to see these New Zealand natives. The glow worms are actually larvae for the fungus midge. The midges sit on the ceiling, and drop sticky threads to catch food. The light they emit lights up their thread and attracts prey.

We chose to do a ‘blackwater rafting’ trip, where you have an inner tube, and you tube down the river inside the cave, looking up in the dark at the glow-worm colonies. We were in the cave for about an hour with a group of 12 folks and 3 guides. We spent a bit of time hiking in the cave, then the guides helped us over some small waterfalls, before we peacefully floated through the rest of the cave, checking out the ‘worms’.  It was a little like looking up into the night sky with no light pollution, except these worms were brighter and there were a lot more of them. It was really great; not just the worms, but also the caving. It was over much too quickly, and we took a short hike out of the forest back to the vans.

We ordered the picture CD from the tour company, and it has some great photos on it, including some of us in the cave (in our adorable hard hats and wetsuits… the water was 12°C!). However, it’s a CD, and our netbook doesn’t have a CD drive, so we can’t upload those pictures until we get home.  But in the meantime, we also took a hike around the caves, and took a picture of the stream coming out of one.

After all this caving and exploring, we got back in the van and drove to our next destination, Rotorua. It’s a geothermally active area, but fortunately our campsite was far enough out of town that it didn’t smell like sulfur all night!

On the way, we stopped at the Kiwi house. It was closed 🙁 but we took a picture with the giant kiwi statue anyhow!

After we finished our dive day (and hung out with our British friends until midnight), we slept in, then drove south. We made a stop-off at Sheepworld, to ferret out the reason behind the pink sheep, and see a little of what they had to offer.

We got there just in time for their daily show. We got to see one of their sheephandlers go through the routine with the dogs, rounding up and herding the sheep. Those dogs are amazing!  Then he had people from the audience help him with some demonstrations. There were only 5 of us, so we all got to participate. First, a woman from Europe had to separate the sheep out by color; she had a rough time of it. Then her husband and I (Mel) got to try our hand at shearing a sheep. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, since he held it down for us, but I did come away smelling like a sheep. Also, as soon as you touch their wool, your hands are covered in lanolin, which makes them silky smooth. Then we got to feed some lambs, and see lambs in various colors.

At this point, it was pouring out, so we grabbed umbrellas and toured the grounds to check out the other animals they keep there, and hung out in the shop for a while, waiting for the rain to stop. Since it didn’t, we dashed to the car after a bit, and continued our drive south. We made it south of Auckland to Hamilton at a reasonable hour, and stopped there for the night, with the plan of checking the weather in the AM before planning the next few days.

Oh, and the mystery of the pink sheep. The farm hands had dyed a small group of sheep red and blue, which are the colors of the local rugby team, before a rugby match a while back. They used vegetable dye, which washes right out and doesn’t hurt the wool or sheep. Their boss came back and got upset with them, and made them wash it out. So the next time he left, as a practical joke, they dyed a group neon pink and put them in the pen at the entrance to the park. The boss got back and was very upset, until he started getting calls from his neighbors, saying what a clever marketing scheme he’d come up with.  Apparently, so many people were stopping to photograph the sheep, that the neighbors noticed! They also got higher ticket sales from the extra people brought in. So now they keep some pink sheep around as their signature 🙂

First off, I apologize for the lack of updates recently. First of all, internet access is spotty at many of the parks where we are camping, and in some, prohibitively expensive. Second, I (Eli) have, as predicted, gotten good and sick. We’ve had to cancel our planned Tongariro Alpine Crossing hike for today, and instead moved our Cook Straight Ferry reservation up to 1PM. We’ll have a relaxing day crossing the straight and driving part-way to the glaciers on the South Island.

Anyhow, the Poor Knights. We went diving with Dive! Tutukaka, which is the largest operation heading out to the Poor Knights. Our group was great, just a captain and 2 crew, with about 12 divers. Several of the divers had big time photography gear with them, which was a first for any of my trips. The first site we headed out to is called “The Tunnel” or the “Eastern Arch”. Its a large archway/tunnel through the island, and had a huge school of pink snapper swimming in the middle of it when we arrived. The diving was fantastic! Tons of snapper, blue and pink mau mau, large short- and long-tailed stingrays, and all sorts of fish were cruising up and down the walls and floor of the tunnel. Once we finished that dive, we had lunch and a cruise about the islands, stopping at the world’s largest sea cave (by volume) Riko Riko Cave. After lunch, we headed out to the Northern Arch for a second dive. Mel and I went out alone this time, and spotted a ton of great sea life. She spotted a Moray Eel hiding in the rocks, and there were bunches of nudibranchs on the vertical walls.

All in all, the Poor Knights was by far the best temperate diving I’ve ever done.  Mel seconds this, emphatically.

We also made friends with a couple from Australia, Nicky and Brian. We spent a bit of time chatting with them afterward, and they provided us with some information about their itinerary. That was immensely helpful, and helped us limit ours to something reasonable.

The Poor Knights themselves were beautiful, rocky islands with all sorts of arches and outcroppings, like the one above. One of our dives was through an arch like this, and in between dives they took us around in the boat to look at the islands themselves while we had our lunch.

We didn’t have an underwater camera, so us on the boat with the islands in the background is the closest we could get.  We’ve got some more pictures which we’ll upload to the photo site later. It was an amazing day!

A quick note on soda overseas. They don’t drink a lot of it, but what they do tastes so amazingly good, that soda in the States pales in comparison. They make it all with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, and it tastes crisp with no aftertaste. It’s made this way everywhere we’ve been, and in India they even use glass bottles. MMMMMM. Tasty! I’ll miss this when we get back home.

A quick update, before we head out for the day. Unfortunately, we’re out of upload bandwidth, so no pictures until the next campground. We had some amazing diving on Thursday at the Poor Knights (Hil, you have GOT to get back here and do that), and drove south on Friday, with a few stops along the way (we actually made it into Sheepworld and caught the sheep show).

We’re in Hamilton right now, which is half way in between our next two activities; “blackwater rafting” through the glow-worm caves, and exploring the volcanic landscape of Rotorua, with hot springs and sulfur pools. We’re waiting to see what the weather does before we decide.

We stopped at an auto shop yesterday morning and got our van problems solved; the internal battery was dry and barely holding a charge, so easily fixed with a new battery. Now we don’t have to worry about whether the fridge will stop running and our food will warm up.

So off to breakfast and to start the day!

Today’s Lesson:  Just because a road is called a highway, does not mean you will be able to use it to quickly get from point A to point B.

We got up early in the morning on Day 2 of our time in New Zealand to travel from our lodging at Sheepworld to meet up with Tiana (Eli’s coworker’s daughter). We had been planning on stopping for an hour long hike up a mountain on our way, but it was raining and incredibly misty out, so it didn’t make sense to do the hike. Instead, we decided to take the “scenic highway” route to get to our destination (since none of the museums or shops were open at 7:30 am).

The scenic highway turned out to be quite an interesting drive in a large campervan on a windy day. The road was quite curvy with a few one-way bridges sprinkled in. I wish I had a video of driving it, since it’s hard to describe. My best description would be that they needed a road, but didn’t want to blast through any rock, or cut down any trees, so wound the road around these things. And the geology of the island is very young, so there are a lot of hills and valleys, but they’re not rounded from years of weathering like they are in the states; they’re new and quite irregular. So instead of slow winding loops up the hills like you get on Rt 17 through the Catskills, you get very tight corners that loop back on each other in quite sharp turns.

Another interesting thing about the roads here in the Northlands, is that the speed limit is higher than any sane individual would drive.  There was a particularly twisty pass with almost constant switchbacks and sharp corners, with a speed limit of 75kph (~50mph). We took it at about 40-45 in the campervan. There are stretches of 100kph road that we couldn’t do more than 60 or 70 on. Quite a difference from the Mass Pike.  Eli has been doing all the driving so far, since I’m not quite sure I can handle these roads, driving on the wrong side of the road in a large diesel van.

So in the morning we drove the excitingly windy scenic highway. We stopped frequently at various parks and sights, since Eli couldn’t look at much except the road while we were driving.  There are some really beautiful parks here, most of the ones we saw today were long stretches of coastline with mountains in the background.

We took a lot of pictures, but didn’t upload very many, since we’re paying for internet by the MB.  We’ll upload more later, when we next have a free internet connection.

This is a shot of Lang's Beach. I love a beach with mountains in the background.

Eli and I after walking the beach to stretch our legs after an hour or so of windy road driving.

They call this the New Zealand Christmas Tree (I can't remember the official species name), since it flowers with these beautiful red flowers in early to mid December. They're starting to flower everywhere just now!

Close-up of the red flower from the "Christmas Tree"

We went to a reserve called One Tree Point (although there were many trees there, so the name was misleading), and there was all of this igneous rock that was incredibly soft. There was also harder stuff that they'd carved stairs into so you could get close to the water. These trees have amazingly strong roots; most are coming horizontally out of the rock face, with no roots pointing downwards!

After we reached the town of Whangarei (pronounced Fahn-goo-ray), we found we had 6 hours before meeting Tiana, so we decided to go to see the Waipoua Forest, which has the last of the native Kauri trees in the country. It used to be covered with them, but most were cut down by Europeans after they settled here. We first took a walk to the Father of the Forest (the second largest tree in the forest) and the Four Sisters (four large trees clustered together). They were nice, short hikes, and the trees were amazingly large. Then we took the very short hike to see the Mother of the Forest, the ‘mightiest tree in the forest’ (although we forgot to bring our herring…). It doesn’t come through well in pictures, because it’s hard to understand just how large it is… 13.8m around the trunk (over 45 feet).

On the way to the forest, we stopped by a shop and met a man that does carvings with this wood. He has to use trees found preserved in swamps, since it’s a protected species and cannot be cut down. There’s a lot of wetland area in New Zealand, and when a farmer finds one of these trees on his land, these folks pay to have it extracted, then they work with the wood. It has an amazing grain pattern, which they call ‘fiddleback’ here, since it’s often the same pattern as the wood used on the back of violins.

Eli with a tree fern

We were wondering if tree ferns were like ground ferns, and started their fronds as fiddleheads. We wondered this for a while, until we finally saw this one, which is nearly as big as my head! And we saw a partially unrolled frond, where the individual leaves were still uncurling. Quite cool!

The mother of the forest, but with no people for scale, it's hard to see how incredibly massive this tree is. I'm standing quite a good ways back to get this picture (and could still benefit from a wide-angle lens)

After the forest, we drove to Tutukaka to meet with Tiana for dinner. The drive took a lot longer than we expected, since we hadn’t accounted for the curvy-ness of the road through the forest, which made our drive earlier in the day seem tame. It’s as if the road curved around every individual tree, with very small shoulders and often steep dropoffs. But we eventually made it to Tutukaka, and had a lovely dinner with Tiana at the local restaurant, and took a walk along the marina there. She graciously offered her yard for the night, so we parked the van and got a good night’s sleep.  We had a reservation to dive on the Poor Knight Islands the next day, and wanted to be ready!

We posted a little yesterday about our first day in New Zealand.  We got to sleep around 10, which is easy to do when in a camper van and it gets dark. I (Mel) forgot it’s summer here, so was thinking it would get dark at 6. I was happily wrong, since it stayed light until 9 or so.  We are currently in our camper van in a holiday park at Sheepworld. It’s 5:something AM… this is what happens when you get to bed early… you wake up before 10am.  I’m not sure how I like this development in our schedule.

Here’s some pictures from our travels up here yesterday; it took maybe an hour to drive from Auckland to Warkworth, where we are now. We’re going to go hiking this morning when it gets light somewhere close by, we can’t remember where and it’s too dark to look it up 🙂

You officially know you're on vacation when you're wearing chacos and sitting on the beach.

We'd barely arrived at the beach, when Eli disappeared. After some searching, I found him lying in a tree, soaking in the scenery!

I set the autotimer on the camera and tried to join him, but look much less natural as a result of the mad dash to beat the 10 second timer 🙂

Our home on wheels for the next 2.5 weeks, parked at our second stop, Moirs Hill Walkway.

A forest view from the walkway. In addition to the palm trees dotting the forest canopy, we also have tree ferns.

Eli and I at the end of our short forest hike to the waterfall

The first thing we saw when we pulled into Sheepworld was this group of pink sheep. I'm not sure what their story is... but they're definitely something I've never seen before.

More pictures on our website:

http://wildsprite.com/gallery/v/honeymoon/NZ/North/

Now, we’re going to go cook us some breakfast (egg and slab bacon breakfast wraps), brush our teeth in tap water for the first time since France (can’t drink India water), and go for our hike on the way to visit Eli’s co-worker’s daughter, Tiana, who lives an hour north of here.

The morning after the we slept in a bit, then walked around Ahmedebad.  We spent some time in the coffee shop people-watching (and looking for camels), and wandered in some jewelry stores along the street.  The jewelers keep the lights and AC off most of the time, and turn it on for you when you come in to browse.  We didn’t end up buying much, just a few books for the plane ride.  We did see some monkeys in our wandering!

We got to the airport right on time for our flight back to Mumbai, which was delayed again (1.5 hours or so), and got to Mumbai right around 11pm.  None of the cabbies knew exactly where we were going, but they took us out anyway and asked for directions along the way. We drove through some pretty impoverished areas, then came to a giant wall and gate with security guards. This was indeed our hotel. The bomb-sniffing dogs ok-ed the cab, and we were dropped off. As I posted before, we ordered room service for dinner (since all the restaurants were closed), then passed out.

On Sunday, we got up, took a walk around the hotel grounds, and had brunch, which was a buffet. They had the biggest assortment of food I’ve seen in a buffet, along with cocktails and desserts. We each stuffed ourselves, then took a nap 🙂 When we got up, we went for a swim in the pool (The hotel pool showers were tiled elephants with 3D trunks for showerheads. We didn’t shower, but I enjoyed the effects.). Then we repacked for our international weight limit (20kg instead of the 26kg for internal India flights), wandered the hotel shops (I got the Pashmina scarf I’d been searching for), and had a late dinner at the Chinese restaurant in the hotel. They had a four-course meal option that was very affordable, and the food was fantastic.

On Monday, the entire day was spent travelling. We left the hotel at 9am in a taxi to the airport, then went through the normal hoops before boarding our ~5 hour flight to Singapore. We had a very short layover there (partly because our flight was delayed), then we flew to Auckland (over 9 hours). We arrived at 11am this morning, making for 24 hours of air travel, counting layovers and time zone changes.

When we got here, we got a shuttle to the Jucy car rental place to pick up our campervan. It’s pretty nice for a sleeper van; we assembled the bed from pieces of the seats, and splurged on an upscale campground; we have electric and water hookups, a communal kitchen area, etc. It’s right next to Sheep World, but it doesn’t open until 9am tomorrow, and we’ll be hiking.

I took some pictures, which I’ll upload first thing in the morning, since my camera is buried under the bed. We drove through beautiful scenery, saw rolling hillsides and beaches, took a hike through the forest to see a waterfall, and walked around the downtown area, all this afternoon. This evening we had pizza and did our laundry.
And now it’s 10pm or so and I’m exhausted. You just don’t get as good a night’s sleep on the plane. So I’m going to give it a go in the camper (Eli’s been snoring next to me the whole time I’ve been typing). Goodnight!