well the road trip has come to and end. we covered something close to 3000 kms in the last week. the weather sucked and we spent a lot of time in the car, but it was pretty fun in all. the scenery was awsome, but would of been even more so if it hadn't rained or been cloudy pretty much everyday. i'm starting to realize how randomly i packed for this trip: i brought dive gear, but not enough to really make a difference in price when going on a charter, i also brought camping gear, but not enough to actually camp, i also clearly brought more summer clothes than i should of and not enough winter clothes. ah well. so in the many hours in the car over the last week we spent a lot of time discussing (and mocking) the need to use a ton of traffic cones for absolutely everything, and the complete lack of logic when it comes to traffic laws here. clearly they credit their drivers with more common sense than we do in north america. there will be this dirt road with serious corners and it'll have a speed limit of 100, then you'll get to a stretch of straigh paved highway that will have a speed limit of 30 for some random reason like there's no lines on the side or something, then they'll have passing lanes on blind corners and one way bridges. it all is very mind boggleing when you come from north america. i did do some of the driving which was an interesting expierence, turns out its harder to get used to shifting with the other hand and using the turn signals than driving on the other side of the road. that being said i did make a right turn out of the gas station on to the right side of the road, but recovered quickly before oncoming traffic got too close. so much has happened in the last week i can't remember what to tell you. we made it all the way up to the top of the country, which would have been beautiful had the weather been co-operating. they have a 2 or 3 day hike/camp up there along the beaches, that i'm going to have to try and do. we did go sandboarding up there as well. we saw this sign on the side of the highway to rent sandboard so we went there and it turned out the guy was from edmonton and his brother and mom live in summerland... crazy. anyhow we got the canadian discount of half price. sandboarding was pretty fun, but got old fast when you had to keep hiking up the dunes, i have some video i'll get up eventually. that day we also drove up 90 mile beach where the "highway" goes right on the sand along the beach (and still of course has a speed limit of 100) there is a big thing in the guidebooks about how you shouldn't take your car on the sand because you will get stuck and they charge a ton to get pulled out, but that obviously didn't apply to the subaru since we had it going 100 km w/o a problem. we also walked through this forest that have these really old trees that are 5m in diameter, pretty cool, but the pictures didnt' turn out. for the one partially nice day we went back to raglan and sat on the beach which was awsome, then a bit south of there, there's a beach that has some sort of geothermal activity so you can dig a hole in the sand and it'll have hot water in it, like almost too hot to sit in, you can only do it within 2 hours on either side of low tide, but it was awsome, low tide was at 7 so we stayed until it go dark and there wasn't a single other person on the beach. yesterday we got to one of the national parks and did the tongariro crossing which involves climbing up the side of a volcano. we did it one way and stayed in a hut run by the parks department where you get a bunk and they supply stoves and gas for cooking for 20 bucks a night then we came back this morning, and the weather was completely miserable, it was super foggy so you couldn't see anything and it was rainy and windy, and we managed to get high enough up to find snow even though its summer here. we also saw one of the ski hills by accident, and they truely do have no trees on them, just rocks. its very strange. they have the shortest chair lift ever too, 15 chairs. anyhow i'm getting back on the bus tommarrow morning and heading for wellington for a few days then either take the ferry to the south island or go back up to hamilton for new years, i can't seem to decide.
