By the end of the two weeks we had crisscrossed the upper North Island for 2800 km (1700 miles), seeing so many beautiful sights and doing such ridiculous stuff that it is hard to know where to begin. So, today I am going to post this quick update to give a general overview of traveling Kiwi style. Then over the course of the next week we hope to post a number of times about the different stops and experiences we had so look for a flurry of posts with pictures!
I will begin with the driving (again). 2800 km may not seem like much, but you really have to drive these highways to appreciate it. The typical road has a posted speed limit of 100 km/hour but at the slightest notice, you can come upon a hairpin turn where the suggested speed limit (posted a mere 50 meters ahead of the turn) is 35 or 55 km/hr with a double length semi truck barreling around the corner at you! You have to be on a high state of alert at all times when driving. Also, unique to NZ I imagine, on the very first day of the trip we had our first experience with a "rural traffic jam". Yes there were 1,000? 5,000? 10,000? sheep all making there way from Farmer Boggart's farm to Farmer Brown's farm via the highway. I hope this picture and video does this justice.
It was super cute for the first half hour but after an hour of crawling along at low speed the charm was starting to wear off and we were thinking of mutton stew. Finally the farmers, who were on ATV's with their herding dogs, got the wooly creatures into a paddock about 10 km down the road and we were able to speed on our way.
The landscape of the North Island was consistently beautiful, with rolling verdant (vocab word for the day) green hills, flocks of sheep (more sheep than people here) and the occasional farmhouse. The kids started to mock me for this but every hour or so I would simply point and say "Shire" to yet another idealic rural hillside. The whole island seems to be never-ending green hills and valleys covered in farms or "bush". It seemed like we crossed a mountain range about every hour. And given that the roads that are just two lane, windy, and without much shoulder, this led to some anxiety of the part of the passengers (Jen) and some backseat driving (Jen again begging me to slow down).
The towns were mostly small and rural, and spaced 15-20 km or so apart. All of the smaller towns had a petrol station, dairy (small general store), liquor store, "takeaway" restaurant (fish and chips or Asian food) and a few other stores like laundries and post. The slightly larger towns had a main street with more choices for food and groceries, and would also have "holiday parks." We also drove through a few of the bigger towns like Tauranga and Whangarei, and then the one real metropolitan city, Auckland. Here is a picture of the Auckland skyline from the bridge just north of town.
And, ahhhh, the Holiday Park, our home away from home. They offer camping, RV hookups, small cabins, and hotel rooms and even apartments as well as indoor cooking areas, hot showers and playgrounds. We mostly camped, but also spent a night or two inside as well when the kids started to get bitter about the camping. We took good advantage of their kitchens, hot showers (remember we have 3 girls) and indoor places to eat especially when it was raining. The camping areas were different then what we are used to in the US, but awesome all the same. The tent sites are typically large flat green grassy areas with a couple scattered communal picnic tables and NO FIRE ALLOWED. This seemed ironic to us that we can have outdoor fires in Colorado where the fire danger is always somewhat high, but not in NZ where it rains all the time. We had brought a box of firewood and it made the whole trip with us, just sitting unused in the back of the van. We also enjoyed the fact that it was not that crowded and we could just show up and be able to find a spot. Most of the other tourists were 20 some year old Germans traveling together but they were all very polite and the holiday parks are strict about not allowing partying or noise making after hours.
Here is a picture of us setting up camp at Piha Beach Holiday Park.
Another obvious geographic feature of the trip was the ocean. NZ is roughly the size of Colorado, with a total land mass of 267,000 square km but 15,000 km of coastline. Compare this to the US, which has 1.0 million square km of land mass but just 19,000 km of coastline! Indeed NZ has the 9th most coastline in the world for any country! So you are never far from the ocean and spectacular ocean views, usually perched on a hill high above the shore looking down into little coves and bays. We have a LOT of pictures that look like this...
Prior to leaving for this trip we became huge fans of this little known NZ guide book called “NZ Frenzy”. (If you are ever coming to NZ, I would strongly recommend getting these books - there is one for each Island.) One of Jen's colleagues, who is originally from Germany but has lived in NZ for 9 years and traveled extensively, recommended the book. As he put it "This (insert cuss word) American came to NZ and found out all the local secrets locations and wrote all about them." As opposed to guidebooks like "Lonely Planet" and "Fodors" which tend to just mention the same popular tourist locations over and over. We do need to insert a disclaimer here that the author seems to be somewhat of a nudist and has a true love of all of NZ’s little pools, rivers and thermal spots where he can be in "his element". Nonetheless, he was our unofficial guide for most of the trip, and so many of the spots we visited were completely off the map, and were "Sweet As" (with just one S please). We found ourselves doing everything from driving on beaches at 90 km/hr, exploring abandoned mines, clambering above waterfalls that led from one pool to another seemingly without end. And throughout all that, we rarely saw other people. Granted, we were not traveling at the peak tourist season but we were amazed at the lack of crowds.
Anyway, between that and our collection of maps and other guidebooks, we saw a lot in those 14 days. In the following posts we hope to chronicle the places we visited, throwing in some videos and pictures. I hope this gave a good overview of the trip and about traveling around this amazing country!
P, J, K, L and L
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