At Long Last!!!!

Howdy everyone!! So, it's FINALLY time for entry one of the NZ travel blog :D

Sorry it's taken so long, apparently my netbook doesn't like tethering to my phone for internets, and it's taken ages to get into a place with WiFi when I've also been able to squeeze in the time to post (as it is I'm on a rickety table covered in plastic bags as we sort everything for going on the Ferry tomorrow morning).

I’d intended to try and have the first entry up the day we landed, but it was not to be. So, here’s the deal:

Day 1: I won’t bore you with the details of the flight and stuff, that was pretty standard and boring. We landed in Auckland, grabbed our hire cars (which very nicely had free SIM cards that just needed to be topped up, since NZ doesn’t normally do free SIMs) and headed to our accommodation (a hostel in the city).

Upon the recommendation of the lady behind the counter we went to a place called “Elliott Stables” for dinner, which was utterly awesome. Imagine a food court, but the tables are setup like a restaurant (with numbers), and there are food places around the sides. So you go up, place your order and give your table number, and it’s delivered to the table. So the ‘restaurants’ don’t have tables on their own, they all use the ‘food court’.
Really nice food too, I had Jamaican Jerk Chicken with a side of Jumbalaya, others had everything from crepes to chinese.

Day Two: Sleep was had and next day was off to Hobbiton. There were a few confused turns, numerous roadworks and a four car accident on the highway but we got there in the end and could change the time of our tour. I’ll say this, the place is gorgeous, tonnes of flowers and fruit trees and such, piles of moths and butterflies, it’s really well maintained and setup. Also, take a look at this, the bumblebees are HUGE!!

They told us a few quite interesting tales of the place. The big oak at the top of Bag End? Yeah, they found a great oak for the shot out in Rotorua, so they cut it down and then into pieces, carefully labled each piece, and then reassembled the now very dead oak where they wanted the shot. They then imported thousands of fake oak leaves from Thailand and wired them onto the tree.
Then when The Hobbit rolled around, they realised that the oak had rotted and really couldn’t be reused. So they took it apart again, made a mould of each piece, recreated it out of resin, reassembled it, imported thousands more leaves….

The tour ended with a drink at the Green Dragon Inn (their cider was actually very tasty) and then we were off again to Rotorua.
Accommodation was a little self-contained place in a holiday park which was thankfully much cooler than the Auckland. We headed off to a wildlife park place. Alas my photos aren’t too great due to lighting, but here’s a few to give you ideas:

We saw Kiwis and Wekas and such. Laura was right, NZ seems to be a place where every niche that might be taken up by another animal species has been taken over by birds instead (Wekas are basically bird like rodents in terms of the place in the ecosystem that they occupy. Much cuter though).
Also, take a squiz at this:

Those rainbow trout are a handspan high, they’re bloody HUGE. Alas no eating them, apparently they’re protected in NZ.

After that, back to our lodgings and we made dinner (salmon, mussels and chicken with haloumi and salad. Tasty!)

Day Three: We had a bit of a slow start, but first stop was to the Wainangi (I think?) hot springs, which was the site of a huge volcanic eruption 130 years ago and has gone from “barren wasteland” to “A scene from a Dinosaur movie” in that time.
Take a look at some of these, the hot pools and mists and boiling water and stuff made some amazing pictures:

Unfortunately we only had time for a third or something of it before we had to leave, as it was time to head to ZORBING!!

For the record, Zorbing (ie rolling down a hill in a giant hamster ball) is absolutely utterly completely awesome. Kicks the crap out of everything else we’ve done, Hobbiton had no chance of competing. There’s two balls, one inside the other, and then water in the inner ball so that you don’t have issues with friction, and you get kicked down a windy course on a hill. It was basically impossible *not* to be grinning like an idiot when you get to the bottom, it was amazing (so much so that most of us paid for a fourth run rather than the three we’d intended).

Some photos!!

From there, well, a ‘nice’ long four hour drive to the Mahia Peninsula where we get to stop for a few days and not rush about the place. We went via Napier and dinner, and finally rocked up at Mahia at 12:30am (yay for finding our accommodation in the dark!)
Most people were kinda frayed and tired after all that, so sleep was had as soon as we could. 

Dare Four: After sleeping in (well, I did, most people were up a bit earlier but dear gods I needed the sleep) we drove up to the Morere Hot Springs and rainforest preserve.  Basically this place is a big rainforest national park with a hot springs setup in the middle.
So we walked for a couple of hours through rather lush rainforest (see below for pictures) with a picnic lunch in the middle, before spending a nice long time recuperating in the hot springs they had (one hot pool, one super hot pool, one ‘holy crap that’s one degree above freeing’ pool, and you’re supposed to swap between the three).

Here's some random shots:

They had a really awesome gift shop there as well with a lot of locally made jewellery and such (including possum fur nipple warmers… I have no idea where the idea for those came from!)

After that four people headed up to Gisbourne to get groceries, and myself and Laura headed back down to Mahia to get the place tidied up, take a look around town and such.
Here’s a couple of shots of the coastline nearby J

Dinner was BBQed seafood with salad, and desert will come once we’ve digested that a bit.
Aaaaand that’s it for the first blog post! Sorry it’s taken me so long to get this up, but I hope it was interesting reading J.

It doesn't actually bring you up to date, but with a three hour ferry ride and eight hour bus ride tomorrow, I think I'll write up the remaining stuff then rather than tonight.

More to come soon!!