Our time in the North Island has flown by and the last part of of our journay is coming scarily close, even though we still have 6 weeks left. We arrived in Wellington at about 5 in the evening from the ferry and nearly had a heart attack as we drove onto a motorway! It was rare to see a two lane road on the South Island! The shock of such a big city (in England's terms it's not big atall) caused harriet the navigator to get all flustered so we drove around lost for quite a while before finally finding a hostel. We decided to treat ourselves that night by going to a restaurant as we realised that we'd only been out for tea once in New Zealand and that was only a burger place. It was really nice not to cook. Wellington has quite a nice atmosphere but we decided only to stay one night and the next morning, after visiting the museum, we headed North. We took a detour (an hour more than expected down a winding, sometimes gravel road with some apparently suicidal sheep and cows on it) to visit the place with the longest name in the world. 'Place' is quite an exaguration really. It was basically a very long sign by the side of the road with a house opposite....and that was it. For miles. After a 3 hour journey a cafe or anything would have been nice. A stretch of the legs and a photo of a very long sign was all we got. The name is in Maori and means something like "the man who walked a lot and was known as the land eater because he appeared to eat land with his strides, and he played a flute for his brother". Interesting. We drove on to Clive, a little village in Hawke's Bay; another wine region (yay!). We stayed in a lovely cottage that we had to ourselves for one of the nights, a bargain for 7 pounds each. This time, instead of riding bikes, we did an organised wine tour. The red wines are much better in the north so we ended up buying a nice bottle to go with our bangers and mash....mmmmmmmm!
The next day we drove to Taupo which is a lovely town or city or something by a lake that is fromed in a volcanic crater. We walked to the tourist information office to book skydiving for the next day but because it was such a nice day we were told we should try and do it that afternoon. Ten minutes later the skydive company picked us up and within an hour we were at 15 000 feet ready to jump! We hadn't really had chance to think about what we were doing, and it was only when i was dangling out of the plane with the man about to jump with me that I became absolutely petrified! my face on the DVD is hilarious. We were freefalling for over a minute which was terrifying and amazing. During the freefall I lost a contact lense (got stuck to my goggle) and Harriet managed to slobber all over her face (it had dried to her face by the time she got to the bottom). Nice! The views were amazing. We only discovered this after though, when we looked at the photos as we forgot to look when we were falling. We did some walking the next day and visited some steaming craters and mud pools which are very surreal-the earth just steams because of the lava heating the groundwater. We also saw another hydroelectric dam and a geothermal dam. I found these very exciting!
The next place we visited was Rotorua, which stinks of rotten eggs because of all the sulphur being emitted from volcanic craters. It's really pretty though. We went to a Maori show there. Maoris are the tribal people that were here before the Europeans came and settled, and they wore little clothing with many tatoos. They did some dancing and chanting and then cooked a huge buffet dinner in a hangi; a hole in the grond that they cook in. It was like a roast dinner and we were stuffed! While we were in Rotorua we did a bit more walking and went Zorbing. Zorbing was great fun. We jumped inside a huge inflatable ball with same water in it and were pushed down a hill. we went in together and harriet sat on my head at one point as we were slipping all around.
We headed from Rotorua up to the Coromandel Peninsula at the North of the island. It was lovely weather there, but cold at night. One hostel didn't have heating ans we thought we might die from hyperthermia but luckily we didn't. We stayed 3 nights on the peninsula, in different places on each night. We did a few nice walks, one involved walking though an old mining tunnel that we needed a torch for, and there were glow worms. That was pretty cool. We also went to Hot water Beach where you can dig a hole in the sand and just bathe in it. It was quite funny to see all these people lying in holes in the sand in winter. Luckily it was a nice day so we didn't get too cold when we got out of the holes. The water was lovely. We stayed on a farm last night and then drove to Auckland today. We have one and a half days here before flying to Chile. Chance to do a bit of shopping (it's the first time we've seen propper shops in ages!)