We got back and that very weekend the All Blacks were playing the Rugby World Cup final. They won. 8-7. The whole country went fucking nuts. The city center of Dunedin exploded. Castle St has a goddamn bonfire of couches going. It was a good night for just about everyone in New Zealand.
Shortly after that, me and two other friends hopped on a plane to Auckland. This was our epic North Island trip. We rented a campervan called the Jucy Condo. Jucy rentals are pretty clutch and come through with some great stuff. Our trip took us to the Coromandel Peninsula where there we saw Cathedral Cove and the Hot Water Beach. The Hot Water Beach is really cool because you can literally dig a hole in the sand and hot water will come up. If you dig it deep enough you can make yourself a hot tub to sit in. This happens because there is a molted rock about 2 km from the surface or something that heats ground water which comes up through the ground as steam, cool a little to become liquid again, then appears on the surface as hot water. Some of this stuff was really really hot. There was a couple that was actually hard boiling eggs in the water. Here's some pictures, the first is the cove, the second is the eggs.
After that we headed south to Rotorua and Taupo. Saw some stuff there that didn't impress all that much after the cool stuff we'd beens seeing for the past months. Rotorua has sulfur geysers everywhere so the whole town smelled terrible. Taupo was kind of nice, I took my first shower there in a public pay bathroom.
We were told that we weren't going to be able to do the Tongariro Crossing when we had wanted to do it (it's the hike that basically takes you through Mordor, it takes about 8 hours one way and you have the option to summit the mountain used as Mt. Doom in LOTR), so we headed up to Waitomo to do some caving. Here's some pictures of that:
After caving, we dipped south to get to Wellington for some night life. We made it, but were turned down from every club we tried to get into because of our attire. We figured our scent didn't help either. Living out of a campervan for 4 days and sleeping in parking lots and beside lakes wasn't optimal for hygiene. We eventually settled on a sake bar that actually let us in. There were white ladies working there that were pulling out pretty legit Japanese and talking to the Japanese customers. I was impressed.
We spent the next day in Wellington. Saw Parliament, went to a museum and saw a giant squid and some other stuff. Then we had to dip real hard up to the National Park, where we found out we could do the Tongariro Crossing the next day. Got in at midnight, crashed hard, woke up at 6:45, got ready for the hike, and hopped on the shuttle to the start. This was definitely one of the coolest things I've done in New Zealand and I highly recommend it to everyone who is fit enough to do an 8 hour hike of medium difficulty. There are some pretty hard parts, but you can just take em slow. We went through snow, mountains, forest to get to the end. Here's some picture from that too:
After that long ass hike, we headed North because our flight out of Auckland was in a day or so. We stopped in Hamilton where we some people we met in Samoa live and are studying abroad. They offered us some nice couches and a hot shower, something we couldn't pass up.
The next night we had to return our van by like 6 or something, so we ended up spending another weird night in the Auckland airport. We slept right next to the McDonalds. Interestingly enough, Auckland International Airport has been rated one of the best airports to sleep in. Case and point: I've spent two nights there, and one of my travel buddies has spent three nights there.
Got home sunburnt and tired, but it was most certainly an epic trip.
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