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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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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…
