Katie & Roger

2nd Feb 2023

Today was a big driving day. 5+ hours in the car down to Hokitika. Fortunately Kate had planned the route with some exciting stops. They were: The Longest Swingbridge in New Zealand, T-Rex Tree and Pancake Rocks.

The Longest Swingbridge wasn’t really a scheduled stop, but we just saw it en route and decided to take a break and give it a go. I found it quite fun but Kate was very scared of it. It moves around quite a lot and it’s pretty scary when you look down. Unfortunately there were a lot of these pesky sandflies around that love to feast on us. I was quite fortunate in that I got chatting to one of the carnies and he gave me some repellant. Kate was quite far behind me because she was scared to pass anyone on the swingbridge so she missed her opportunity and she was bitten. We did a nice short 15 minute walk before hopping back in the car and heading to our next stop.

The T-Rex Tree is… well, exactly as it sounds. A tree at the side of the road that looks like a t-rex. The fun part is it isn’t cut or shaped like that, it’s just the way it’s grown. It’s literally a tree next to a road with the river running alongside it, but we decided to have lunch there despite there being many more beautiful places to stop and eat lunch.

It’s worth saying that the scenery all around us is fantastic, we still haven’t really had the weather to show off the true beauty of the landscape but you do get glimpses. The whole route was undulating through valleys and mountains, next to a river, in and out of clouds and heavy rain.

Anyway.. on to the main event! Pancake Rocks. To be honest I wasn’t expecting anything too spectacular from Pancake Rocks but as we got closer to Hokitika the road started to run parallel to the sea and there were lots of places to stop and talk in the views. We saw them before we got to them and whilst we expected to see some rocks that were like a stack of pancakes, what we actually got was quite spectacular. I guess that’s the beauty of setting the bar low.

There was a whole area full of these limestone rocks that have bizarre layers that look like pancakes. They have eroded quite spectacularly but scientists haven’t really figured out why they have taken this pancake form that is unique to these rocks in this area.

With all these stops the journey flew by and we were in Hokitika around 7 hours after setting off. We checked in to our hotel which had a lovely view out to sea. The sea was so rough and the wind was howling which was good to watch out of the window. The sun set somewhere out there but it was too stormy to see it.

We did go for a walk along the beach but got absolutely drenched. I ended up getting a delicious Thai takeaway and Kate got room service salmon and veg delivered to the room before we got an early night ready for our trip to Franz Josef tomorrow. We continue to hope for better weather!

After our kayaking/adventure day yesterday we had an idea of getting a boat further into the park and doing a longer hike. Unfortunately we woke up to awful weather and decided we didn’t want to be boating or hiking in it, so we needed a new plan.

We went for a nice breakfast at a place called Toad Hall. I had some delicious French toast which if I’m honest was more like eating Donuts. Kate had something more sensible and we decided to hit the road and head north.

Today wasn’t supposed to be a driving day as we have a 5+ hour drive tomorrow heading south to Hokitika but it’s kind of what we ended up doing.

We drove up a mountain for a good 30 minutes and the roads were very twisty. Visibility wasn’t great but you can’t help but feel the amazing scenery around you. Every so often it clears out a bit and you can see layers of mountains and dense forest.

After an hour or so we stopped in a small hippy town called Tākaka to grab a coffee, there were lots of people with no shoes or socks on. We had a look round the hippy shops before deciding to move on.

We continued north for pretty much as far as we could until we hit the end of the road. There was a long beautiful beach that was part of a wildlife sanctuary, we had a walk about on the beach for a bit and Kate saw a rare bird. After about 10 minutes the weather was a bit much so we once again returned to the car.

On the way back south Kate found a Māori spring on our route, it has some of the clearest water in all of New Zealand but you’re not allowed to touch it. It was a 15-20 minute walk around the track and there was a viewing platform where you could see the water rising up and look down in to the deep but very clear water. Apparently it’s coming up at a rate of 10 cubic litres per second, although it’s all very tranquil and calm.

After that we headed back home, it wasn’t officially a travel day but we still spent a good 6 hours driving round. It was still fun though! Tomorrow we head south hoping for better weather.

31st Jan 23

Today we had a pre-booked adventure, in the morning we had a guided Kayak tour around to split apple rock which is a rock split in two and looks a bit like an apple. Then a boat trip a bit further down the coast into Abel Tasman national park.

The forecast was looking pretty bleak last night, but it was slightly overcast and the water was nice and flat with zero wind, basically the perfect conditions for kayaking. Our trip had six people and left from the town where we’ve been staying, Kaiteriteri (which is Maori for food-quick-quick because it had abundant supplies of food and the waters were plentiful) and went out to split apple rock. Our tour guide was a young American outdoorsman called Ian and he was very knowledgable about the birds, trees and marine life.

Split Apple Rock was pretty impressive but it was more interesting to learn about the national park. There are quite a few houses nestled in to the national park which is quite uncommon, but they were there before the area was officially designated, so they get to remain. They all have such perfect views out over the bays and across to the Marlborough coast. Because there aren’t any roads in the National Park, the construction equipment/materials had to be brought in by barge.

Our knowledgable tour guide Ian found a sun star sitting on a rock (which is a type of starfish) and let us have a look at it. We also saw lots of cormorants on the rocks and diving in the water. We paddled back along the water and made friends with a couple of Americans in our group. We had an hour to chill and eat lunch before the boat picked us up to take us down to Anchorage.

Anchorage is a bay in the national park, the only way to get to it is to hike in to it on the coast path or via boat. There was a 5k hike we wanted to do that went around the headland. We walked fairly quickly because we had to be back for the boat to pick us up. The track was fairly busy as it’s a popular tourist route, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. It had nice views over the bays.

We had about thirty minutes to hang out on the beach before the boat picked us up, so we went for a paddle and bumped into our American friends again. We got the boat back with them and had a beer.

Forgive me for I have fallen behind on the blog. But fear not, we’ll be up to date before you can say “Taumata whakatangi hangakoauau o tamatea turi pukakapiki maunga horo nuku pokai whenua kitanatahu”. Which is the longest place name in New Zealand and it’s based in Hawkes Bay.

We left Hawkes Bay & the North Island behind today. We had an early start to drop the hire car back before our flight.

Once we arrived, we pretty much headed straight for the nearest town on our route to get some lunch, unfortunately we didn’t realise that it’s a bank holiday in NZ today, so most places were closed, we did manage to find a bakery for a mediocre sandwich though.

We were slightly too early to check in to our accommodation, so we headed up to a nearby vista and walked down to the beach. We could some mountains across the bay but we could tell a light haze was keeping the real views away from us.

We checked in to our accommodation which is sufficient, however we have been spoiled a bit by the last couple of places. In danger of just slobbing out after a lot of travel/driving, Kate rallied the troop (me) and we decided to go for a walk into Abel Tasman national park. The path was wide, clear and not very steep, so it made for really good easy walking. Before we knew it we’d covered around 3.5km and were at a lovely beach called Coquille Bay.

We sat for a rest and some water and a couple guys pointed out a Stingray swimming really close to us, parallel to the shore. We later found out it was an Eagle Ray. I really wanted to dunk my GoPro in to get a view of it but had my shoes and socks on so just had to admire from the shore.

Kate did some birdwatching, she found a Weka trying to get in to someones bag, as well as some Canada geese and a cormorant of some sort.

After 30 or so minutes on the beach we decided it was time to get back to the car. It was around 7km in total so a nice little tramp! There was a perfectly placed pub at the end of the trail for a well earned lager. On the way back through Kaiteriteri (our local town) we picked up some fish and chips before turning in for the evening!

Sun 29th Jan 23

Huzzah! The sun is out and the bad weather seems to have gone, although it is still very windy. I overheard someone saying we picked up the tail end of a cyclone.

We started the day with a walk along the beach down towards the town centre. We found some strange looking mussel things attached to some flotsam and lots of tiny blue jellyfish washed up on the shore. The sea looked pretty rough in the wind, lots of crashy waves. The beach is black and stoney.

Once we got down to the town we found somewhere for breakfast and headed to an outdoor store to pickup some shorts a bit more suitable for the longer walks we’ve being doing, we had a pootle about looking at the architecture before heading back to take care of some admin ahead of tomorrows flight to the South Island.

Around 12:30 we were picked up for our Grape Escape wine tour! And that’s about all I remember.

Just kidding, it was fairly boozy though. Our tour guide was pretty good, a very knowledgable and opinionated chap, but I guess that comes with the territory. There were a six other people on the tour with us.

We could’ve done with a bit more food to soak up some of the wine. We went to four different wineries. The first one was the nicest, Kate really liked the Sauvignon Blanc. I ended up drinking a bit more red wine because Kate doesn’t like it. But the only food was a bit of cheese and crackers. I tried some blue cheese, it was pretty grim.

I didn’t really take any photos as it was a bit awkward with strangers. However, we got along a bit better by the end of the day!

All that wine drinking with only a few rations of crackers had really made us hungry. We ended up getting some food delivered from the Mexican we went to the night before. It wasn’t as good delivered. The we spent the evening re-packing our suitcases ready for our flights to the South Island tomorrow. Our flight is at 7am so it’s an early start.

Sat 28th Jan 23

Napier is a town famous for its Art Deco architecture and being in Hawkes Bay which is a very popular wine region. It was completely levelled in 1931 by a major earthquake and was rebuilt in the Art Deco style.

Today we were travelling from Taupō to Napier. Yesterday the weather was a bit rainy but not terrible. Today the weather has been terrible. As in, you don’t want to leave the house terrible. They had to close Auckland airport last night because it flooded and they declared a state of emergency as some bridges/houses were washed away and neighbourhoods flooded. They are the worst floods that Auckland has ever seen. We feel very lucky as we didn’t miss that by much.

Despite it being very wet we had to make the two hour journey to Napier. The drive was pretty gruelling and visibility wasn’t great. You could feel how beautiful the drive could’ve been though, it felt like we were driving through the mountains but we just couldn’t see them.

When we arrived, we were a bit too early to check in to our Airbnb so we went for a walk around the town. It’s pretty cool with lots of Art Deco architecture and colourful buildings but the weather made it difficult to enjoy it. So we checked in to our apartment at the earliest opportunity and hung around for a few hours hoping for the weather to relent.

The apartment itself is a a lovely little two-bed, with and open plan living area and kitchen and views out over the sea front. Unfortunately we can barely see the sea but fingers are crossed for better weather tomorrow.

Unfortunately the weather did not relent, if anything it got worse. We felt like we were wasting an afternoon moping about so decided to make a break for it. Well… we were both pretty unprepared and ended up getting completely soaked through walking about half a mile in to town. There was only one thing for it. Find a pub. We had a couple of pints to work up our appetite and then found a nice looking Italian.

After a short walk to the Italian we were greeted by an eight year old who told us they were fully booked. So we found a burrito bar round the corner, grabbed a couple of burritos, took them back to the apartment and that was pretty much our day.

Fingers crossed for better weather tomorrow.

Fri 27th Jan 23

I can’t believe we’re at day 13 already. The weather has finally caught up with us and we’ve had quite a bit of rain. It didn’t stop us though, we donned our rain coats and walking shoes and headed on out.

We started off by heading out for a walk not far from our accommodation. It said it was an hour but we ended up doing it much more quickly than that. It was nice and flat, especially compared to the mountain we climbed yesterday. Again it was mostly bush, but we found a pretty cool Māori carving and nice views out over the lake. The water was really clear.

Because we finished the walk so quickly we had an hour to kill before our boat trip to Huka Falls, so we headed in to town for a coffee. Taupō is a bit of a holiday town for locals so it’s less industrial and built up than Rotorua, basically a bit nicer. It smells better too. (I don’t think I mentioned it in my Rotorua blog post, but the place often smells like rotten eggs because of the smell of sulphur coming out of the earth.)

After we’d had our tea/coffee and looked around a few shops we headed up to the Huka Falls river cruise which is a nice slow boat that trundles up the river to Huka Falls. It’s the most visited tourist attraction in New Zealand. For some reason the captain kept his retirement fund on the ceiling.

The cruise was nice, very relaxing and undercover. The falls were impressive, it’s not a big waterfall in terms of the drop, but more in terms of the volume of water that comes over it. Our cruise captain said it’s enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every six seconds. I wouldn’t want to get caught up in it.

I made the mistake of mentioning to the cruise captain that we were on our Honeymoon, so he put on a bit of a show and let (made) Kate do a Kate Winslet on the front of his boat. It was funny but she was terrified and quite embarrassed.

One of Kate’s work colleagues told us about this really cool restaurant in a plane, it was her no.1 recommendation of things to do in New Zealand. We’re not sure how old she was when she visited here, but it was kind of fun eating a McDonalds in a plane except for the over-excited children and it being generally quite dirty. It’s rated as the worlds coolest McDonalds. Side note: McDonalds is about 1/3 more expensive in NZ compared to the UK and you don’t get any napkins in the bag. Also, we’ve done quite a lot of eating on planes really so perhaps the novelty was a bit lost on us.

Later on we went to a place that had been recommended by multiple people around Taupō, The Wairakei Terraces and Thermal Health spa. It’s water that is fed in to manmade pools from a natural Geyser, they claim lots of health benefits from the natural minerals and the Māori have used them for hundreds of years to help treat illnesses, aches/pains etc… There are a few different pools and as you get closer to the Geyser they get hotter. We had a nice relax in there for about an hour before heading back for dinner at our accommodation.

All in all, a pretty good day considering the weather.

Thurs 26th Jan 23

Today was a bit of a travel day with a one hour trip from Rotorua to our next location, Taupō.

I got up early and went for a walk around 7am hoping to fly my drone over the lake. I was a bit put off as there was an airport nearby and a couple of seaplanes on the lake and thought better of it. It was however a really lovely morning and I managed to get a nice coffee on the way back to the hotel.

Taupō is another lake town surrounded by beautiful mountains. Under the lake lies a supervolcano of which there are only known to be twelve on earth. It hasn’t erupted for 1800 years but when it did, it was the biggest eruption in known history. Last year the volcano alert level was raised from zero to one. Scary!

Once we arrived we headed to the tourist information centre to get a bit more info on what to do. The (extremely helpful) lady said we should get our walks in today as the weather was going to turn tomorrow. She suggested we climb Mount Tauhara which is a 2.5km trail with an elevation of 1088m. Just 3m higher than Snowdon. So after making some ham and cheese sandwiches in the car we headed to the trailhead which was about 15 minutes out of town.

After a walk across a field it started to go up, then it kept on going up. We thought there might be some flat bits, but we were wrong. As soon as we hit the tree line we were pretty much in thick bush on a steep narrow track that just went straight up.

The bush gave us good cover from the sun which was beating down but it was still warm work. Every so often we’d come to a small clearing and we could see how high we’d climbed. Our hearts were beating fast, but with a few water stops along the way the bush started to thin out.

After about 90 minutes of climbing, it opened out and we had reached the top! I had a sit down before taking in the views over both sides of the mountains. One side was Lake Taupō and the other was forest and a rural landscape as far as I could see. We hung around up there for a bit and tried to venture to a big rock we could see people sitting on, but it was a maze of narrow pathways through thick bushes that went really close to the edge of the mountain. We decided to play it safe and headed back to the top before making our descent.

The descent sounds like the easy part, but with such a steep trail it can be pretty hard on the knees, especially when there are lots of step-ups, tree routes and mini gorges to get through. Anyway, I’m probably over-dramatising this a bit now. It was pretty hard though!

Following our MOUNTAIN CLIMB we headed back in to town to find our accommodation. It’s in a nice sleepy neighbourhood called Acacia Bay a little away from the hustle and bustle of Taupō. The house we’re in is incredible, it’s a huge house with views over the lake, we’re staying in the lower apartment, so we don’t have views over the lake, but we do have the whole downstairs and garden including a full size snooker table. There are a couple of small dogs that made us miss Poppy.

After settling in and having a rest after our MOUNTAIN CLIMB, we popped down to a local restaurant, drank some beer and ate some junk food before popping down to visit the lake. We ate an ice cream and Kate did some bird watching before turning in for the evening for a well earned rest.

Weds 25th Jan

Our first impressions of Rotorua weren’t that great when we arrived yesterday, but today has been much better!

We had a bit of a slow start to the day and decided to head to a Redwood forest around a ten minute drive away. They planted small Redwoods from California in around 1901 and now it’s a huge forest with trees up to 75m tall. We worked out they grow around 0.6m per year.

We had a look and there were lots of trails from 2km up to 30km long, we settled on one that was just under 5km and would take around 90 minutes. It started off really nice and flat but gradually got harder. There was a viewpoint looking over Rotorua but it was more about the walk than the viewpoints. It took us just over an hour.

We’d been to the supermarket on the way and picked up a few bits for a picnic, so we ate those in the car before heading to activity 2 of 3, which was Te Puia Geyser.

Te Puia Geyser is the largest Geyser in the southern hemisphere but it’s located in the Maori Arts & Crafts Institute, we went ahead and brought some tickets but initially thought it was really expensive to look at some hot water.

We went along with it anyway and it really took us by surprise, it was a guided tour of a lot of the arts and crafts around Maori culture such as weaving, masonry and woodwork along with an education of Maori history and culture. The tour guide was excellent, 30% of all Rotorua residents are Maori, so there’s a strong heritage here. The centre doubles as a university where people can get scholarships to study Maori arts and crafts and students were crafting items whilst we watched.

After that we did get to go and see the Geyser, but in many ways the education we’d already received was more interesting than the hot, bubbling water.

Activity 3 of 3 was the Rotorua gondola and luge which had come highly recommended by my young cousins Charlotte & Felix. So after a five minute pit stop at the hotel we headed on up.

Views over the town and lake Rotorua were great and it really gives you a sense of scale for the size of the lake. The backdrop of the mountains gives you an idea of what’s yet to come as we head further south.

After taking in the views we brought a few luge tickets and headed on down! There are various different runs you can do. You have a little cart you can steer down a steep track, it’s great fun for kids and adults alike. After three runs down we were pretty pooped and ready to get back and have some dinner.

What a day. Rotorua was a great stop. Education, exercise, scenery and fun!

Today is another travel day! Only a two and a half hour drive with a very exciting stop along the way… It involves small people, wizards and a powerful ring!

You guessed correctly… Hobbiton! So after a long and winding drive we arrived at The Hobbiton Movie Set Tour, which was excellent. We were smiling from ear to ear, and that was before we had our pints in The Green Dragon Inn.

The tour was excellent, our tour guide made lots of scripted jokes which were right on the money! We walked all around the set and had our photos taken outside hobbit houses of all different sizes. Fun fact: They made the houses to both 60% and 90% scale so that they could use camera trickery to make the hobbits look small and Gandalf look big!

After our ales and a ploughman’s in the green dragon inn, we were back on the bus and waving goodbye to Bilbo & co…

The good weather couldn’t last forever and we drove through some showers on the way down to Rotorua. But we checked in to our hotel, did some laundry and wandered round a local park with steaming pools of boiling water.

It was mostly an afternoon of settling in and planning our adventures for tomorrow. We went out for some dinner which was pretty rubbish. They only seem to serve fried food down here and we just want some vegetables.

Anyway.. we’ll report back tomorrow.