Coromandel Peninsula - Waiau Kauri Grove and Waiau Falls

We just stopped at these two little roadside attractions on our way from Whitianga through to Coromandel Town on the 306 road. Definitely a pretty narrow winding road but pretty fun overall... And definitely worth it to see these two stops!

Kauri trees are native to New Zealand but due to their size and the greediness of man, most were cut down (after 600+ years of growing to massiveness) to be converted into paper and lumber... :( There's still a few to be found though, and the Kauri Grove here didn't disappoint.

Kauri are big!

And tall!

Way bigger than a Jacqui!

Water flows peacefully through the grove...

An excellent view Jacqui found... nice little pool in the creek!

After that we drove just a short distance further and found Waiau Falls, which was super duper pretty for a small waterfall like this. :) Definitely worth the stop and short 2 minute walk from the car!

Purty!

So are we! :)

Beetroot on burgers is delicious

McDonald's NZ feature burger
- has beetroot and egg (I'm indifferent to the addition of egg). I wish it had avacado too!

Driving in New Zealand

Wee! So as you saw a few days ago, we own a van here... And even before that we had a Camry that we were using to get around to get our errands done... As such, I've noticed a bunch of things while driving, and also being new to the left-hand driving bit, that was an experience in itself.

• Driving on the left is actually better. It's taken some getting used to and I'm still not awesome at thinking of the proper lanes to be in and stuff, but it's totally true that with a right dominant eye, left side driving makes more sense. Thanks a lot, teamsters.
• Driving on super windy (as in winding; a windy path) roads up some of the steepest slopes and with thin lanes and no shoulders is pretty harrowing. Especially when you commonly see signs saying that the road is narrowing or that there's a one lane bridge up ahead (we must've passed over 50 one lane bridges by now)...
• A stretch of mountain road here might have 20-30 switchbacks, kind of like the road to Hana in Maui but even worse as there's no ocean reference on one side... It's just a big winding tunnel!
• It's almost impossible to go the speed limit here. The aforementioned windy roads are almost all 100kmph roads, straight up and full of turns... I get tailgated all the time... Then I see this:

Yep, that's a logging truck. And yep, that's a 2 lane (bidirectional) road. wtf.

Anyways, it's an experience. But if my parents come to visit, I think I'll do everyone a favour and volunteer to drive instead of letting my dad. ;) He knows why.

Coromandel Peninsula - Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach

We are staying in the town of Whitianga ("fit-i-anga"?) for a couple days. It's a small town on the east coast of the Coromandel peninsula. The beaches all along this coast are AMAZING. And the drive was pretty neat too, through lots of dense tropicalish forest.

Jurassic Park?

Today we did a short walk from Hahei to Cathedral Cove - you may recognize this rock arch from the Narnia movies! It was a nice walk which hit some other secluded beaches along the way. It was a beautiful day for going to the beach, which was fortunate since yesterday was rainey. Yay good luck! The only bad part about today: Scott lost his sunglasses in the waves. At least they weren't expensive ones.

Stringray Bay (picture stitched together from multiple shots)

Narnia?

This island is awesome. Look at that little bird, lol.

Yep, we're really here!

More evidence we're in Narnia

Scott lost his sunglasses :(

We also went to the Hot Water Beach, which is one of the coolest things I've ever experienced. During low tide there is a section on the beach that has hot water flowing down from the rocks (under the sand). So if you dig out a pool for yourself it is like sitting in a hot tub! 

Hot Water Beach!

It took us awhile to figure out how to do it properly...when we arrived there were already lots of people soaking in steaming pools. So we started digging a hole, but the water wasn't noticibly warm. We thought we probably just needed to dig deeper to the warm water. But after awhile it was obvious that our pool was not going to be a hot pool. We tried again right next to other hot pools, but once again no amount of digging got us to warm water. Confused,  I wandered over to the middle of a bunch of other pools to test the water temperature and scalded my feet on the burning hot water that was flowing out from the sand. So apparently the hot water IS there, it is just very localized to a few streams. Once we had that figured out it was just a matter of digging a pool in the sweet spot on the edge of the hot water, so the pool was a perfect mix of warm :)

Our first pool attempt

"I think we are doing something wrong"

Front Left: Our ice cold pool full of sea water
Back right: Others enjoying their nice hot pools. WTF?!

Yay we finally have a hot pool!

There was not a lot of real estate on the edge of the hot water stream, but we were lucky enough to arrive as some others were leaving and they let us take their pool. We had a well-deserved soak and chatted with some of our pool neighbours. We also helped some other confused pool-seekers to the right place to dig (since we were now experienced hot water beach gurus). 

View from our hot pool paradise

Enjoying our hot pool

The hot pools require quite a bit of upkeep because the flowing water quickly erodes the sides of the soft sand puddle. But it was a fun activity to dig on the hot or cold side depending on the temperature adjustment that was necessary. Also as the tide continuted to go out the water level in all the upper pools went down, so eventually our pool was pretty shallow. But by then we were ready to leave and passed down our good location to another group.  

Dogwood Green

A couple days ago we went to visit a rental home that is available from Christmas - March. It's located on a small 2 acre farm near the city of Tauranga on the Bay of Plenty. This rental oppurtunity is a bit special because we would be required to look after the farm during our stay. The only animals are sheep and chickens so it's not too difficult - the sheep need to be let into different areas of the field every few weeks and the chickens need feeding nightly (but the neighbours can help out if we want to go away for a few days). These small duties mean that we get a pretty awesome house for a reasonable price. Also as a bonus the owners have an extensive garden that we can eat from. VERY extensive - I can't remember all the things they grow but it's more than we could eat. So basically all we need to buy from the store is beef and ketchup for Scott :)

There's lots of nice areas for Dexter to walk and some streams nearby for swimming. And of course the ocean is only a short drive away for us all to enjoy the beach! I'm really looking forward to staying here!

The owners are really nice and invited us to have dinner with them and stay over in the guest room. I think they are quite pleased that we will be looking after the place for them while they take a holiday on the south island. They had been looking for renters for a long time and had almost given up and canelled their trip. I think commiting for the full 3 months was difficult for other holidayers, but it was perfect for us!

Only took one picture on our visit, but there will certainly be more when we are living here :)

Chickens and rooster that we will soon be looking after!

Ruakaka rental is a go!

The owners were a bit hesitant to let us sign a lease for only 2 months, but now they have agreed! We are limited by 2 months because we need to be at our next rental place by Christmas (more info to come once we find internet for our laptops...I am writing this from my phone and it's not really good for long posts or pictures!)

We are bumming around the Coromandel area until Wednesday when we get to pick up Dexter! Then we will head north to our new home for the next 2 months :)

Yay!

What the Whuck

In NZ the "wh" sound is pronounced "f". So combo that with the kiwi accent and the city Whangarei is actually pronounced "fung-ga-ray". It's pretty confusing... it took us awhile to figure out where people were talking about!

We have more to post as soon as we find internet...be patient :)

Ruakaka

Today we drove to Ruakaka to check out a house that we might rent. It was our first big drive in Binney, and he was great! It was nice to get out of the city...Auckland is a cool city, but it's a pain to have a car there. 

Ruakaka is a little town on Bream Bay about an hour and half north of Auckland. It has an awesome beach, and apparently the surfing there is quite good too. The house we looked at was nice, but we will have to see if we can get a rental length that fits in with our plans (there is another place available starting around Christmas that we are interested in...more on that tomorrow).

We are staying the night in Ruakaka so we spent the afternoon at the beach. First "vacationy" afternoon we've had in NZ so far, so yay! It's spring here so it's not super warm yet, but Scott still went in the ocean.  I spent my beach time finally getting back into Dance with Dragons, I've neglected it for so long! Nice to finally have some relaxing time :)

Here's a few pics from the beach! Forgot to take any others of Ruakaka, oops. If we end up renting the house here then there will be plenty of opportunity for more :)

Ruakaka

Such a pretty beach, and we have it all almost to ourselves!

Scott braved the chilly water

I opted for relaxing on the beach instead

Look at this sand dollar go!

We bought a van!

So the other day when we got to Auckland we went over to the Backpackers Car Market and saw a few vehicles there, though none were too impressive. One of them was painted rather fantastically and led us to some ads on Trademe from Escape Rentals, who were selling a number of vans from their fleet, including this one, Binney!

They are all painted pretty awesomely, but of the ones available, we liked this one the best.

Only 404000km on it! What a steal! We got it inspected down the road in Glen Innes at VTNZ, seemed everything was in order... So now we have even more paperwork to complete getting the registration transferred over to us... Wee!

All Blacks Parade!

This was pretty exciting, though really we got there as an afterthought, so we were way at the back out of the crowds, but still a pretty fun experience. Pretty sure we could make out the captain and coach and also the cup itself we definitely saw!

Our hotel was on this road way down, so it was completely unreachable... lol. We ended up parked there for 24 hours, for $24. :(

Visiting Dexter

We saw Dexter today! It was our first time seeing him in NZ, because he had to go directly into quarantine when he got off the plane (the quarantine people picked him up). We visited his quarentine facility Pet Haven which is 40min south of Auckland. It's a really nice place with friendly staff, so hopefully he isn't having toooo horrible of a time.

Family back together again!

Nice drive on the way out to see Dexter

Dexter's cosy bed

Dexter has an exciting view of cows from his kennel

Dexter was so excited to see us! He couldn't stop giving us kisses and jumping up (bad puppy!) We stayed for about an hour and gave him lots of pats and playtime. He had his toys that were with him on the plane, and miraciously they weren't destroyed yet. We'll see how they last over the week - while we were there the ear came off his bunny toy and he was super excited to see some stuffing coming out. Ripping stuffing out of toys is pretty much Dexter's favourite pasttime, so he is probably hard at work with that right now :)

Hugs!

Kisses!

"I love getting pats!"

Tug o war!

It was sad to leave, and Dexter was sad too :( But hopefully he knows that we will be back to take him home eventually! Maybe we will even have a home by then :) He has to stay in quarantine for 10 days, so we should be able to pick him up mid next week.

Internet in NZ

Internet sucks here. Seriously, I've been all over the world and somehow Auckland has the most ridiculously overpriced crap ever.

Back home no one even knows what a megabyte is.. here the "free wifi" offered by hotels and coffee shops is limited to something like 8-60MB per day. Wtf? What can you do with 8MB of data? Certainly not look for a house and car effectively, which is exactly what we want to do!

Not even going to mention parking downtown here... ok, too late. Parking at the hotel is 50% the cost of the hotel itself! We are parked megablocks away since we had parked there earlier for the parade (more on that later) and already paying $23 for 24 hours there...

Can't wait to find a home... increasingly difficult to find one furnished that is ok with dogs... especially when realtors and owners don't remove the ads after they've found a renter.

It's sad that the cheapest internet we've had is my $50 for 2GB of mobile data on my phone... thank god for it though, at least I can get some emails sent!

Wow, that was a pretty negative post! At least the people are friendly and weather is nice! And Auckland seems pretty nice too! Just rather expensive for a couple who hasn't had a paycheque in over a month!

<3

Netball on TV!

One of the 5 channels on our hotel TV was showing a netball game! Other cool/weird/random things we've experienced in NZ so far:

• FM codes end on even numbers
• Public sreet tdrinking and drunkeness is legal, but most cities have banned this within city limits (so you have to be at home or in bars)
• Every single person, business, car, etc is obsessed with the All Blacks
• Price totals are rounded to the nearest 10 cents if you're paying by cash
• Downtown Auckland has too many all-way crosswalks... takes forever to get through any intersection! Many people seem to jaywalk, but we are not sure of the legality of it.
• Lots of people wearing flip flops (even though it is spring and therefore not super warm yet)
• Truckers are called "truckies" (I can't see truckers in north america going for that)
• Avacado is very popular, and can be added on things at mcdonalds, subway, wendys, etc.
• There really are tons of McDonalds
• So far haven't seen that many sheep (we have only driven between Auckland and Hamilton though), but there are lots of cows

All Blacks win!

What an exciting match!

Jacqui and I had been looking forward to going out to a pub and watching New Zealand's All Blacks dominate another country in the finals since we found out we'd be flying in the same day. Today was that day! After a few hour nap following a tiring plane ride, we hit up a pub down the road from our hotel here in Hamilton, "The Helm"... a pretty great place and apparently some sort of official rugby bar for the area. lol. Beers were cheaper than expected at only $5.50 to $6 a glass (though not a "pint"), and they had some massive $5 pizzas as well. Anyways, Jacqui's probably typing about that beside me already... haha.

[Jacqui] Yes I am!

Used our 2 for 1 coupon on some local beer! Yay for getting here early enough to get a table with a good TV view. 

Delicious pizza with pork, kumara, bacon, apple sauce and mozzarella. Only $5!!! And fries for Scott.

[back to Scott...]

The game was great though! I really have to thank our good friend Rob Johnston again for giving us a great rundown on the rules of Rugby Union before we left town! Definitely helped out massively today. The domination we expected from New Zealand never really materialized and they just barely squeaked out a win at 8-7 against France, but it was totally awesome anyways. Mostly we just felt bad for Piri Weepu since by all accounts he's a great player (and leads the team in the Waka dance before every game), but he was just off his game tonight and missed a few kicks and then gave away the ball which quickly led to France's only try for the game. Sad. The locals here in Hamilton were ridiculously excited about his replacement (Stephen Donald) though, assumingly since he plays for the local team, or has in the past, or something. We aren't 100% sure. In any event, Donald kicked the winning penalty goal and is surely to be a new national hero. Looks like his Wikipedia page has been updated already:

lol...

Anyways, great day, great game, great people so far! Can't wait for more adventure! :D

P.S. It's hilarious how when somebody is injured and needs help from the paramedics the game doesn't always stop... usually the action is still going on as players try not to run over the medics, haha.

First day in New Zealand

After a somewhat uneventful flight we have arrived in New Zealand! Dexter is here too...we haven't seen him yet, but we called the quarantine company and he had a good flight, yay! We get to see him on tuesday (apparently tomorrow is a holiday).

The best part of the flight was the All Blacks themed safety video - I actually paid attention for once!!

Our flight landed at 5:30am, so not much was open. We expected customs and stuff to take way longer, but it was pretty quick and we didn't have any problems (what a nice surprise!). So we had a small snack at the airport. Scott was pleased to discover that salt and vinegar chips exist in New Zealand too! Richard - the $2 you gave us bought one small portion of this snack :) 

Our first "meal" in NZ! 

We picked up our stylin rental car, and experienced the excitement of driving on the left side of the road. Scott did a great job, we didn't even have any accidents!

Our new (rented) wheels.

 Driving on the left, eep!

Using about three sub-standard maps we made our way to a nearby mall, which of course was also not open yet. Luckily the grocery store was, so we picked up a few items and wandered around exclaiming at anything that was different than in Canada. Turns out Coke and Pepsi cost more in NZ (somewhat expected), but Pepsi is substantially cheaper than Coke. Not everything is more expensive than back home though, so that is nice! And tax is included in the prices....bonus! (Also tipping is not expected in resturants or bars, yay no hidden expenses!)

The mall opened at 10am, including the bank and phone stores. We activated our bank account at the National Bank of New Zealand, but unfortunately we have to pick up our debit cards in Auckland later this week. Oh well, our TD Visa is working for us fine pretty much everywhere. We got SIM cards from Telecom NZ and signed out for prepaid plans (was slightly the best option, but we are able to change later if we want). We have a decent number of minutes and texts and data...I decided that 500MB was enough data but Scott of course went for 2GB :) Not too expensive either! Hooray, we are connected to the world again. 

Due to the Rugby World Cup we hadn't been able to reserve a hotel in Auckland for a reasonable cost, so we booked one in Hamilton, which is about an hour south of Auckland. The drive was pretty easy, though we were starting to get tired by this point. 

We checked into Chloe's Motor Inn, which is lovely...this is what you get when you check in:

A room key, a coupon for the nearby pub and and a container of milk.

  

We were totally beat, so a nap was definitely in order. I feel a bit better now....excited to watch the Rugby Final tonight! Go All Blacks!

What a great first day! And it's sunny now!

Last post from Canada!

We are sitting at the Vancouver airport about to board our plane to Auckland! It's nice to finally be relaxing...it's been a hectic few days :)

Today we arrived at the airport at 9:30am to get Dexter ready for his big plane ride. There were some complications with the paperwork and Scott had to run around calling our pet shipping agent and the lab in the US. Finally we got the right documentation faxed over, and the government vet was satisfied enough to sign off on his departure. It was a stressful couple of hours though! Meanwhile we were trying to give Dexter as many walks as possible so that he would be nice and tired for the plane ride. Of course it was pouring rain. On the plus side, there was a nice cafe across the street from the pet shipping company where we spent many hours, haha.

We dropped off our boxes for shipping today too. We discovered that that it was not tooo expensive to ship things by sea, so we packed up our skis and Scott's snowboard, a bunch of shoes, and some other heavy items to ship them to Auckland. They should arrive in about a month....fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong.

Had some food with our moms and then had to say goodbye :( Thanks for coming to see us off!!!!

When we finally made it through security we were at least super early for our flight. But just as we sit down I'm paged to the Air New Zealand desk outside security. Of course I'm imagining the worst, like there's something wrong with my luggage or something. At least all Dexter's shipping is under Scott's name, so we are pretty sure it's not involving that. But to get to the desk there I would have to exit through customs, so we tried to find somebody who could call the gate to find out what it's all about. For some reason this is impossible...nobody has any way to contact the desk. Scott even tried calling Air New Zealand and the lady there was helping us, but then the connection cut out. Finally the people at our gate show up and we talk to them, and turns out they just need to see our work visa. So much worry and running around for something small!

So NOW we are finally relaxing...I'm actually looking forward to the 14h flight where I can just watch movies and nap :)

Our waiter at the Keg last night made us a special dessert. Kiwis, hahah!

All done packing

After only 16 hours of packing our house is all boxed up and clean, and our bags are packed. I am soooo tired. Enjoy the house Andrea and Greg!

Here's what we fit into only 3 large bags and some carryons, believe it or not!

We are driving to Vancouver tomorrow with Dexter and my mom! It will be nice to spend some time with her before we leave, and I know Dexter will enjoy that too :)

So long and thanks for all the fish

Thanks to everyone who came out to our going away party last night! It was a blast!!!! We will miss everyone while we are away...hopefully we will see some of you when you come to visit!