We took an early bus from a dreadful company that is indirectly responsible for severely damaging one of my cameras, after leaving at 07:30, we arrived just after 09:00 to connect to a Wilsons boat that took deep inside Abel Tasman to our kayaking point (it's a 5 day backpacking trip from end to end):

cool rock

about 1h later, we arrived to our beach

We got to see seals and sea lions

Baby!

so cute :)

oyster catcher

a mixed couple, I'm told it's rare

low tide, this all get covered

beautiful insect, we called it 'clack clack' for the noise it makes

stingray

Thanks to a very nice british couple that was part of our group, we were able to stay 2H longer, enjoy extra beach hiking time, and get back to Nelson 2h later thanks to them giving us a ride (the bus leaves early for no good reason). Abel Tasman was beautiful, we really loved it

Because we had seen Wellington some years back, we went to Napier airport to drop our rental car and flew directly to Nelson, the gateway to Abel Tasman, a very nice national park and the first part of New Zealand discovered by westerners, in this case a Dutchman who got in trouble with the Maori, left, and never came back, leaving the true discovery of New Zealand by Captain Cook.

We had to change planes in Wellington, which was a fun airport to visit with its Lord of the Rings theme:

Once we arrived in Nelson, our awesome motel had bikes they were able to lend us, so we biked downtown to a small museum which quite frankly was skipable, but we figured we'd give it a shot anyway :) and we went to check out their small cathedral:

We checked out a couple of wine shops for Jennifer, went around Queens park and walked up to the middle of new zealand for a bit of a view:

some birds with webbed feet have learned to stay on trees

Because there were too many things for us to see in Rotorua for the time we had, our first drive in Taupo was really just driving through to get to Tongariro NP. On our day back, we actually first spent the morning flying around Tongariro before heading back up.

I was told to stop at the National Trout Center (a trout hatchery), so we did just that.

plenty of trout, kids can even fish there :)

Next, I wanted to catch the damn opening by Hukka falls, but despite my best driving efforts and beating the google maps time estimate by a fair bit, we still got there 2mn too late to miss the damn opening (they open the damn 15mn after 2 hours to release extra water). That was vexing. I'll pretend that we saw it by playing the pictures in reverse :) 232*

Next door was Rapid Jets where we got a nice jet boat ride except for the fact that Jennifer was talked out of wearing her sunglasses and couldn't see anything as a result while later we were doing 70kph flying on the water (impressive) but in pelleting rain which was somewhat painful when the water hit your face. The experience was much lesser than it should have been, shame...

the driver was incredibly skilled

And this was it for lake Taupo area, we then had to drive to Napier by the coast for our next area (which will be the next post)

After arriving from Lake Taupo, we still had a few hours in the day, so we went to check out a local winery for Jennifer before doing a quick tour of Napier for its art deco style (it was destroyed by an earthquake almost 100 years ago, so they used the opportunity to rebuild it differently). It was nothing to write home about, but still fun to see:

On to the art deco:

The next morning, we took a tour to see Gannets, birds related to boobies we had seen in Galapgos:

native NZ ducks

here they are, they like company :)

they have no fear of humans, you can be 1m from you and they'll ignore you

the babies were already somewhat grown

couple preening one another

and making a little dance

It was late in the mating season, but the males find sea weed to offer to females so that they can pair for life:

who wants my nice seaweed?

this poor bird is late for finding a mate

offering a feather seems like a nice gift too ;)

After the birds, we quickly stopped a small petting zoo on the way:

5 legs

I'm a little piggy and here's my snout. Oink oink oink :)

The rest of the day was spent in wineries:

and by 17:30, it was all over, everything was closed, so we had to go home and find dinner

Per recommendation from Arturo and others, we went to the national park to do a nice 6H hike across a volcano.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize when I was offered a guide to get across that it was utterly useless and because I don't really like being in a middle of a pack with other people, I paid ever more to get a private guide who eneded up waiting for another private group we got effectively stuck with, and sometimes he was just with them chatting as Jennifer and I just pressed forward without him.
Putting aside the waste of money, it was a very nice hike, and while we got rained on for the last 3rd with virtually no visibility, it fortunately happened at the end when the views were that that important anyway, so it wasn't a huge deal.

down down and down, but it was easy, I could just jump down and land in soft dirt, almost like sand

then the weather turned to shit :)

this birdie actually came to me to check me out and kept flying around me

almost at the bottom

and done! :)

Here is the track: 19.6km, 1000m altitude gain, 7h with more than 1h of breaks and waiting for the other slower group.

The next morning, we went for a quick flight to see it from the sky, but weather wasn't good, so we only so a little bit:

the chateau where we stayed

nice grass strip

So Rotoruta is actually tourist destination and as a result has a lot of things to amuze tourists that have nothing to do with the region. Usually we'd skip them, but this time we made an execption because they were just so much fun, and not something we were able to do elsewhere.

We started with rainbow springs to go see Kiwis as part of a backstage tour where you see how they take care of the babies that hatch in their nursery (kiwi birds do a very poor job raising their young and only 5% survive to adulthood in the wild. Actually kiwi birds are just not meant to survive unless they are alone, they don't fly, don't run fast, and can be easily eaten by any of many mammals that were introduced to New Zealand):

while they don't care for humans, they are cute :)

baby kiwi being weighed

kiwi in its enclosure

The park had a few other animals and birds:

kea, their local parrot

the tallest land bird, now extinct (Moa)

their local pigeon, it's quite fat :)

Next, we went to the Gondola for a view of the lake higher up, and 6 consecutive rides of luge, which was a lot of fun. You can go quite fast with them, catch serious air, and if you're too fast in turn they'll tilt and slow you down without flipping over. They are quite well designed. You then go back up with a ski lift chair and go again :)
Needless to say that I went full bore on the expert track quickly being a bit competitive and all :) and let Jennifer get a good head start before trying to catch up with her. I managed most times except when the tortoise beat the hare :)

Next, we went to Ovo to try Zorbing, a New Zealand specialty. You're inside a giant double layer ball which itself has water inside, so the ball is falling down the hill while you are sliding around the ball on the water (if you wonder, you can't be inside too long since you'd run out of breathable air, but for the downhill length, it's not an issue):

This left us just enough time to drop our luggage at our hotel, and go to Mitai, a 3H Maori experience, including slow cooked lamb and chicken in the ground:

We then had a tour of the grounds and saw another Maori performance:

The next morning, we quickly went around Rotorua to see some of its geothermal activity and went to see a Maori Village built on heat vents for free cooking and hot water (in hindsight, Rotorua was totally skipable compared to what we were going to see later):

nice hot bath

hot water is channeled

cooking corn

Mud pools are fun to watch:

Next, we went to Waimangu, towards Taupo Lake and did the walk down to see geothermal activity down the road

The next location, Waiotapu, also had a mud pool next to it and a long walk showing you all the features there:

When we were done, we drove through Taupo to get to our Chateau Hotel for the Tongariro crossing the next day:

Huka Falls

Taupo lake

Tongariro NP

Chateau Tongariro Hotel

After diving diving in Tutukaka, we took a bus back to Auckland, picked up a rental car, and drove towards Hahei. We lost 1.5h due to having to swap rental cars (the one we got in Auckland didn't have a trunk that could fit our luggage), and then we got stuck by an accident on the freeway out. Nonetheless we made it to hot water beach a bit late, but still in time to appreciate the hot water coming out of the sand which you could use to make your own hot pools given the right mix with cold water (the hot water on its own is scalding).

Next, we hiked to cathedral cove, a nice beach and cove that is usually filled with people but because we went there late (20:00), it was quite nice and quiet. The relative low tide also allowed us to cross the cove without getting our shoes wet (the next day, you had to swim across):

oyster catcher birds

there was also a waterfall, nice...

we then hiked back to our car and got to our B&B

The next morning, we enjoyed a nice breakfast before going to the beach for our kayak tour:

interesting rock formation

cathedral cove see from the sea

this is where we crossed on foot the previous evening :)

looks like running around that corner to avoid the water wasn't going to work this time :)

After the kayak ride which was fun and scenic, there didn't seem to be much to do besides staying on the beach which isn't much what we enjoy doing :) so my hiking book recommended the Karangahake Gorge and its Windows Walk. It's a very scenic place which mostly made up for the unfortunate 3H it took to drive all the way there and back (with a detour via Waihi). In hindsight, we should have stayed in Waihi the 2nd night or actually gone all the way to Rotorua to be onsite for the next day.

Anyway, Karangahake Gorge was very pretty, unfortunately windows walk was closed in the tunnel, preventing us from doing the full loop and wasting some of our time while we figured out where we could go and where exactly the track was closed (inside a mining tunnel turns out, so when your loop is almost over, you have to turn back and do it all again in reverse).

From there, it was too late to go to Waihi Beach before Orokawa Beach Track, so we went to the later directly. WE just happened to be driving by another mining town along the way, and they had an open mine you could look at:

For Orokawa Beach, you had to park somewhere obscure and hike 30-45mn to the beach:

fresh waterfall

I went for a swim, but it was kind of dicey with all the rocks

having a fresh shower afterwards was nice :)

I did apply sunscreen almost everywhere :)

From there, we had to drive back to Hahei which was a bit tedious. The mountain roads at night would have taken almost 2h for the average driver. Google gave me an optimistic 1h25 (it uses the speed limit without knowing that you can't typically drive 100kph on curvy mountain roads). Thankfully mountain roads are my bread and butter, so I did it in 1h15 :) .

We took an early bus from Auckland to Paiha, the place where all tourists to Northland get dumped :) As my guide book says, the town itself isn't much of a destination, but it's a convenient base to explore locations around from. When we arrived around noon, we were met by the owners of our B&B, Decks of Paiha, who nicely came to pick us up and drove us up the hill to their place. From there, we went for our boat tour of the neighbouring islands. As part of the trip, we got dropped off an island where we hiked a bit for views:

the bus ride was pretty comfortable

the locally famous hole in the rock

we got lucky to see some wild dolphins on the way back

To be honest, the boat trip is probably what people do there, but not what we enjoyed the most. At the end of the trip, the boat dropped us off at Russell across from Paiha, and we hiked to the flagstaff and the beach by Takeka Point. Ironically that was actually free and fun ;)

passion fruit, but not quite ripe yet

After our hike at the beach, we got back to the ocean front for dinner and took the ferry back to Paiha to our BnB:

The next morning, we had great trip with Salt Air. They flew us to the north tip of the island. I put the flight on my flight blog. Thanks to that flight, we got to the north of northland to see its tip in a van driven expertly by our pilot:

checking out tide pools :)

The last but most fun part of that excursion was going to sand dunes and doing dune boarding:

Jennifer struggled a bit with directional control :)

After another great flight back, we went to Waitangi Treaty Grounds and learned about how the british went to New Zealand and actually treated the Maori with more respect than they have of any other country they tried to invade. From what I can tell, it's actually because the Maori were bad ass: all the tribes were unified against the british if needed, and they were scary warriors. The british likely feared them which is understandable considering how they look when they do their dances. All this to say, I have much respect for the Maori and I'm happy that it's probably the only native people to a land who stayed ahead and didn't get crushed like most others (Australian Aborigines, US Indians, and so forth).
(but rest assured the british of course still did their best to screw the Maori later, but only managed to do it so much)

huge boat

where the treaty was signed with the Maori

The Maori gave us a very nice show:

The treaty grounds are also quite nice to visit:

The 3rd day, we had a nice breakfast at our B&B before heading out with a rental car. We then went to Kawiti Glow Worm caves:

you can see the glow worms if you look carefully

Next, we went to the parrot place, which was quite fun:

yeah, scratch me right here :)

friends :)

very small baby quail

On the way out, we went to see the oldest house in New Zealand, the brick house and rainbow falls:

We finished with a couple of wineries for Jennifer:

From there, we returned our rental car, took a bus to Whangarei and a minivan to Tutukaka where we slept before going to our diving boat the next morning

Our first day was a bit tough since we landed around 05:30, and went directly to the hotel to drop our luggage and start exploring. Thankfully our flight in business was quite pleasant and the lie down flat beds were very good:

the entertainment system was top notch

The flight was almost over too soon, I'd have happily slept there a bit longer :)

Welcome back to NZ!

After arriving at our hotel around 07:00, we did a portion of the coast to coast walk although we only got as far as the War Museum (which is actually a lot more than just a war museum). We stopped by the botanical garden on the way:

happy bee :)

heavily loaded bee

Finally got to the auckland museum

The museum had one display showing you a simulation of what willl happen when the next volcano errupts around Oakland (and that's just a matter of time, we just don't know when):

Oakland is full of volcanoes

The war museum part is the 3rd floor, which actually was the least interesting to us, but we still went through it quickly:

We then went to the art museum before heading back after a quick dinner (actually I went back out to see a couple of movies at the planetarium that were only showing that evening), and then it was time for well deserved rest :)

The next morning, we took a ferry to Rangitoto, the youngest volcano around Auckland:

Rangitoto

we took the easy way up :)

you can still see that the island is volcanic

that's the volcano crater, but you can't really tell with all the trees

After getting back to Auckland, we went to MOTAT, the museum of transportation:

After MOTAT, we went to Auckland Sky Tower:

you can walk around the top, tethered

war museum

That was it for day #2, we were still a bit jetlagged (not just the difference from California, but that we had flown from France 2 days prior), so we were happy to be in bed by 22:00 so that I could get an early start at the conference on monday the next day.
The rest of the week was indeed spent at the conference, but friday night, before leaving, I went to fly a jet auckland to try a 737 simulator again (75mn of flight), and joined Jennifer for dinner at Clooney, probably the best restaurant in Auckland, where we enjoyed a very nice 5 course dinner:

And that was it for our time in Auckland. It's a nice little city that isn't too crowded and we lucked out with the weather