Finally! (one month later as usual…)

After enjoying the amazing landscapes of the South island, we continued our road trip on the North island, where we first stop in Wellington, the capital, to meet with some really nice fellow Quebequers that we met earlier in Greece, Vi and Ray. So we travelled during two weeks with them and we had a fantastic time! It was the 8th month of an amazing round the world trip, and they inspired us a lot about other new destinations (which is not good… hihihi!)

We punctuated our trip with some free wine tasting (there was a winery every day on our way, so…), but that didn’t make us forget that we were going to do some skydive for Vi’s birthday… My God… I never though you could suffer from motion sickness in a parachute… Mathieu shown some bravery by jumping first, although they don’t really give you the opportunity to change your mind once the door is opened, hehehe! 45 seconds of free fall, it’s amazing how quick it goes! We all really enjoyed our experience and the view of the lake Taupo was awesome!

We did some black water rafting which is (well, we thought) rushing down an underwater river on an inflatable tube. But because it was weeks since the last time it rained, we were just floating slowly and the guide had to pull us up by the foot to make us going a little faster… ye. Ok, still, we had a great time doing some abseiling in the caves and admiring the glow worms (larvae of which the poo is luminescent… not very appealing saying like that, I know, but it was beautiful!)

And then we told Vi and Ray that we were in good shape (hehehe, I know..) and we followed them on the Tongariro Crossing, the most popular day hike in New Zealand. This is the national park that has been used to create the Mordor in Lord of the ring, and the volcanic landscapes are absolutely breathtaking!

If you ever want to experience the feeling to be in a hamster ball rolling down a hill, try the Zorb, probably one of the funniest thing we did during our trips! Sand boarding on the giant dunes of the cape Reinga in the far North of NZ was very funny too!

We then left for Rotorua, a town situated in an important geological failure. And so there’s a disgusting smell of rotten eggs that floats everywhere but also some amazing natural phenomena like boiling mud and boiling lakes, craters, geysers, etc. Not far from there, we went to the hot pool beach, where you can rent a shovel and dig yourself a spa by the beach, that will filled up automatically with some (very) warm natural underwater. But we were too lazy as usual so we just squatted one already dug.

We had a fantastic time with our new friends in NZ, and we didn’t have any bad thing that happened. Well, actually, we had a punctured tire, but the funny part of that story is that after putting out all our luggage to reach the spare one, the dog of the very nice man that helped us decided to mark his territory on Mat’s suitcase, HAHAHAH!

And so here we are, our beautiful van is sold, our travellers friends left for South America, and us, we just landed in Australia. We already experimented something local : kangaroo’s kebabs for diner! We’ll be in Oz for 4 months if you find the winter too long!!