Ok, so I know its been a while since i've updated...we have been travelling a lot and not all the places have good internet, or any internet at all! so i am going to catch you up from my last entry. ( as for the photos...i am finding it very hard to connect my camera to computers here...i need to burn them to a cd and do it that way...talk about hassle!)
So, we bought a car in Auckland from a very nice english couple, kevin and emily. its a 1988 toyota corona, automatic, ( we just put 200 k on it the other day) and runs ok. we paid $750 nzd for it, which is a steal! we even installed a new stereo ( which we paid about 20 nzd for, bargain!) ourselves, which we were very proud of.
once we got the car, we promptly drove straight out of auckland, which is an ok city, but it just didnt do it for us. we drove north and ended up in a region called bay of islands, in a town called paihia ( sounds like, "pie-heeyah"). its a touristy vacation town right on the water, and we stayed at a hostel called the mousetrap! it was a cool, quiet little place that had lovely gardens in the backyard. there was one bar in the entire town that all the backpackers go to, and its called the 'salty bar'. on the second night there, the salty bar held a karaoke competition, so naturally i did it! i blew the crowd away with my rendition of "proud mary", but the requirement was that you had to perform 2 songs, and since the song book was severely lacking in choices, i did dionne warwicks' 'say a little prayer', thinking, i know that song, no problem. well, i got onstage and surprise! it was the techno version of the song( who even knew one existed!) so natrually, i bombed that. oh well! all the contestants got a free drink, so all's well that ends well!
we stayed in paihia for 3 nights, and then drove to cape reinga. cape reinga is the second northernmost point in nz, ( the 1st you cannot drive to) and it is a very sacred place for the maori people, as they beleived that is where your spirit leaves the earth when you die. it was very beautiful, and we had fun taking pictures there. we left cape reinga and drove south on the west coast to a small town called ahipara, and stayed at a really nice quiet hostel called the endless summer lodge. it was right on the beach, and it is located at the end of "90 mile beach" which stretches all the way down the west coast of the northland. there was not much to do, and we met a nice canadian couple and hung out with them for the two nights we stayed there.
from ahipara, we drove south with the intention of making it to wellington in a few days. we knew we had to drive through auckland, and would stop sometime after we got through there.
before we got to auckland, we noticed that our brakes were GRINDING and sounded terrible, so we pulled into a garage in a town called orewa, and had to spend a night while they got repaired. i guess thats what happens when you buy a car for 750 bucks! we stayed at this horrible hostel called "pillows" and it was freezing, and there were no sheets on teh beds, so we wrapped up in all our clothes and towels. we were happy to get out of there!
after orewa, we drove southeast to a town called rotorua ( sounds like "roto-ru-wa") and it is a trendy tourist place because of the natural hot springs and volcanic activity found there. you know you've arrived there because the entire place smells like rotten eggs, due to the huge amount of sulphur in the air! gross! there is a nice public park with free hot springs, and there are even parts of the land that have boiling mud pools and yellow sulphurus rocks everywhere...very strange. we were there for 2 nights, and needed to keep moving south towards wellington.
we left rotorua, and drove southwest across the north island towards the west coast in a city called new plymouth. it was a nice city, which was sandwiched between a huge voclanic mountian ( mt egmont aka. mt taranaki) and the ocean. we spent one night at "shotestrings' backpackers, where paul and i discovered a mutual love for the game of scrabble! we decided to spend a night at a hostel at the base of taranki that boasted itself to be off the grid, making all of its own power (solar, wind, and water). we spend two nights there, and it was nice because we were the only ones there! we went for a hike on the mountian, ( well the base of it) to a waterfall in the middle of the woods. very cool!
we tried to leave new plymouth, but had to get our brakes fixed again ( this time our rear brakes) and so we spend another night at shoestrings backpackers. once the car was ok, we jetted out of new plymouth and headed straight for wellington!
