Tongariro and Wellington

It was time for our last weeks on the North Island and we made some very unique experiences like seeing Mount Doom and skydiving.

After traveling to the East Cape and stopping over in Rotorua again, we came to Taupo and the Tongariro National Park.

Taupo is a lovely town at Lake Taupo, which is the biggest lake in New Zealand. In fact, Lake Taupo’s surface is larger than Singapore. Taupo itself offers quite some streets with smaller and lager shops and nice walks, for example to the Huka Falls and the Spa Thermal Park, which has a nice, natural and free hot spring. We also visited the Botanical Garden of Taupo, but it was just an average park with some native trees. Taupo was also the location for Maeve’s skydive. I am not the type of person to jump out of a plane myself, but it was really interesting watching Maeve and the other people take off and land again. She said it was totally awesome, but over to fast. I am sure it was not her last skydive.

One of the top things to do on the North Island is the Tonagriro Crossing or at least visiting the Tongariro National Park. Maeve took the eight hour walk of the crossing and we both took a smaller walk in the national park. It was just a stunning landscape and quite unusual for the North Island. The vegetation is very different than the green bush and you walk between old volcanoes  (including Mount Doom).

As soon as I entered Wellington, I developed a chrush on it. It is a beautiful city with nice streets for walks in the evening, a lot of art and culture, the awesome Te Papa museum and a very nice waterfront. In addition, Wellington has many little cafés and interesting smaller shops, as well as the very big ones. It was one of my favourite stops so far and I am pretty happy to spend a day again in Wellington on our way back.

Now we already been in New Zealand for over three months and we just arrived on the South Island. I am sure there a still many amazing things to see ahead of us.

(This blog post has taken forever to write due the horrible WiFi in New Zealand.)