New Zealand 0 Maps

Maps and Itinerary!

One of the things that I forgot to do was to show some maps on where we went while we were in New Zealand! So, I have found some maps and have added some red text to show where we went.

Our schedule was:

Sept 8 - Fly from Seattle, WA to Los Angeles, CA

Sept 9 - Fly from Los Angeles, CA to Auckland, NZ

Sept 11 - Land in Auckland

Sept 13 - Drive from Auckland to Tairua on the Coromandel Peninsula

Sept 17 - Drive from Tairua to Taupo

Sept 23 - Drive from Taupo to Wellington

Sept 25 - Take ferry from Wellington to Picton on the South Island

Here is a map of the North Island showing most of these locations.

On the South Island, our schedule was:

Sept 25 - Arrive in Piction, drive to Motueka
Sept 28 - Drive down the West Coast to Greymouth
Sept 29 - Drive to Fox Glacier
Sept 30 - Drive to Wanaka
Oct 1 - Drive to Te Anau
Oct 6 - Drive to Queenstown
Oct 7 - Drive to Christchurch
Oct 8 - Fly to Auckland to Los Angeles to Seattle!

New Zealand 2 Coromandel Peninsula

On September 13th, we picked up a rental car in Auckland and headed out to the Coromandel Peninsula. To get there, you go south from Auckland until you get below this large bay extending down from the Hauraki Gulf, then go east under the bay and turn back north again onto the peninsula. In all of the websites that we studied for our trip, it was advertised as the place New Zealanders go for a vacation.

We learned about "baches" while researching the Coromandel Peninsula. There's a website http://www.bookabach.com/ that you can go to and rent these baches or holiday homes. People own them as their cabin or holiday home, but rent it out to tourists or friends. This was our first bach and you can see the view from the deck in the picture below. It's unbelievable!



The bach sits on a large hill (Mt. Paku), so we had a great view. If anyone is ever going to New Zealand, this bach is called the Tairua Escape. We recommend it highly, as it was only about $100 US per night in off-season. We walked down the hill towards the bay, and you can see the bay and harbor below.

We spent several enjoyable nights on the deck, with a glass of New Zealand wine watching the moon come up, listening to the waves, just soaking up the feel of New Zealand. At least until the cold drove us inside! Then you were reminded that it was still late winter in New Zealand!

We drove up to Hahei and hiked to Cathedral Cove. It's a beautiful hike. The picture below is from the parking lot where you start the hike. The hike will go off to the left of the picture, down to the water where you can see the white cliffs, then up over the hill where the cliffs are and down to the next cove, which is the Cathedral Cove. At times, you are walking underneath enormous ferns, growing 15 to 25 feet high. You feel like you are in a tropical jungle, and you have to keep in mind that you are in the South Pacific. So it makes sense that this type of foliage is here.

Finally, we reached Cathedral Cove, and here is the cathedral that you walk through to get to a really nice beach area. Annie is in the center of the picture, since I am always walking behind taking pictures!

On the 16th, we went to the Miranda Shorebird Center. To get there, we went back towards Auckland, then drove up the western shore of the bay. We took two hikes while there, the first to a bird "hide". We saw plenty of harrier hawks and one huge White Heron, but little else. As I said earlier, this was late winter, so many birds had not come in yet.

The next hike was to a shell bank, which was literally made of trillions of shells. To the right is a "art shot" where a jellyfish had washed up and was caught near the shore.

In this picture, you can see the extent of the shells. It just goes for miles down the coast of the bay and way out into the bay, which looked to be very shallow at the southern end.

While we were at the Shorebird Centre, we kept getting "buzzed" by a WWII Spitfire fighter plane. I thought it was beautiful, but Annie disagreed! I guess it's a guy thing!







Next, we go to the geothermal heart of the North Island, Taupo and Rotorua!

Take care, everyone!

John & Annie

New Zealand 1 Auckland

Hello Everyone and Anyone!


Welcome to our New Zealand photoblog! We went to New Zealand for a month from September 8, 2008 to October 8, 2008. It was the trip of a lifetime! When we got married, we agreed that for each of our 50th birthdays, we could go wherever we wanted for a vacation (assuming that it was financially possible). For Annie, we went to Japan. For John, it was really a tough call between Australia and New Zealand. It finally came down to the amount of time we had. We figured that we could see a lot of New Zealand in a month, but we would only see a little of Australia. We'll have to wait until we retire to try and do a trip to Australia on the cheap.

We saved money by using the last of John's airmiles for the plane tickets. We booked most of our hotels and baches on the web, and since we were traveling off-season, we got some really great rates for some awesome places. For the plane trip, we were really worried about sitting upright for 15 hours, but since the plane was mostly empty we got to lay down and sleep for the trip.


In fact, the only bad part was that John left his cell phone on the plane in the seat pocket in front of him. So his phone went onto Sydney, Australia. Hopefully it's having a great time there. I guess the cell phone didn't agree with the decision of New Zealand over Australia!

At any rate, we landed in Auckland at about 4:30 am and then found some benches to sleep on until the airport "woke up". We couldn't get into our hotel room until 8:00 am (we had arranged for early check-in), so we just hung around the airport until 7:30.





Even with sleeping on the plane, we were pretty groggy after checking into the hotel. But we went out walking and Annie saw that harbor cruises were half-price, so we had a great cruise for our lunch picnic. Above is one of the skyline photos we took of Auckland. You can see the Sky Tower on the right of the picture. Strangely enough, there's a casino on the ground floor.

After the cruise we continue wandering around town. We were trying to find a grocery store, when we saw this view of the old gaslamps down a street on the harbor. The beautiful building in back is the Ferry Building. There's so much water around Auckland that it is easier to use ferries than having to drive your car around to the bridges.

We visited Kelly Tarleton's Underwater Encounter by meeting a van at the base of the Sky Tower. Kelly took over an old water treatment facility, with large pipes running everywhere, and made an aquarium out of it. In the picture to the left, you can see that there is a moving "side walk" that you can stand on, and if you want to stop and watch something, you get off the moving strip and stand where Annie is standing. It seemed that the fish were happier than in many aquariums that I have seen, because they had a longer path to swim. They just didn't swim to the other side of the aquarium. They could swim in a single direction for a long way without bumping into a wall and having to turn around. Tons of penguins also (Gentoos and Kings for those who are interested in penguins).

When the van dropped us back off at the Sky Tower, we decided to go up to the top and see what Auckland looked like from there. It was nice to see the entire harbor area, the town and everything. It's hard to capture all that in a photo and John was not successful in doing so! You could feel the tower move in the wind as it was blowing about 30 miles/hr that day.

While we were up on the tower, a bungy jumper came flying down (in the picture to the left, you can see him dressed in blue and yellow towards the bottom center of the photo). John had the camera on "burst" mode, so he took about 50 pictures as the bungy jumper flew by, but this one looked like it was the best.

New Zealanders will jump off anything that sits still long enough. It seems that there is a collective death wish among them! Everywhere you go, there is some "extreme" sport, where you can risk life and limb. While we were there, a Chinese tourist was killed in one of the jet boats that roar up and down every river over six inches deep. The boat hit a gravel bar and flipped, trapping the lady underneath the boat. But, it's a high adrenaline country.

This last photo is the Spirit of New Zealand, a replica sailing ship that goes around the harbor. Not sure if it is powered, but it looked like it was going pretty fast, for as little sail as she had on. But the Kiwis are some of the world's best sailors, so it's possible that they are just on sail power.

So that's it for Auckland! Of course, we (and by that we mean "John") took hundreds more pictures (about 2500 pictures over the entire trip), but it's best to limit the photos.

In the next blog post, we rent a car and drive from Auckland to the Coromandel Peninsula. It's a gorgeous place, with tons of beautiful beaches and hikes.