A Blonde Abroad

Sweet as bro!

I have fallen in love with New Zealand already. It is so beautiful here. It reminds me more of home than Australia does. True fact: There are LOTS of sheep in New Zealand.

I spent the first week in the North Island doing the following;

I flew in to Auckland at 2am Saturday morning and only spent one day in the city so didn’t get to see much. The weather wasn’t great but I made myself go out and met up with a friend from Newcastle so saw at least a little of the city. I got a NZ sim so just let me know if you want the number until I get back to Australia.

The next day I started the Stray bus. I have never met so many Germans on one bus in my life! Stray is a little different from the bus I got up the East coast of Australia. Most of the bus has stayed together (and will stay together until Queenstown).

On the first day we travelled to a place called Hahei where they have hot water pools in the sand at low tide. Unfortunately low tide was at 11pm and was 8km away so no hot sand pools for us. We did a nice walk instead to somewhere called Cathedral Cove, I found out the beach here is where they filmed scenes from The Chronicles of Narnia.

I have also been black water rafting in Waitomo. You dress up in sexy wetsuits and gumboots then crawl, swim, float on a rubber tubes around underground caves. Some of the guys almost got stuck in in the tiny holes we had to crawl through. At certain points we had to turn our flashlights out and walk around in total darkness with only glow worms guiding us. It was really cool!

We stopped at a surf spot called Raglan. It was really chilled and relaxed and the surfing instructor had a Bobbie dog, I fell in love with the dog. We found out the next day that the surf instructor was going to be our bus driver for the next few days. He was an awesome Maori guy who is quite possibly the dizziest man I have ever met. We then travelled Rotorua and spent a few hours looking around the natural hot springs there. My god it smelt so bad of eggs because of the Sulphur. No way could I live in this town. We stop here on the way back up to Auckland so I might do zorbing depending on time. We also stopped at the National Park to do the Tongariro Alpine Crossing but the weather was bad so the hike was called off. The views here are amazing, snow topped mountains in the background of lush greenery. Just wow. Next we stopped a night a Blue Duck Farm. The weather was beautiful and they had baby lambs, piglets and horses running around the place.

But the best thing I have done in the 10 months I have been away is………..

A freaking sky dive baby!

I jumped out of a plane at 15,000ft over Lake Taupo. I can’t begin to describe how amazing it feels to free fall before the parachute opens. We got picked up by a limousine that then took us to the air field. I hadn’t actually planned on doing it in Taupo but the weather was good and within half an hour I was in a plane looking down at the ground below. I didn’t give myself time to get nervous! I got the dvd but can’t put it up on here yet because my netbook doesn’t have a cd drive. I’ll do it as soon as possible though. You get some amazing views of up my nostrils haha.

In the south island we have only been to Able Tasman and now in a town called Greymouth on the west coast of New Zealand. I find the town a little bit off. Think of the tv show ‘ A League of Gentleman’. We all had a good time last night and made various fancy dress costumes out of bin bags. I had three other people in my room so we decided to dress up as a deck of cards – I was Queen of hearts. Today we make our way to Franz Josef and tomorrow do a full day glacier hike.

But for now, Kia Ora!