The far north- Cape Reinga

Since chichi was having none of the beach, we drove by the gravel roads towards Cape Reinga, pretty much, the end of the world as far as New Zealand is concerned! Words cannot describe the feeling of isolation that you get looking beyond into the point where the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea meet! The water is crazy at the point where the two currents meet, reaching 10 m of height during storms, apparently! There’s pretty much nothing but open sea beyond this point, with the exception of the “Three Kings”, a small, uncharted, trio of islands.

Viewtiful sceneries and one of the oldest lighthouses in NZ, as well as a little signpost to remind you that you are 18000 kms away from good ol’ London!



We stayed at a camping near there that night and I swear I must have seen about 10 shooting stars. The sky was absolutely clear and the lack of towns nearby meant you could see all the start and the milky way! I discovered the South Chross (La Cruz del Sur) which helps the sailors find their way south, so the Southern Hemisphere equivalent to the Big Dipper.

We camped out and met other travellers and had a wicked bonfire with plenty of music and good times (there were 4 guitars there!)


The next day we went tramping near Cape Reinga to check out some of the beaches, and saw some crazy cliffs! I guess being extremely exposed to the seas takes it’s toll!

And then we headed over to the giant sand dunes! Absolutely crazy change of scenery, from being in the seaside (all green and rocky) to pretty much being in the desert! I tell you, it’s crazy how big the dunes are! Great fun to run around in and jump off some pretty steep dunes, all great fun!


Can you see the guys? The dunes are huuuge!!

And that is pretty much it! We then swiftly made our way back to Auckland (except when going uphill, when chichi was choking!) and here I am, tho I tell you, watching Spain lose to France this morning makes me wish I’d stayed at the end of the world!

The far north- 90 Mile beach

We then shot up towards the further north towards the 90 mile beach, which, as the name suggests is a huge beach/highway (4x4 wheel drives can go through it at 100km/hr!) that runs towards the top of the north island.




Very cool, it’s a bit of a mission to drive around it if you haven’t got a suitable car, specially if you get caught by the tide which changes the fairly compact sand into quicksand pretty swiftly!

The far north- Bay of Islands

This past week I’d been working real hard and got some great results for me project, so to celebrate, I took Monday off (how slack am I?!). Not wanting to dilly dally and in an effort to spend as much time as possible with some buddies who’ll soon be going, I joined them on a trip to the far north of NZ! So we borrowed a 80’s camper van (Chichi, we decided to call it! So we could say “Corre chichi, corre!!”) and we were off!!


Our first stopover was at the Bay of Islands, towards the north east of Auckland, which was the site of arrival of the first European settlers to New Zealand. Great place, it’s a maritime park, very popular for diving and yachting. Since we were a bit poorer than all than we got some kayaks and looped around some of the islands! Great beaches and views of the Pacific Ocean so I’ll definitely be back in summer!

It's been a while!

I guess there’s been quite a lot on my plate recently, and the last few days have really been flying by! And since my lapatop got stolen (grrr...) I haven’t been able to keep up on the blog – in fact, I’m at work at the mo!

Luckily my hard disk got left behind, so I haven’t lost all of my data, and have managed to not have my camera stolen as well, so I’ve been able to keep on taking pictures!

Right, without further ado, I want to wish farewell to all the people who have left Auckland with the end of the semester, it’s been great knowing you and hopefully we'll cross paths again.

All blacks Vs Ireland

Right then, the rest of the weekend was actually pretty good, on Friday I went to the horse races on a work dinner thing, which was awesome. There was free food and a free bar, so as you can imagine hilarity insued… no photos I’m afraid, but I think that’s probably for the best!

And on Saturday I went to eden Park to check out the All Blacks play against Ireland! It was one of the test matches (rugby speak for ffriendly game) but the crowd was absolutely awesome! The all blacks were great fun to watch, it’s a pretty over the top show, with fireshows and the like not to mention the Haka dance that the all blacks do before the game to scare their opponent!


It was VERY wet and since they haven’t invested in a roof to cover the heads of the plebs (i.e. cheap ticket crowd) we got absolutely soaked! All great fun tho, great play and even tho they fought valiantly Ireland got pretty trashed by NZ!

Grrrrr

Some bastard stole my laptop! So I’m using all my forensic skills to nail the mofo… unfortunately it looks like I might be no grisham...


Grrrrr!!!

Paella please!

Hispanising the world one paella at the time!!

Whatipu

Monday! Noooo, another dull day at work luminoling away...

So I wake up and look out the window to witness a veritable tropical rainstorm! The first thought in my head was "it figures", cos you see I just bought a bike...

So I gave up on that idea and headed over to the train station, getting literally blown away in the process. So in a weird twist of fate, because I originally planned on cycling a lost my usual train and ended up settling for the next one only a few minutes later. However at that point the electricity went out... in the whole of Auckland! Traffic lights stopped working, trains stopped running and a quick check confirmed that I had the day off! Sweet!

So I headed back to halls and ran into some mates and spontaneously planned a quick visit to whatipu, to the west of auckland, at the point where the Tasman sea meets the Manukau harbour (check a map!) and what an awesome alternative to work!

We explored some of the nearby natural caves and wandered over to the black sand beach where we actually caught a sight of some Orcas! (couldnt get a decent picture of them tho, so youll have to take my word for it).




We also hiked up to the summit of one of the nearby mountains near the coast, which was great fun, tho the wind was so strong that by the time we reached the summit we pretty much wouldnt stand up for fear of getting blown over the precipice!!


So pretty awesome, all I can say is roll on the power shortages!!

Mt Eden

Yet another great weekend in good ol Auckland!

This time, I stayed around Auckland, which is great and finally managed to get a good sleep in for the first time in two weeks! For the most part, this weekend I just spent chilling out during the days (steadily growing shorter as time goes by) and going out at night.

Me roomate (will) gave a gig in friday which was pretty awesome and on saturday went out to watch the extremetly boring England match (might as well have just watched the first 4 minutes) and a really fun night!

Feeling bad for the lack of sight seeing tho, I lucked out cos on friday I headed over to Mt Eden with a few mates, following a great luch Chez Luz!


Mt Eden is basically another volcanic peak in Auckland and it was absolutely awesome, the crater is huge and the 360º views of the city and the islands were absolutely breathtaking.



No less so was the sight of the "Van Man" a random dude who we saw blowing bubbles in a very colourful patchwork tunic! He even gave me his card, his job being that he goes around supporting "random acts of kindness"...

>Gandalf?

Guest Post

I was tempted to say that I've just come back from a flash trip to Paris, but I suppose it's best to not mess with the might of the copyright of the fist (where no lawyers are involved, just pure killer instinct) and admit that it was, indeed, me mates Dani and Dru, who've just come back from Ohlala-land, bringing with them the awesome pix below!




Needless to say, the 6-6-6 was complete caos in paris, the french people wondering where all the color had gone to, and cowering in fear of the pointy-toothed devil loitering around the streets of Paris.

Luckily the apocalipse was soon over and found to come down to a poor salami indigestion.

BackLOG

An easy way to spend an evening is to look through my photo collection. Here's second part of a series of pix backtracking through the events the led up to my coming to new zealand.

Here're some from the night before my departure, the end of exams and the drinking that insued! Please forgive my leaving out so many people, everyone should be in there, but I can only fit so many pix at a go!





It's been a great year of forensics, the class as a group has been awesome and I'm only sorry we didn't get more time together! See you all in september!

Queen's Birthday Special: Part 2

The road trip rolls on as we gave up on New Plymouth due to weather mishaps and headed over to waitomo for some underground fashion, stricktily in the kiwi sense!

Waitomo Caves and the Lost world Highway

We decided to take the scenic route to Waitomo, through route 43, aka the Lost World Highway. And to be honest, the route certainly lived up to its name.
With sights of the New Zealand landscape as I expected, with hills, sheep and awesome views. We stopped off at random points in the road, cos we could not bear to drive past such cool places without fullfilling every tourists' duty:




We stayed the night at a really cool backpackers (with electricity and everything, so quite a luxury!)
The day after we set off to explore the Waitomo caves. Waitomo is a limestone-rich landscape which has been heavily worn down by the rain and has developped an intricate system of caves, which are exploted fully by the tourist industry in kiwiland.

This seems like a good point to bring up the fact the Nz is heavy on extreme sports, this is the home of skydiving, bungee jumping and rockclimbing. In an attempt to work out why, we came up with two possible reasons: either because NZ is so far away from other countries that the people here have had to work out alternative ways to spend their holidays, or simply, they are nuts.

Excuse my digression, but it just seems necessary to point this out. Cos the Waitomo caves, rather than a simle walk through the caves have been developped into an over the top adventure playground, where you can abseil into the caves, go tubing through the river and then climb your way back out!
Feeling brave, we went tubing thought the caves, and it was pretty awesome! The caves are dotted with "gloworms" (a fancy name for glow in the dark maggots) which do make the view pretty cool (no pix, I'm afraid, no chance of getting the camera there and back!).

Afterwards we went tramping (hehe, the new zealand term for hiking, hehe, we went for a bit of a tramp, lol) around the general waitomo area and the views were pretty cool as well (tho excuse the slight shaking of the camera, going caving can be COLD!)




So that, in a nushell was my weekend, pretty cool, wish it were longer- but alas, there's blood splashing to be done and it might as well be me doing it! (note to self: must stip bringing up creepy forensics updates).

Queen's Brithday Special: Part 1

The Queen's birthday is synonimous with holiday in New Zealand, and since I wouldn't want to let the poor ol' gal down I grudgingly took monday off work.

So, during the long weekend I joined a few of me mates in a trip to the southern half of the North Island of New Zealand. So in a dead exciting two part special I'll try to explain my excitement, amazement, knackeredness, relief, consternation, constipation (actually, I'll skip that one) and general good feelings about a three day weekend that could not end but in the obvious conclusion: that good ol' Liz had more birthdays a year!

Taranaki and New Plymouth

Taranaki is the district on the west of the north island that kinda sticks out like a nose into the Tasman Sea. I'd been recommended the place by me flatmate, who reckons it's some of the best NZ surf.
So I joined a few others from the railway campus and we set off! (wowowowo) ... at 5 am! (ouch!)


The road trip was pretty cool, with some cool views of the sheep dotted new zealand fields, in a pretty cool day. We made it to Mt Taranaki just after lunch.
Mt Taranaki is an old volcano and New Zealands most climbed mountain (it stars in "the last samurai" as Mt fiji, incidentally)

Unfortunately, we were greeted by thick mist and clouds that prevented the spectacular view we were expecting (it turns out that two situations exist in the taranaki region: if you can see the summit, that means that it will soon rain, and if you can't see it, it's already raining!)
It did make for some pretty good tramping tho, the hills are amazing and the paths are absolutely awesome!



It actually turned out to be a pretty random day, with us ending down the pub and getting chatting to some locals who let us crash at their farm (cheers Sam!) near the beach!

The day after we toured New Plymouth, a nearby city and since the weather was so crappy we set around visiting a few art galleries (some pretty cool stuff, there was this weird exhibition about music and sound and relations between the two, hard to explain and even harder to understand!)Some pretty interactive stuff, tho, like the Nacho-Ipod Ad below


In the end we accepted defeat by rain, and decided to set off to Waitomo (see part two!)

Ramblings

--> Even though it's winter here, the weather is still pretty warm

--> A lot of people in Auckland walk around the city in flip flops

--> New Zealand ketchup bottles are shaped like giant tomatoes

--> Guiness is pretty expensive here (and it's not as good)


--> I can't tell if the swirl of the toilet goes the wrong way around, cos my toilet just doesn't swirl.

--> People here finish their sentences with "eh!", which is kinda cool

--> They also say "sweet ass mate" when something is cool

--> I wish they'd just leave my ass out of the conversation

--> If you wanna speak like a kiwi, you should just not open your mouth as much

--> Kia Ora means welcome and hello in Maori

--> A team of about 12 people deal with most of the crime in New Zealand