...And finally i just wanted to share some of my very wet, very green, very beautiful family trip to New Zealand in late september...
Here is a map of our driving trip
View Larger Map
We hired a great, cheap, bit rough but still good car from Ace Rentals, $200AUD for 9 days!!
We started in Auckland - Rotorua - Napier - Wellington - Whakapapa Village (aka MORDOR) then back to Auckland. We usually drove for 4+ hours at a time.
Things I noticed:
-How it would have been a lot handier to have a car with a bigger engine that could drive up mountains faster that 15km per hour!
-How great their coffee was (!!), and how they ALWAYS put in 2 shots of coffee as the norm.
-That having soy milk in your coffee was not frowned upon, but embraced in small towns.
-That everything was SO CHEAP (i like this one a lot).
-How green everything was - it was rather overwhelming, my eyes were struggling to recognise every different shade of it.
-Instead of a million red light cameras they have a million police cars waiting by the side of the freeway.
-A freeway is not a freeway, its a motorway.
-That not everyone wore black and that people actually smile...
-That it rains...A LOT, no really A LOT!
A few pretty photos to snoop at:
Lake Rotorua - Misty morning
Rotorua Museum - An old bath house
Napier -Art Deco town
Wellington houses
Whakapapa Village
Snow on a volcano
And Auckland
I did really like New Zealand, and would love to see the south island next time!!
*All photos are authors own
looks like an awesome trip! my friend and her boyfriend are about to do a similar trip- wonder if they'll come back with similar discriptions of New Zealand. Definatly a trip that's on my hit list.
ReplyDeleteNew Zealand is amazingly beautiful, granted every time i have been there it has been on a visa run! did you do a wine tour? or bungee jump? watch an all blacks match? or am i being completely stereotypical here? either way, you cant go wrong with a little vacation...
ReplyDeletegreat pics by the way, are they your own? (after this weeks lecture, you better copyright them!)
ReplyDeleteHi Carla,
ReplyDeleteYour photos look great. My friends went to New Zealand and told me how they went on a raft ride in a dark cave (dark water rafting); they saw glow worms in the cave's walls. My brother went there and drank water from a melting glacier (poor glacier!) Did you partake in either of these exploits...or, are they too cliche?
If you do decide to go back there you should check out www.standbyrelocations.com. This company rents out campervans for cheap on one way journeys after full-price clients have dropped them off and they need returning. It's called a relocation vehicle. I drove a massive V8 6-bed van around Tasmania for $5 a day. I'm not joking. Give it a shot! :-)
wow thats sounds like an awesome idea! I will definitely be looking into that. and no i didn't do anything too crazy there, we went to a mineral park and saw bubbling sulfuric acid and bright green/yellow fluorescent water. its was pretty amazing, but it stunk like nothing else!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the nice photo comments :)