We last left you wondering what the pancake rocks were at Punakaiki, well they are simply what the name says. Huge rocks that with a lot of weathering now look like thick pancakes piled on top of each other combine this with some blow holes and you have a very intriguing costal spot. Hopefully you will remember from the Kangaroo island blog what blow holes are. Some of the paths that lead through the rocks are as interesting as the rocks themselves as they too ha...

Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand and our final stop on the North Island. The drive here had been uneventful but quite a good one with a coast road resembling the Great Ocean Road in OZ but no way near as long. At this point of the trip we were a bit behind on our blogs along other various internet stuff, as well as not yet having booked the ferry to the South Island. In view of this we scrapped the rest of the day in favour of getting to a camp site ea...

The Taupo region was next in line on our trip, and is a good rest point on the way to Wellington at the bottom of the North Island. A day hike that is also famous is the Tongario crossing which ventures over and around a dormant but not extinct volcano; it takes in several crater lakes and hot pools along with other thermal activity spots. We had planned on doing this hike as part of our preparation for the Inca trail as it is quite a challenging 17killometres. T...

Having had such a good time at hot water beach we were in search of some more thermal activity, of the volcanic type or something near to it which made our destination Rotorua. On the way we were making at stop at a place called Waitomo caves which is a place famous in New Zealand for its glow worm caves. After a long and pretty average drive we arrived at Waitomo caves to discover that this natural wonder had been turned into a money spinner in a big way. The op...

With Auckland far behind us we were well on our way to the Coromandel Peninsula with the aim of going to Coromandel town. On the way we had been reading the ‘Bible’ otherwise known as the lonely planet book, which tells you just about everything you need to know from what to see, where to eat, and where to say along with other random info. Our conclusion was that we had no interest in going to Coromandel and decided that we would divert to the next planned s...