Monday, January 14 2008, 0:09

New Zealand New Year

Happy New Year! Sorry for the delayed greetings, but it's been all go since the middle of December. I have high hopes that John and I will finish unpacking our luggage today, a week after we got back from New Zealand. Speaking of which, everyone's asked me how our holiday was, so I'll give you a brief summary here.

It was great!

And a less brief summary: we had a busy time of it, flashpacking (not backpacking, thank you) around the North Island, squeezing in as many places as we could. We started in Auckland and then made our way up to the beach paradise of the Bay of Islands, stopping off at the Goat Island Marine Reserve for some of the reputedly best diving in NZ. Unfortunately the company we were diving with cancelled due to bad weather, so we spent our Christmas Eve on a beach getting severely sunburned instead. If it had been sunny on Christmas Day, I'd have had to hide my red legs in the shade, but luckily it was grey and miserable, so we drove across mountainous Northland in the rain to see 4000 year old kauri trees instead.

Boxing Day saw us board 'The Rock', a converted ferry that gets you out sea-kayaking, snorkelling, shooting, fishing (yes, not what you'd expect herbivorous John to be interested in), and exploring one of the Bay's islands. From there it was a seven-ish hour drive down through Auckland to Rotorua. If you didn't know, NZ is one big fault zone - lying across the meeting of two of the earth's plates, so it's got lots of volcanic activity. Rotorua has geysers and hot springs and bubbling mud pools and stinks of sulphur; I got to see it from the air as well, but unfortunately I don't remember that much about the scenery since I was plummeting from 12,000 feet. More about that another time...

After Rotorua, we drove over to Waitomo, famous for the glow worms in its subterranean caves. We got up early one morning to abseil 27m down into a cave, and on into the darkness on black rubber rings on the chill water, before squeezing through cracks in the rock, sometimes on hands and knees in the mud and gravel, and finally climbing back up those 27m in cold, dripping wetsuits. And all before lunchtime! We saw in New Year with a bang in Auckland with some of the usual dancefloor action, then had a day in bed and a couple of hours watching The Golden Compass, and then we were back in the car again the following day for a drive down to Tongariro National Park. You may be thinking this sounds like a lot of driving - it was. We covered 2410km (about 1500 miles)! Not bad considering how rusty my driving is.

Anyway, the drive down to Tongariro was pretty special - NZ's got some famously dramatic scenery, but most of it's in the South Island. But driving from the mountains around Auckland to the flatter areas further south and then to the amazing snowcapped volcanic peaks of Mount Tongariro, Mount Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings) and the largest and most recently excitable, Mount Ruapehu, was so spectacular, we had to keep stopping so I could get out and appreciate the views. Not content with the view from the foot of the mountain, I dragged John up as far as the ski chair-lifts would take us.

NZ's tiny capital, Wellington, was the last stop on our holiday. Maybe it was just because it was just after New Year, but it seemed a sleepy little place, but a good opportunity to just relax after all the zipping around. We strolled around the harbour, the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, the (mostly-closed) shops, went to the cinema, checked out the (almost non-existent) gay nightlife, and generally chilled out. The chilling was wiped out at the checkout desk when we discovered our luggage was overweight, but a gin and tonic on the plane sorted that out.

And now here we are again. Back in the heat of Sydney's summer, and back at work. Ugh. I'll be putting the pics up soon (I hope) with more detail about everywhere we went, if you can stand it ;)