Goodby, Mo...

We have to admit, it was a little emotional saying goodby to Mos Eisley today and heading off to the Auckland airport.

 

We've had an amazing nine weeks in New Zealand, involving hikes to fjords, epic climbing around active volcanoes, marriage-testing tandem kayaking, great fly fishing, and a host of new kiwi friends. It's a great, quirky place that continues to surprise us. Like today, when we arrived at our airport hotel to find not only a gastropub nearby, but also a newly landscaped park with funky art installations from some of En-Zed's best emerging artists. And, as we strolled around for a couple of hours we happened to meet George, the landscape architect who designed the park. 

New Zealand is like that. Odd, epic, and neighborly all at once. We like it, and are pretty sure we'll be back.

But tomorrow it's a 4:00 AM wake-up and a flight back to Australia. First stop: Cairns, for a week of diving on the Great Barrier Reef. 

How to build your own hot tub

Hot water beach on New Zealand's Coromandel Peninsula is a big tourist attraction, and for good reason. Thanks to volcanic activity a few billion years ago, there are molten hot rocks under the sand that heat up the water and, if you dig a hole, the hot water bubbles up into your very own hot tub on the beach. Here's how to do it in a few easy steps:

1) Rent a tiny shovel for $5.

2) Walk around the beach feeling for hot sand.

3) When you find hot sand, start digging. Note: The water coming up can reach 140 degrees F, so it's important to dig a pool that mixes hot and cold water. Getting this right is an art.

4) Relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor. (Notice that Brook has created a hot water stream to mix with the warm water in the pool.)

5) Take a refreshing dip in the ocean and call it a day!

Learning to love holiday parks

Holiday parks are a thing in Australia and New Zealand. We'd heard of them before arriving - that they're great, family run affairs and also that they're loud, crowded, over-priced campgrounds. We've found both descriptions are true, along with everything in between.

Holiday parks aren't your average KOA campground, located in a few high-traffic tourist areas. They are everywhere. Nearly every town has one, or three.  There are smaller parks with not much more than a grill (in Australia, this isn't actually a grill, but rather a flat metal griddle - all the better to collect your bacon fat and stir-fry your shrimp) and a hot shower, and there are big holiday park chains with amenities like bouncy balls, mini golf and water parks.

At first, we found the fancy amenities and $35-40 price tag to camp a little offensive. Who needs hot showers, a TV and a full kitchen when they're camping? It's camping after all!

How wrong we were. After three months living out of a tent and Mo, finding a nice indoor space to hang out ranks pretty high. Wood stove to keep warm? Score! Not having to haul dishes from Mo? Yes! Beer fridge and hot showers after surfing? Excellent! Getting more than three feet away from each other? Sign me up. 

They're also a great place to meet Aussies or Kiwis (not just the ubiquitous German backpackers) since they are very popular among the locals. We've gotten great travel tips while making dinner in the common kitchen, stayed warm and dry during pounding rainstorms, and Brook had a fascinating hour-long chat about hog and cattle husbandry with one park owner. So, a lesson from our holiday park traveling: put aside your camping snobbery and when in Rome...

Entering Mordor

As it turns out, Mordor has a ski resort. And the summit of Mount Doom is about four hours from the car park. But it's still an otherworldly place, with dozens of volcanic craters, vertical scree fields, and billowing steam vents. In other words, not a bad place to spend a few days.

When we planned our time in NZ, there were a few places we definitely wanted to visit. One of those was Tongariro National Park, in the center of New Zealand's north island. This is a place where the clash of continental plates is strikingly obvious, filled with jagged rock and active volcanoes. It's also home to Mt. Ruapehu, which was used in the Lord of the Rings as Mordor, and Mt. Ngauruhoe, a volcano (actually a parasitic cone off the rim of Mt. Tongariro itself) that stood in as Mt. Doom. Luckily, we fared a bit better than Frodo and company...

When we got to the nearby town of Turangi, the mountains were stuck in a cloud, so we spent a couple of days fishing, visiting hot springs, and doing laps in the local pool. We also rented crampons and ice axes since rain in the valley means snow up high - about a foot. When the weather broke we headed off on the Tongariro Northern Circuit, a 3-day loop through and among the peaks and valleys of the park. It was worth the wait - a remarkable hike with bizarre rock  formations, some steep ascents and descents, and volcanoes everywhere. With three blue bird days, the crampons and ice axes weren't really necessary. But we did strap on the crampons for a few hours of off-trail fun.

Not satisfied with just walking among the volcanoes, we returned for a fourth day (after a hot spring soak and steak dinner) to climb Mt. Doom itself. It was a steep, difficult climb, but we were rewarded with awesome views and the chance to reenact throwing the ring into the volcano.

Photos from our hikes can be found here: https://plus.google.com/photos/103829313469224560701/albums/6015266209838871825

We're off to the coast for our last week in New Zealand!

Catching up and catching fish

The days are getting shorter, which means fewer long hikes and overnight kayaks. But we've still been keeping busy, even if we've got a little more downtime to get to know the Kiwi microbrew scene and enjoy some awesome hospitality from Kiwi and American friends. Below are a few highlights from the past couple weeks.

Eating green lipped mussels, the local specialty in Marlborough sound, following a surprisingly hard hike on the Queen Charlotte track.

Hiking the Kaikoura peninsula and stopping twice to see the seal pups at nearby Ohau stream: http://youtu.be/VfUT9xSiXyY

Then it was over to the North Island via a very scenic 4-hour ferry...

Riding the Wellington cable car and checking out a very cool and funky city for a few days while waiting for the Vietnamese embassy to process our visas for this summer (which eventually came through).

Fly fishing in the Tongariro river near Lake Taupo...

And having this guy for dinner last night (the fish, not Brook).

Along the way we spent a few great nights with with friends in Oakura; it was fun to be around a family (including a very enthusiastic 4 year old and über-chill one year old) after several weeks of having mostly german tourists for conversation...

Now we are outside Tongariro national park, awaiting a break in the weather before attempting our last big hike on NZ, which will take us through volcanic alpine environs that stood in for Mt. Doom in The Lord of the Rings...

The Kiwi Psyche

One lesson we've learned after six weeks in New Zealand: Don't underestimate a Kiwi, especially those over 50. That gray haired Kiwi in (way) too small short-pants and muddy gum boots calmly sipping a beer likely just finished a day of kite surfing, mountain biking, and finished with a bungy jump for fun. All that after rising at dawn for a 10-hour day of sheep wrangling.

Maybe it's because they're named after an ungainly, flightless bird. Or because there are more sheep than people. But it feels like Kiwis have something to prove - without actually talking about it.

Oh, sure, they have wineries and lamb, but also distilleries and more deer meat than sheep. In many ways, it's a rough country all cleaned up for church but not really fooling anyone. And that's why we love it. So, we thought a few observations on the Kiwi psyche are in order. To wit:

- Gumboots and short pants. It's a thing.
- Think you're cool with your surfing and extreme skiing abilities? Try again; the average kiwi can handle a 2- week trek then paraglide home.
- All Kiwi beer is about 5% for a reason: it's important to be sober when wrangling sheep, lest they get the better of you.
- It's open season on deer all year long, no bag limit. This gets interesting when in the back country, yet never once mentioned in parks offices or tourism brochures.
- Trout the size of your arm. Everywhere.
- Daily limit on Mallards = 20. Recently down from 50. No limit on tourists.
- The old guy in the department of conservation office? Probably about to do a 6-day trek that's way harder than whatever you had in mind.
- On an island, where it rains all the time (Maori name translates to "land of the long white cloud"), weather forecasts are, well, a bit general. Like the cyclone nobody mentioned.
- Understated is the new overstated. "Fine" weather really means intermittent rain. And "mainly fine"? Well, we never figured out what that meant.
- The couple of nice, friendly school teachers you meet at the campground? His hobby is stunt piloting. She likes to take it easy and sticks with paragliding and adventure races.
- Think you've finally bested a group of 60-something Kiwis because you're doing the same hike in one less day? Think again - they just biked 3 days to the trailhead, oh and one of them thinks she broke her shoulder, but that's not a problem, even though she's flying to Australia on a red eye the day the hike ends.
- If you encounter a guy in gumboots, ask him if the 200-meter suspension bridge is still out 100k up the road and he says " maybe," odds are good he's going for it as well and will be there with you two hours later in the driving rain and 80 knot winds, tromping around in short pants but also wondering if it's still safe to cross after 7 cables blew out. It was, barely. How we figured that out? Some kiwi drove his truck across to test things out.

So, generally badass, understated, handy in a crisis, and with a fondness for good (albeit it weak) beer. We'll take it.

The Tasman Peninsula

At the top of the South Island of New Zealand sits a land of bays, islands, and low mountains sloping into the sea. The vegetation is semi-tropical, the waters carribean-blue, and the beer the best around.

When we first got to Nelson, we thought we would spend a few days in town. But the weather was good, and we couldn't help ourselves, so after a morning of laundry and van-dry out at the caravan park, we headed up to Abel Tasman National Park. Home to one of NZ's nine great walks, Abel Tasman is also ideal for kayaking. We found a local company, hired a tandem for two days, and the next morning caught a water taxi (kayak strapped to the back) to the top of the park. We had a couple nice days of paddling, saw some great wildlife, and tested our relationship skills in the tandem kayak (Brook can't get over rowing, and the need to go fast over water; Erin likes to actually look at stuff along the way - there's grumbling but it works out). We also had an entertaining evening camping at a beach: after flagging in two lost Israelis with our headlamps on strobe-mode, Brook had fun chasing brush tailed possums around in the dark with a kayak paddle. Here are a few photos from the paddle: https://plus.google.com/photos/103829313469224560701/albums/6007520983675966785

All-in-all a good few days. Then we finally did spend a couple of days in Nelson, including spending the night with some friends we had met about a month ago in Fjordland, complete with venison stew courtesy of our host's rifle.