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South Island, New Zealand
On our first morning in the South Island, we woke up bright and early in order to catch a cab to Picton to retrieve our rental car from the ferry terminal. To make a long story short, the cab ride lasted about 30 minutes and cost us $105NZD. Our cab driver also took us to the wrong rental car location, so we had to walk quite a bit with our luggage to find the correct pick-up spot; when we finally did, we grabbed the keys to another Toyota Corolla and zoomed out of town as quickly as possible. Picton is a small fishing village on the northern tip of the…
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Martinborough, New Zealand
On the twelfth day of our adventure, we woke up in the morning with the sad prospect that today was our last day in the North Island, as we had a flight to the South Island at 5pm that evening. Wanting to toast goodbye to the gorgeous North, we decided to head to wine country in Wairarapa, situated about an hour east of Wellington. This drive consisted of another pass through the Rimutakas, and since it was such a beautiful day in the mountains, we stepped out of the car at a lookout point and went on a short hike to reach this beautiful vantage point: Before we came to…
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Weta Cave, Wellington, New Zealand
On the day after Christmas, we woke up to the discovery that it was Boxing Day, a term that we Americans only partially recognized as a British holiday of some sort. Our hotel clerk quickly informed us that Boxing Day was a public holiday in New Zealand, where the stores run huge sales and people get out and shop. Wellington, which had been a ghost town the day before, was now a madhouse of people. For those familiar with the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, you will recognize Wellington as the hub of production for the cast and crew in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Wellington is home to the…
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Putangirua Pinnacles, New Zealand
The walking track guide didn’t give much instruction other than “follow the stream,” and since New Zealand is currently in the midst of a super long drought, that was easier said than done. Several times we lost our way and had to double-back on the path to make sure we didn’t get lost in the middle of the mountains.
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Wellington, New Zealand
Wellington is a four-hour drive south of Tongariro National Park, which is where we woke up on Christmas Eve. For most of the drive, we passed through beautiful countryside and farmland, spotting cattle, sheep, goat, alpaca, deer, and horse farms. We popped in at a small café in the tiniest little town you can imagine—“Bulls,” which made every effort possible to make a pun about cattle (“this café is unbelieva-BULL”). After lunch, our car zoomed across several smaller mountainsides and eventually wound its way to the West Coast, where I shouted in glee upon seeing the Tasman Sea, which spans between Western New Zealand and Australia. About an hour from…
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Tongariro National Park
Tongariro National Park is situated about an hour’s drive south of Lake Taupo, and is home to three famous volcanoes: Mount Tongariro, the smallest; Mount Ruapehu, the largest; and Mount Ngauruhoe (arguably the most famous, since it served as Peter Jackson’s “Mount Doom” in the Lord of the Rings films). These three mountains are hugely important to the Maori people.
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Lake Taupo, New Zealand
We left Waitomo bright and early on the 7th morning, eager to reach Lake Taupo before noon. Lake Taupo is a spectacular, massive lake, much bigger than Lake Rotorua, which we’d seen earlier in the trip. It’s the largest lake in New Zealand, known formally as “Great Lake Taupo,” and as we learned that day, it was formerly a supervolcano. Several thousand years ago, a supervolcano erupted, leaving a large, cauldron-like depression in the ground called a caldera. Lake Taupo formed in that caldera. Because of the volcanic activity surrounding the lake, there are several hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the lake (360ft below) that make the temperature of…
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Stars Above the Water: Waitomo Caves, New Zealand
They were the titiwai, or “stars above the waters,” as the Maori call them. Seeing the titiwai felt like lying on the grass on a pitch-black night in the middle of nowhere, staring up at the stars above.
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Hobbiton Movie Set, New Zealand
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien So goes the famous first line of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the prequel to his famous Lord of the Rings trilogy that has touched so many of our lives. On the seventh day of our December 2017 honeymoon, Matt and I woke up after a pretty restless night at our Rotorua hotel (super old hotel = super thin walls) and drove an hour north to Matamata. If you look on a map of New Zealand, Matamata rests in farming country, with green, rolling hills that are slightly reminiscent of our home state of Tennessee. Before director Peter Jackson…
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Rotorua, New Zealand
In the morning, we woke up early and drove straight to Rotorua—a lakeside town about an hour inland from the coast. Rotorua is known for its geothermal activity, as the town sits on the caldera of a massive volcano that last erupted several thousand years ago. This volcanic activity makes the region home to several geysers, geothermal hot springs, bubbling mud pools, and sulphuric gas. And let me tell you—that sulphur smell is extremely strong. Our clothes likely still smell like rotten eggs, and it’s impossible to get used to that stench. Rotorua is also famous for its Maori culture, as the city is one of the first places the…
