Nau mai, haere ki Aotearoa

What??
I am in New Zealand only since one and a half weeks? Really??
With all the stuff I did so far, it feels like sooooo much longer!

First of all: WOW!! This country is just amazingly beautiful! And I have only been on the Northern island so far. People keep telling me, that the Southern island is much more beautiful. I really don't know how this can be possible, but we shall see :)

My hub here is Auckland, and I am really happy to have found the nice, funny and cool CS-host Sy from Singapore. He drove me around, showed me his favourite places amongst which the really cool café coffee supreme: it is like a big storage room. All their love goes into the preparation of their supreme coffee. Loved it :)

But Auckland iself is not interesting at all, and I only stayed there 2 nights, because of my issues with the Chinese consulate: getting a visa to China in Austria was much easier for me. But because I am not a New Zealand citizen, I had to get a valid flight ticket into China (So now it is official: I am flying into Hong Kong on the 5th of July). On the second day, with this ticket in my hand, they would still annoy me and tell me I had to give them bank statements. Finally the guy at the consulate accepted taking my papers when I agreed to apply only for a single-entry-visa. Well, that's fair enough... Wish me luck that I can pick up my passport with a fresh Chinese visa in it in when I return to Auckland in around 3 weeks.

Oh, short but necessary excurs: reading the Austrian news I found out about a copy of the Austrian town Hallstatt in China?! WTF?! They even have their own little "Feinschmeckertreffpankt" (sic!).
Thats AWESOME!!  And it is really close (in Chinese measures) to Hong Kong, cool, that's DEFINITELY worth a side-trip before heading to Chengdu - haha, amazing!!

But hey, back to New Zealand, right?

In the bus from Auckland to Rotorua, my second destination, I couldn't stop making photos (most of which I deleted afterwards... too blurry, stupid to make photos in the bus), because everything is just so beautiful. I was really lucky with the weather as well, so far it was always brilliantly sunny, no clouds on the deep-blue sky. The whole country is green, hilly and most of the trees are in their purest autumn-colours.

Rotorua

Rotorua is a town near a volcano next to a beautiful blue lake (which is in fact a vulcano-crater).

The whole town is steaming: there are natural hot sources everywhere and the town is not without a reason referred to the egg-smelling town because of the smell of sulphor.

With my CS-hosts, a french couple, we went to put our feet into one of the open hot water sources in the late evening while it was freezing outside. In fact, we shouldn't have done that: a kiwi woman told us, that the park we had just been to, is really dangerous at night. Well, good to know...

I have been in NZ only a short time, but it is not the first time, that people tell me, that their country is dangerous. Man, what's the matter with you?? Why are you guys so negative?? Is it really THAT dangerous in your country?

Some kiwi are really blessed with weird names. This very womans name was - no joke - Gretchen! Yes, GRETCHEN!!! Note Grete or Greta, but Gretchen! I mean, her parents must really have loved Faust to call their kid like this...

Apart from walking around in the town and the waterfront with its many thermal areas with steam everywhere and a long visit to the really interesting Rotorua museum (after the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Warsaw the best historical museum I ever visited), I ended my day with a long stay in one of the spas... How nice!

And here I had the next encounter with a kiwi, who really made me wonder... no, this time its not about the name... One of the guards in the spa, after I answered him where I was from, told me how much he loved Austria, when he had been there last year. He listed up everything he visited, amongst which the statue next to the parliament of the founders of the republic Viktor Adler, Jakob Reumann and Ferdinand Hanusch. Yes! He cited me these three names (and yes, I admit, I had to look the names up right now)...
Feel free to ask me the names of these three blokes in one year; I am quite sure that I won't be able to tell you like this guy in the spa could.

Wai-O-Tapu

I got to see much more of the volcanic activity and its influence on the regionaly geography when visiting the thermal area Wai-O-Tapu the next day: it is called Goethremal Wonderland. Well, I didn't choose the name!

But it is a wonderland indeed: with big mudpools, bubbling all the time. It is simply impressive!

There is also the Lady Fox Geyser, which erupts every day. The natural erupting period would be around every 24-48 hours but by putting a basic powder into the geyser, they make it erupt every day punctually at 10.15am... how nice to make nature obey our time-table ;)

And finally the park with different sceneries: a lot of craters and sulphor holes in the beginning of the walking path...

...different pools of boiling hot water...

...and finally pools of different colours. It is simply amazing!!

The champagne pool is a huge pool with bubbles like in champagne...

...and finally the last pool on the trek, which is so green, it is just unreal. It is even more turquoise-aquamarine-comic-blue in real than on my picture!

And all of these coloured pools appear like that in nature without human influence, so no big colour pot poured inside the pools...

Taupo

My next stop was Taupo, another touristy spot of the Northern island. The town itself is a bit like Rotorua minus the geothermal activity: sweet touristy town next to a lake.

Like it was the case already in Borneo: to get more out of New Zealand kind of adds up, as everything interesting is connected with quite high costs - additional transportation, expensive accomodation near interesting sites, access only via tours in some areas... And New Zealand is a also country of adventure sports. Nearly every bigger town (or should I say bigger village - beside from Auckland all towns are reather smallish) provides adventure stuff: skydiving, jetskiing, white-water-rafting, bungy-jumping.... So you should really think about what you want to do and where.

Which I did: I knew I wanted to do a bungy jump in the country of its origin! So, hell, yes, bungy in New Zealand!! But in Queenstown, the capital for adventure sports and adrenalin junkies, the bungy is so much more expensive, so I decided to jump off a cliff in Taupo...

Yes, I do look really relaxed and as if I was looking forward to this adventure. But at the moment when this photo was taken I was in fact really really nervous! Guash, I don't know how high 134m (the Nevis Bungy in Queenstown) look like, but believe me, the 47m in Taupo looked already high enough...

I had been thinking if I should scream or not, but when falling down, I was not thinking at all and couldn't do but screaming...

It was amazing but scary, really really scary! I ask myself how could anyone could want to die by jumping off a building, it is definitely NOT a nice way to die!
So: bungy - tick, done :)

Tongariro Alpine Crossing

Still on an adreanlin rush, I decided to go straight into Mordor, the dark land on the following day...

Yes, Mount Doom in the Tongariro National Park is the place, where Peter Jackson filmed the Mordor-scenes for his "The Lord of the Ring". As the whole film was filmed in New Zealand I will have the chance to visit some other locations of the film in the upcoming weeks...

I guess the orcs were on a day out, or just didn't like the brilliant sunshine: there were simply none around when I hiked on the famous Tongariro Alpine Crossing. So it was much less of a thrill than my bungy, but much more enduring! It was one complete beautiful day, not only amazing 4 seconds... would maybe have been more of a thrill with some orc-encounters ;)

It is indeed a beautiful 7h hike, with some steep climbs (this one is for you, Rindo: the first steep part is called "Devils stairways") but mainly easily walkable paths past two mountain tops,...

....a big red crater ...

...and emerald lakes (again, unreal colours!).

The good weather didn't follow me though :(

I am sitting here in Wellington in the house of my CS-host Ricky, with a hot cup of tea. It is raining and it is f*&% windy outside, and cold.... brrrrr..... Nothing better I  could do than writing my blog and loading up all the photos to the new gallery covering the Northern island, before getting ready for the big trip to the beautiful South (it's snowing there...)

Oh, and for all who read till here: "Nau mai, haere ki Aotearoa" means "welcome in New Zealand" in Maori language - the first sign welcoming you at the customs in New Zealand.