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!)