Hello friends! Sadly, we will be bidding farewell to Lily of the Valley tomorrow... she has been good to us...minus the break-down in the middle of nowhere. We head out for the Samoan islands for 10 DAYS!! tomorrow evening (can you tell I am excited??!?). But before we leave, we thought we would give an update on our final days in the campervan.
This past week, we have been traveling up the most northern part of the North island. Our first stop along the way was Hot Water Beach. Hot Water Beach is so cool because there are "pools" of hot water heated from thermal activity under the sand! Jared and I headed out early in the morning (to make sure the tide was low) so we could dig us a little hot water pool. Now when I say hot water, I mean HOT water. The pool was so hot in some spots, your skin would literally burn! Rumor has it that some of the hot water pools can reach 140 degrees... I'd say we dug one that was about 120 degrees. And remember...it's the winter down here, so outside it was about 40 degrees. Here are some pictures from that adventure. WARNING: you may want to put sunglasses on...there are pictures of us in bathing suits and we are WHITE as snow.
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The north is made up of a ton of beaches. We did a couple of hikes up here and wanted to show you some pictures of paradise. Even in the winter, this place is absolutely beautiful!
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Here is a story about one of the weirdest things that has happened to us while on this trip.... While we were planning this trip, we heard about a guy named Ron Laughlin that does itineraries for people coming on holiday to NZ. This guy is originally from Ohio but moved to the South island of NZ in 1988 and absolutely loves it here. So...we decided to email him so he could help us out. Long story short - he was a super nice guy, made us a great itenerary for the South island and even got us a discount on our first campervan. I don't know if the stars were aligned one night or what but here in this beautiful country, in the NORTH island, we ended up running into him while eating supper!! We made great friends and had a great chat. Typical Ron, he gave us a cafe suggestion that was a must do. He told us about this cafe, Corogate, that was owned by a British couple and it was super "quirky." Him and his brother had eaten there about a week ago, ordered a dessert, and the owner totally forgot to give it to them because they were wrapped up in conversation. So Ron sent us there to eat his dessert and enjoy the quirkiness. Here is a picture from the cafe - the back half of the restaurant is dedicated to the Royal family. The owner now loves Jared and me and put our picture on her website. Haha!
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There are tons of tiny sea-side towns here in the North island. Here are some pictures of what some of them look like.
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After a week, we made it to the most northern tip: Cape Reinga. This is a very sacred place to the Maori people - it is where the spirits go when they leave this life and begin their travels into afterlife. The Cape is also where the Tasman Sea and Pacific Ocean meet, so they waves and wind can be fierce. Needless to say, the place was absolutely gorgeous.
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On our way back down to Auckland, we hit up the massive sand dunes for a little sledding and boogie-boarding. I could not capture the actual size of these dunes in the pictures, but I'd say they were about 55 feet tall. Sand dunes = BA. We could have done this all day!
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And just a fun fact to end on: NZ is known for these gargantuan trees called Kauri (pronounced "cow-ree"). They're huge. This first picture is the largest living Kauri tree. It's estimated to be about 2,000 years old, stands 51.5 meters tall, and has a girth of 13.8 meters. Basically, they're massive and we wanted to show you a picture of them.
So that's about all we've been up to this past week. In about 18 hours we'll be boarding a plane to the lovely Samoan islands and couldn't be more excited. I'm not sure we're going to know what it's like living outside of a van. ;)
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