I arrived in Auckland on Christmas day, after a long and delayed flight from Santiago. At least I wasn’t in a rush to get home for Christmas dinner, like most of the very upset folk on the plane whose families were awaiting their arrivals.
I checked into a bland but comfortable hotel in Auckland. The highlight of which was a beautiful bathroom with a deep bath and plenty of gushing hot water. Bliss! After six months of hostal showers in south America, this was real luxury. The remainder of my Christmas day was spent wandering down to the harbour front and trying to stave off sleep in order for my body clock to adjust to this new time zone.
Starbucks was open, 2 of them in fact. Really??? Is there such a need for bad coffee on Chrismas day? Many of shops were Chinese or Japanese take aways and newsagents or superettes as they are known locally. Apart from these there was just me, a few nut cases and one or two tourists wandering about. The harbour was pretty unimpressive. A mismatch of ugly buildings and dock cranes. I went back to the hotel.
It rained for the first two weeks I was in New Zealand. Not just normal rain, that stops and starts and gets you a bit wet. This was big rain, the sort that would soak you through in a matter of seconds, that came from all angles, gusting horizontally at you as if a bucket of water had been thrown.
Barney had arrived from the UK on boxing day, and after a day to recover from jet lag we picked up the camper van.
We set off from Auckland, south on state high way 1. New Zealand is bigger than the UK and has a lot less people. This major road that links the North of the north Island to the South only has two lanes and not a lot of traffic.
I had met a really nice couple from NZ in a bus station in Argentina, and after having sharing a couple of bottles of red wine, (it was a long wait for the connecting bus), they had given me load of NZ travel tips (expertly drawn into a map on a napkin) and also their emails. Subsequently, they had emailed me to invite me to their beach house, about an hour and a half from Auckland. An invitation like that should just never be turned down. Looking up the route we found that Google maps hadn’t mapped it yet (a good thing in my books) and there was one very minor road according to our atlas. It was looking good. We had to make a quick pit stop back to the camper van rental company as we had discovered that the fridge did not work but finally we arrived at the most spectacular little bay on a peninsular of land that faced Auckland city. In a speed boat you could probably get across the water in an hour. There were waves lapping on the shores of a beach of black sand that led up to steep slopes of silver and green tree ferns and all sorts of flowering trees and lush foliage. Along the waters edge were peoples houses, ranging from the 6 million dollar super pad to the original wooden “batch” or fishermans cottage. Grant and Traceys place was one of the latter, passed down through Tracey’s family for several generations and now shared three ways. Most of the other plots had sadly now been yuppified and normal folk would never be able to afford a little piece of this paradise any more.
Grant and Tracy met us with open arms in the nearest car park and we walked up the beach to their house. We spent the rest of the day, picking mussels, exploring the beach and tucking into a fabulous steak dinner.
This was when the rain started.
It started in the night and didn’t stop for about 2 weeks. We had left Grant and Traceys after just one night. Partly because we wanted to get the NZ odyssey started and partly because it wouldn’t have been much fun couped up in the house all day. We were heading for a place called Rotoroua, which is kind of in the centre of the North Island and in the middle of a landscape of steaming hot geysers, thermal springs, bubbling mud pools and clouds of sulphurous gas. It has quite a unique eggy smell! En route, we decided to stop at the Waitomo, an area famous for its spectacular limestone caves and also glow worms. I treated us (as it was Barneys birthday) to a full day epic caving experience, which included a 100m absail and then about 6 hours of caving and canyoning. It was pretty exhausting but really good fun. It was still pissing down when we eventually resurfaced.
The next day were headed off ( IN THE RAIN) to Rotoroua. Our plan was to stay there over New Year. The rain didn’t stop. We were camped up about a 25 min walk from the town centre. We had to buy a big umbrella. New year’s celebrations were cancelled as an outdoor concert with fireworks by the lake had been planned. I was asleep before 12!
We managed a rather waterlogged walk into a huge forest of rather impressive red wood trees. A circular hike of about 2.5 hours to various view points, sadly lost to us due to poor visibility. The next day we did get a break in the weather for about 4 hours, when a scalding sun burned through the cloud as we visited a geo thermal “wonderland”, to watch a man put soap down a very questionable “natural” geyser to make it erupt! It didn’t mention that on the brochure.
The tourist industry here is an extremely slick, costly and well organised operation. With many companies competing to take your money. Most of the small and large towns have “I sites” (tourist information centres) generally very well informed and very ready to book all sorts of things if you hand over the cash. It was beginning to become clear that we really needed to pick and choose our tourist experiences carefully if we wanted to escape a Disneyesque experience of NZ and also if we wanted to stay within budget! We were finding things quite expensive and having the camper van to sleep and cook in was helping to keep costs down. As soon as you ventured into a bar, coffee shop or restaurant the money would start to haemorrhage from your wallet.
New Zealand is a young country, so I am told. This is certainly the feeling I get passing through the larger communities, dotted around the country side. They have a feeling of temporariness. The buildings are wood or metal and new looking. Even the shop signs don’t look permanent, like they might go out of business any moment. There are lots of retail parks, considering there are so few people. Often there are 2 of the same mega supermarkets in the same community. One thing I was finding though was how friendly the people were. In general it seems that people here have more time, are willing to chat, give you tips and directions or even invite you into their homes. The young people are much more polite and confident and often passing on a trail or on a beach will say “hello, How are you?” look you in the eye and smile. Its nice.
After the New years wash out we headed down to The Tongariro national park, in the centre of the North Island. I wanted to do the Tongariro crossing, a 19km volcano hike. We had been watching the weather forcasts and things were looking up. We arrived in the village of Whakapapa where there is a pub, a café and an information center, a camp site a whopping great big ugly beast of a building called “the chateau”. A real blot on the landscape, but apparently built in the 1930s as the area grew in popularity as a ski resort, a past time still hugely popular in winter. The campsite offered transport to drop us off and then pick us up at the other end of the crossing, which we booked for 7am the following day.
After an early night we got up at the crack of dawn, only to find that there were now severe weather warnings in place and we were advised to wait for a day!
After another early night, we got up at the crack of dawn and it was clear in the lightening sky. We boarded the bus along with about 20 others for the half hour ride to the start of the hike. Arriving at the start I was horrified to see about 5 other coaches dropping off hundreds of other people. No joke, it was like Christmas shopping on Oxford street! We set off, with the masses. The first part was very flat, but then came the devils ladder, which is as you imagine. A fairly steep, long, uphill. Luckily this thinned out the crowds a little. I have to say, that despite all the people, once we got up into the volcano craters, the walk was pretty special. There were beautiful layers of ochre and black earth, sulphuric lagoons of exceptional shades of blue. Puffs of steam came out of the ground at various places and the views over the volcanic rock strewn plains, superb. This was where bits of Lord of the rings was filmed. The weather couldnt have been more perfect.
It was raining again the next day. Cats and dogs. We decided to head east to the coast and an art deco town called Napier. We figured that if the rain kept up, at least we could go to the cinema!
Napier is actually really pretty. It was very badly damaged in an earth quake in the 1920s and completely rebuilt in Art deco style. Many of the buildings remain today and have been lovingly maintained. It is a beach resort on Hawkes bay, and there are loads of vineyards around it. We had left the rain and arrived in the afternoon sunshine. I t was great to finally sit on a beach and feel warm!
The next day we hired bikes and did a bit of a wine tour around the vineyards and then along the coast. Our plan was to start heading south the following morning to some remote beaches and a marine reserve, spend the day and night there before driving to Wellington. When we woke, you guessed it…..it was raining. Even harder than anything we had seen before. And blowing a proper gale. So we decided to head straight to wellington. It was that cinema option again. It was quite a drive and the wind was blowing so hard against the van, it would almost whip the steering wheel out of your hand when a cross wind hit. By the time we arrived it was still sheeting down. We found a campervan park, right in the center of Wellington, a whopping $50 a night to park in a carpark, but there was a cinema up the road, so that’s where we went.
When we woke, we woke to a whole different city. The sun was shining and the wind had blown its self out. We spent the morning exploring the city. Wellington is on the South coast and the rolling suburbs fan out on many peninsulars of green hill sides overlooking the Tasman sea. I would say that the majority of homes have sea views. The city its self is a nice mixture of old and new, with some great modern arts centres and cultural bits as well as really nice sea front restaurants and bars. We were off to meet a man called Peter that afternoon. He'd offered me his driveway to park the van and is on old friend of one of my Austrailian relatives. He is also a great hiker and climber and had already sent me 2 detailed emails full of information on things to do and good hikes etc. We arrived, in a cloud of smoke, having nearly burnt the clutch out on the van trying to get up his very steep driveway. Peter has this amazing house, right on top of a hill with huge glass windows overlooking the rolling green hills and suburbs, right down to the coast. At 74 years old he is really fit and still "tramping" regularly up to 25km. He volunteers at all sorts of places, from the local nature reserve to the animal rescue centre and when he's not doing that he fixes the loom at a University that has a weaving dept. We spent 2 nights camped outside his house and he generously gave us plenty of his time, driving us round Wellington and hiking with us up to an amazing view point in the hills behind his home before we headed off to catch out ferry to the South Island.
