The end is nigh!! - Blogabond

Nearing the end of our trip we hopped back on the ferry to return to the North Island (entertained along the way by some Catherine Zeta Jones filems!) Our dropping off point was the lovely, ridiculously windy, city of Wellington. We spent a few days here exploring by venturing up the cable car to wander around the botanic gardens (we have made sure we have seen plenty of these!!), climbing Mount Victoria in totally inappropriate footware and clothesware (where the hell did that hot sun come from?!?), wandering around Te Papa, the National Museum, where we stumbled across a ridonculously huge preserved squid (it seriously looked the size of a bus!) and also made our own squid in the kiddies interactive zone and named him Sid. Funnily enough, then we met up with Gemma's friend Sid who joined us on our travels.

Botanic gardens

Sid the squid that we made at Te Papa museum

We really loved wellington and found lots of cool areas, like Cuba Street, with lots of vintage-y, second hand clothes shops and cafes and Thorndon which was a really beautiful suburb (but we found it impossible to find the NZ author's house that we had actually gone there to see and ended up walking up and down a dual carriageway!)

A naughty young un jumping off the bridge

When the sun came out, we made a bee-line for the Mac's Brewery bar and sat in the sunshine with cider and Coop's new favourite of sparkling wine. We sat and watched in amazement as some mentalist school children climbed up some metal structure in the harbour and took it in turns to jump off into a closed off sea pool (no one thought it necessary to stop them...the health and safety monsters of England would definitely of put a stop to it!!) We also found the most delicious ice cream we've ever had in our entire lives. We can report that on the whole New Zealand does have some delicious gelatarias with millions of flavours!! A group of us wandered around the harbour side market (and a Harvey Norman garage sale....random) where there was lots of scrummy food and free tasters!

Best ice creams EVER

As it was the final night with some of the people we'd been on the bus with, we decided to have a big night out Welling-on stylee! This ended up as a bit of a bar crawl, where we spent too much money as we were trying to live the lives of people who actually have jobs, until we ended up in the backpacker bar for boogeying with the rest of the crowd(despite getting rage at how often the DJ repeated songs!) The night ended up in Hungry Jack's (our new found name for Burger King as this is what the crazy aussie's call it!!)

Cow bum...hahaha

The ever classy Base bar

Our new BFF Gemma

Our last adventure of NZ was the mammouth climb that every backpacker apparently "has to do," however maybe not by choice...as we soon found out. We awoke early and loaded up on porridge and bananas and prepared our extensive list of foods and liquids for the expedition, before being picked up by the minibus to take us to the base camp of Tongariro. It was a 17km walk that crosses over all different types of terrain, from deserts to snow capped peaks to climbing steep mountains. We thought it was bad enough at first as we tried to keep up with Sid and Gems who had previously done the Tongariro Crossing (so were going to climb Mount Doom instead)...we have since realised that they are clearly mountain hikers in disguise and quickly left us behind puffing and panting (and Laura feeling a little pukey after being given an energy sweet by Bets, who told her it would make her feel better! NB. it didn't.) And then we were faced with what seemed like ENDLESS steps. Memories came flooding back of the sweat and pain we experienced when climbing Cerro Chatto in Costa Rica! Arrrrrggghhhh.....

However, once we were up and our heart rates had resumed to a normal pace, we could take in the spectacular views all around us.

Walking across the plain

Beautiful turquoise pools

Mount doom!

We stopped for lunch right on the edge of the red crater, which was literally bright red rock, and got invaded by lots of ladybirds (who knew ladybirds could live at the top of a volcano?!?)

Betty about to jump! The walk had got too hard!

Laura's first attempt of skiing (plenty of bum landings!!)

We then had to make our way down from the peak to the Turqouise pools, which we did in ultimate style as we skidded, skied and pretty much fell down. And we looked on in disgust as not only did kids get down without a problem, but some people were also running down (fell running stylee!) Looking back we're not too sure how we made it down without more cuts and bruises, but there were some hilarious falls! After taking time to observe the pools and the lakes, we were then on a mission to get down the other side, passing through snow and bush and a very stinky portaloo on the way.

See, we've had snow too!

We returned home feeling exhausted but it was "totally worth it!" (gap yaaah!) and to soften the blow we stayed at a really nice lodge (ski resort stylee) with a big log fire and comfy sofas and our friends Gems, Sid and Chris and enjoyed a relaxed movie night, courtesy of Gem's laptop. (If anyone hasn't seen Julie and Julia, it is definitely worth seeing!) The amazing views of Tongariro and Mount Doom will definitely always stay with us as typical memories of New Zealand.

Time for tea!

Arriving back into Auckland felt pretty strange because we had done so much in the last 5 weeks, but it was nice to be back somewhere familiar. We had one last day there stocking up on a few essentials before Oz, we took Lucy and Gems to an awesome German bangers and mash shop for luncheon and treated ourselves to another cinema excursion! (This time...Due Date!) We had a farewell drink with them (yes, there were more teapots involved!) as Lucy was going back to England, but excitingly we would be seeing Gems again in Oz!

We headed to the airport feeling excited about heading to our new home land, but strangely sad to be leaving this one of a kind place. We have had an incredible time here, not only the places that we have been and the activities that we have done (there were LOTS) but the really fun and interesting people that we got to share (and sometimes were forced to share!) our travels with. We already have a list of places that we want to come back to as we definitely didn't have enough time to fit everything in!

The only disappointment.....we didn't see a kiwi. (Obviously we're talking about the bird people!!!)

New Zealand....DONE.

Now for the adventure to really begin and our new life down under!!!

Lots of hot sunny kisses from Oz xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

written by

coopsandbets on February 12, 2011 from Sydney, Australia

from the travel blog: We are off to find the wizard!

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