There are two entries to this blog post since there was a lot of travel in the past couple weeks. Sean helped with some of the post. If you click on any of the pictures they'll get big and open in another page.
Sean arrived on Tuesday (the 27th), which was fantastic….and long awaited. I picked him up from the airport at dawn, and we spent the day chilling in Auckland while he got over jetlag. We spent the week hanging out and going around Auckland a bit.
Sean sitting in my room on this weird diagonal pole looking at a map of Coromandel. It's one of my favorite sit spots in the apt...the guy's room has one too.
Hanging out between my classes in Albert Park next to Uni
Up in The Domain playing on this weird tree. It's the same park I like to go running in a lot.
not much to say about this really...just hanging about in the DomainI had my final Kapa Haka performance that Thursday (hopefully there will be a video), and Sean, Liz, Garcia, and Ying (the rest of the crew was actually in the class) came to watch. I’m going to bring my poi home so perhaps some of you can see that portion in person.
Some of the group after the performance. The Whit. girls are missing. Falen's making a perfect Haka face.
Falen's over in the left corner. He, Charlie, and Bryan were awesome at the Haka.Charlie, Liz, Sean, and I all went to the zoo that Wednesday! Here are some highlight photos.
According to Sean, that's how a giraffe runs
That's what hippos do
Lots of them were carrying little babies around on their stomachs
The females were making these ridiculous noises
Cheetah
Flamingos of course
More of what hippos do
The males would walk right up to the glass
I was trying so hardWell, according to the decision of the New Zealand Military, this fine country decided to celebrate the Queen’s birthday (that's England's Queen of course) on the second of June, which for all intensive purposes just means we got a three day weekend from Uni. This is not her actual birthday.
On Friday we headed out of Auckland at 11 with the intention of heading down south towards lake Taupo, the largest lake in NZ. It was cause long ago by a volcanic explosion. We took a detour towards Bryce’s Climbing café first because it’s a base for climbing/ers in the Taupo region. After many confusing turns and turn arounds because many NZ roads aren’t labeled, we found the place. Bryce’s turned out to be a bit of a disappointment because it was small, pretty empty, and extremely expensive.
We ended up going to a nearby place called Frogett to go bouldering, and it was amazing. The rock was a bit hard on the hands, but the formations were stunning and we had an all around good time just exploring various routes. We decided it would be cool if we could come back someday with sport climbing gear (that’s basically top rope climbing whereas bouldering is when you just climb on lower boulders (surprise) rope free.) Those routes looked awesome and probably had ridiculous views.
Caving away
I just think this photo is pretty
Nice dino
These rocks were really cool
From Frogett we drove to Taupo to our hostel, Burke’s Backpackers. It was probably seven by this point, but we just fell asleep.
The original plan for Saturday was to hike to Huka falls, get in the hotsprings, then go to the honey hive (a bee colony and honey store) etc. But, after finding out that skydiving didn’t involve a rough landing (sean’s knee was to be treated nicely,) we ended up booking a skydiving reservation for 9:20am instead. The weather sucked so after driving all the way out to the place we moved it to 12:50 and did the Huka falls hike in the in between time. It was about 6km round trip.. The river was at our side and so clear blue it almost looked like those putt putt golf course ponds that are dyed. The hot springs are at the beginning of the hike, but we were feeling too cold and strained for time to jump in.
Huka falls was a bit anticlimactic but cool nonetheless. Turns out it produces 15% of NZ power, and there’s a white water slalom kayak course just upstream. After hiking back, we tried a second time to go skydiving but the weather was still too crappy. We made a later reservation, were even suited up and everything when we went around 3:30-4 but the weather turned bad again so we rebooked for the morning.
Rock layers
Along the way
Tree climbing along the way
There really not as impressive as you might think a falls needed to be in order to provide 15% of NZ power
Huka falls
leading up to Huka FallsWe had the shuttle drop us of at Taupo Bungy on the way back to our hostel, and we ended up taking a tandem bungy jump over the river. It’s 47 metres tall and was quite the experience (certainly different from a solo jump for me.) It’s the tallest bungy over water in NZ.
Sunday didn’t bring any better weather so we bailed all together on skydiving in Taupo and ended up searching for a doughnut (which we also couldn’t find.) The honey hive was still on the agenda so we headed out that way only to discover it had burned down that night. Basically we decided that Taupo mostly hated us. We headed over to Craters of the Moon, a nearby geothermal park, for a walk through the steamy bush. There are several epic pictures of the scene.
There might be a crater behind us?
Getting educated on the activity
Disappearing in the mistAfterwards we headed out towards Rotorua (a town further northeast.) Kinloch, this bouldering field, was on the way so we stopped there for a bit. Turns out the bouldering was a stretch but the sport climbing was awesome. Another place we’ll have to come back to. We did run into this crazy dog that followed us for about 45 minutes and attempted to climb this cliff. Crazy thing thought it was a mountain goat or something.
The dog's sort of towards the middle leftBetween Taupo and Rotorua is this crazy geothermal park, Orakei Korako, so we ferried on over there and went for a long walk around the park. There are some awesome pictures of this place as well. NZ is so geothermally active because it lies on the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates, and the Pacific plate is trying to get down underneath so go figure, lots of activity.
One of the only geothermally active caves in the world
We probably spent upwards of 20 minutes in this cave
The water cleans silver jewelry
Sean snuck in this photo
That's what bubbles do. A fine demonstration by Sean
A spider contraption over the awesome blue geothermal water
The rocks are melted so that they look kind of like waterfalls
The name is a bit of stretch....kind of like constellations.
We somehow managed to make similar stupid faces. The geothermal parks were this cool evidently.After this geothermal day of fun, we took a dip in this hot springs called Kerosene Creek. The bottom was sandy and there were hot vents coming up. We chose this place with a small waterfall so we could sit under it for a hot pounding massage. We also stopped to get some manuka honey (it’s a kind of plant here and a very special to NZ honey)…all to make up for the unfortunate mishap with the honey hive earlier that day. Our hostel was right in town so we walked to dinner at this place called Lovely India.
Monday morning we headed up towards Whakatane, a small city just on the western shore of the Bay of Plenty. We booked a kayaking reservation for later in the day and spent the morning playing on Ohope beach, looking for shells, and eating peanut butter and apples on the sand.
hahah, you'll have to ask Sean about this one. If you don't know him, use your imagination.
a running jump may have been involved 
heading for the waves
Mastering the timer setting on my camera...we actually got this on our first shotKayaking turned out to be a bit later than expected, but it was calm water…doesn’t it look like a mirror? We spent two hours out on the water/walking around on islands, arriving back on shore just as the sun was setting.
The glassy water
Sitting on opposite sides of this natural bridge
Hanging around in between some islands
just floating
aiming for the gap
Sean chilling out
Sunset
Us post kayaking with very wet buttsWe drove that night over to Taurenga, a slightly larger city further north along the shore. The hostel we stayed at was called Just the Ducks Nuts, but we didn’t spend much time there as we went into town for some quesadillas and wedges and had to be up early Tuesday to make our skydiving reservation!!
All I can say about skydiving is that it’s surprisingly not as scary as bungy jumping and it’s so amazing! At 12,000 feet we could see a good portion of the north island on the perfectly clear day we lucked out with. We both definitely want to go again (and possibly learn to do it on our own), though perhaps with a few clouds because then you get a bit more perspective about your speed (up to 200km/hr)!
That's our tandem master Tony suiting me up. He's done over 4300 jumps and is a boat/plane electrician as well. Kind of an awesome job.
I look like the kid in the chubby joke. The glasses almost cover my entire face.
Taking in the views
One of my favorites--Sean in his pre-jump attire
Nice form
Sean coming in for a very soft landing
Our facial expression post jumping. They probably last at least an hour.We took a nice drive back to Auckland after the jump since I had class the next day.
