New Zealand

Here I am! I arrived in Auckland about a week ago, where I met up with my friend and travel buddy Kate. Kate is a computer software person/artist who went to school with me. She may actually end up here in NZ indefinitely, but for now we will be exploring and seeing the sites.

We were in Auckland for a few days to recover from the journey, get used to the time zone, etc. We stayed with a friend of a friend (hello Jacky!). He and his flatmates were kind of unbelivably good hosts. Drove us all over the city to places worth seeing and fed us well. They even threw us a party in our honor! Not really, but they did have a Valentine's Day bbq for us and their single friends. We feasted on frozen meat and beer on a really awesome backyard patio. We spent some time wandering around, visited Rangitoto which is the volcanic island most likely to erupt in the area. The water is emerald green and just awesome.

Birds aggressively gathering crumbs inside a coffeeshop

Cool building by the harbor

 

Treebeard? There was a park with many sprawling trees like this one



We left Auckland for The Shire--the actual farm where the hobbit hole section of LOTR was filmed, on what is actually a still-working sheep farm. The farm was in Matamata but we stayed in Hamilton, the third largest city in New Zealand. It was mostly filled with ethnic food restaurants and "adult" stores, but being New Zealand there were still scenes like below. New Zealand is just ridiculously idyllic everywhere you turn. The Shire was pretty as expected, but I didn't have my camera on me. You will see it again in The Hobbit, though.

Dusk in Hamilton

Sheep farm. Supposedly there's actually a lot more dairy farms than sheep



More farmland



And then we went to Tongariro Crossing, skipping a few steps in Frodo's journey but we are on a schedule. Tongariro is where the Mount Doom portion of LOTR was filmed. Here is a part of it below, photographed on arrival the day before the actual hike.



I went up that

The weather was appropriately dismal--cold, rainy, cloudy, windy. It was kind of miserable for about 80% of the hike, honestly. Especially at the "Devil's Stairs." Although it did lend an air of mystery to the whole bit.

The whole thing was about 20km which is about 12 miles. Not so bad, just the weather got a bit terrible so we didn't get to see much. Rain rain rain. But I did end up hanging out in a cool shelter hut for a couple of hours, standing around a stove with Germans trying to dry our socks (pointless really as our boots were soaked through, but at least we dried our feet?). Did meet some cool people which sort of made up for the misery.

At one point we rented a car for a section of the trip instead of taking a bus, which we have been mostly doing. But driving is just much more convenient--public transportation is not one of NZ's strong suits, so a lot of people buy cars for their visit. We will very likely end up doing that soon. I drove on the left side, guys. On two-lane highways with speed limits of 100km, which I enjoyed thinking was actually 100mph since that's what I saw on the speedometer. Though I think I lost a couple months of life from the stress.

Gripping the steering wheel

 And now we're off to Wellington, the capital, then to Nelson (sunniest region of NZ!).