How many km's in a mile?
Every time I take a picture of the Auckland skyline, it's in a cloud...
Kiwi humor. I've seen at least 4 of these.
Mission Bay is probably the most popular beach actually "in" Auckland. It's still a 10 minute bus ride from me.
There are lots and lots of ports on the waterfront.
View from my window.
My room.
My living room
My kitchen
The Flats courtyard right out side of my living room. It goes up another level but I don't think I took the best picture.
The car we took on our trip looks much bigger here than it is. The smallest person was our main driver and after her I was the smallest person. Watching us get out probably looked like a clown car at the circus.
The most amazing thing about the Tongariro crossing is the diversity in scenery. This was the first picture and I'll let you know when you get to the last.
At this point I thought it would be a good idea to show proof how far we hiked.
This is Mt. Ngauruhoe aka Mt. Doom from Lord of the Rings.
We were to tired after walking pretty much right up hill to even consider it.
This is biggest craters on the hike and it literally comes out of no where.
The camera doesn't quiet do the color justice. We at lunch at the right edge of the big lake because there were no sulfur vents out there.
I forgot what this lake is called but it's really big considering you can't see it until you climb out of the crater.
Tired
The Highlands all of a sudden pop out of the moon like scenery.
The last marker I found.
Sulfur just doing its thing.
And then you just end up in the jungle.
And this is the last of them. I have lots of other pictures but after review them they seem so lame compared to the real thing.
We kind of just drove around with a loose plan after the hike. The Haka Falls are in Rotorua north of the crossing
The pictures are in a weird order but this is me after "Zorbing". I'm excited to be on solid ground again.
Ask them and they'll say its some extreme sport where you roll down a hill in a giant hamster ball. Ask me and I'd say its like riding in the washer machine. Fantastic nonetheless
We drove out to the Coromandel Peninsula which looked a lot like Virginia to me.
This is the Hot Water Beach. Around the bend there are pockets of thermal gas leaking out of the beach which warms up the water. You pretty much dig a whole and sit in it. It sounds lame but it's pretty amazing.
I drove a total of about 15km the whole trip. Driving on that side of the road wasn't to bad. The flimsy car we rented for $30 a day was terrifying to drive.
When we were heading home we just popped into a beach (can't remember the exact name) to catch the sunset. We were looking northwest so I can only imagine what it looks like on the west coast.
We made friends with our neighbors the first night and sang some Karaoke with them.
The next few are from the black sand beaches. They filmed the Piano there.
Mount Edgemont or Taranaki form about an hour or so away. The first day of hiking was ridiculously clear.
At one point we thought we might be able to summit it but then we read it's one of the most dangerous summits in all of New Zealand.
This was one of two clouds I saw the whole day.
The view from the highest point of our two day hike.
This was terrifying. The rocks apparently can move at any second so you have to walk across very quickly. The view was fantastic but I decided to keep moving instead of taking a picture.
The scary slip from the other side.
The one on the left I think was the one you have to go across fast.
This swamp field just appears in the middle of these mountains. We would walk through later that evening.
We took a hour side trip to these falls. The picture wasn't great but they're big.
The second cloud of the day
I never walked up more stairs in my life. It literally felt like uphill both ways. My legs felt like Jell-O on the ride home. The hike started with about 750 feet of stairs and then at about the 5th hour on day one we had about 40 minutes of straight up hill. On day 2 we had another 30 minutes of stairs to conquer.
The river that turns into the falls runs through the swamp field.
Taranaki was visible almost at every point during day 1.
New Plymouth lit up an hour or so after we got to the hut we slept in.
This is before the sunrise early Sunday morning.
The sun starting to rise and reflect on Taranki.
The sun just peaked out all of a sudden and quickly climbed over that mountain. I'm not sure but I think it's Tongariro, where I was early this month. It's about 100 miles away. If not we did get to see it the day before but it didn't show up that well on the camera.
There were these small little "lakes" that are so small that they rarely make ripples. And early in the morning the light is perfect to take pictures of Taranaki's reflection.
Stairs turned into ladders...
Second highest point on the hike.
On the way out we had to cross 4 rivers.
Almost fell in here.
So one of the rare pictures on my camera of me. I'm registering for the camp sites at the Cape Reinga Coastal Walkway.
We started at Spirits Bay and walked for about 2.5 hours along the Pacific Ocean and next to a swampy marsh.
The colors wouldn't come out as awesome as they were but nonetheless you can see how unique the ocean color is there.
The swamp was literally to our left. Some of these pictures are taken by just moving the camera from one side to the other. It's crazy how different the landscape can be so close to each other.
We broke for lunch on the beach.
And then we started to get a little lost. The tides are a big issue on the track and depending on when and where you are, you have to go different ways. We really didn't find markers that easily but we made it and probably got a good mix of beach walking and ridge climbing.
The camera wouldn't distinguish between the white and blue of the clouds and ocean...
The point of the beach alllll the way out there is where we started and this is about 3 hours into day one.
The track was pretty smooth when we were on it.
After the beach we had to start climbing Darkies Ridge. Most of the area is flat except for the sudden ridges so when you get on top of one you can see pretty far.
That's the first campsite off in the distance. I got unlucky and formed two big blisters so I was happy to see the campgrounds thinking I would get some good rest.
One of the first day's victims.
The beach we camped by.
Morning came after 10 hours in 4 person tent we crammed 5 into (not to mention the 20 mosquitoes and other critters that joined us. At any given time two of us were awaking moaning and groaning about the person next to us taking too much room...absolutely miserable.
Beach during a really beautiful day.
The worst of the hike was the second half of the first day and the first half of the second day. This was only 10 minutes into our climb out of Tapotupotu Bay to Cape Reinga and we were pretty high up.
The beach disappears for a while which justifies the up and downs on the ridge.
That little sandy patch in the distance was where we began our hike.
Cape Reinga off in the distance.
Sandy Bay. Again the colors are not to be believed.
The lighthouse from afar.
So this is why Cape Reinga is popular really. It's about the edge of New Zealand (there is an even more northern point but just barely), and the views are really amazing.
the waves clashing in the middle of the sea are where the two bodies of water meet. Very weird to think of the Tasman and the Pacific as masses of water that start and end and definitive points. The color of the ocean here is quite distinctive as well.
There's an island way off that I couldn't get a picture of but this was a cool little story about it.
This is when the tramp got amazing. Te Werahi Beach is about 30 minutes from the lighthouse. There was a cloud over most of it it the whole time we were there which was refreshing.
This beach was amazing. The vastness was hard to capture on film but its just huge and open. Also, we were the only ones on it so it felt even more isolated.
This was about 10 minutes into the walk and that ridge felt like it right next to us because of how empty and calm the place is.
My buddy looked about twice as far off as her really was...
Again, the cape would not get further away no matter how far we walked.
That's another Cape I forget the name off but it and Cape Reinga bookend Te Werahi Beach.
And then we found huge sand dunes.
They came up out of no where and felt like they were from Mars.
Again the vastness was impressive, especially how it was a different kind of vast than the beach.
I remember thinking that these pieces of land really just didn't fit together.
After a small ridge and some wandering in the dunes, we ended up at twilight beach where we were hoping we'd find water and a camp site.
It was a 40 minutes walk from end to end of this beach and again, you never really felt like you were moving.
Came across some oysters hanging out on a random rock that was about 100 yards from the water. At high tide the rock was submerged in the water.
Setting up camp after a brief moment of crisis. That's our tent. Looking at it makes me sick now. Also, there was no water store so we had to use survival skills and follows a stream about 100 meters and boil water. We felt like we could be on the Discovery Channel.
The sunset was pretty awesome here.
We ate dinner on the beach and tried to stay up long enough so that we didn't have to be in the tent for more than 8 hours. We ended up getting bored/tired of the bugs at around 10...That night was probably the worst night I've ever encountered.
Day three started and by then I was grumpy and wanted to get home for some rest but it was still an amazing day.
Twilight Beach again.
And then 90 Mile Beach. This was the hardest part of the trip mentally because were all tired, thirsty, and grumpy, and everything looked the same. We walked for about an hour on the beach that covers most of the western short of Northland.
While we were starting to wear, it was quite pretty and the more we walked the close we got to some impressive sand dunes.
A casulaity of the beach. This little guy was about 50 yards off shore which means at high tide he's in the water. The tides here are massive so you can very easily get trapped in the water if your not careful.
Car tracks meant we were close to done.
Te Paki Stream was the last hour of the formal hike. It's pretty impressive how it cuts through the dunes.
So we had to meet someone from a hostel down the road to return us to our car and they refused to walk to the stream parking lot (they didn't seem to know it existed) so to meet them we had to walk 2 miles up a road through someone's farm. Cows didn't like us and quickly gathered sort of checking us out and running away.
On the way home we stopped at the "Famous Toilets"
I forgot the details but basically it was designed by a local who was well known in the architecture world. There's no two lines that go at the same angle and it's made out of bricks, glass bottles, ceramic, and all sorts of funk y materials.
The men's room
Three different urinals.
The architects anme was Hundertwasser. There's a sign up the road that advertises the public bathroom as the "famous toilets" where it gets its name.
