Short and Great visit to New Zealand

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The following statement might cause me problems in countries like Australia...but after having spend 5 days in NZ i have to say its a super awesome country! Definately goes up in the rankings of my 5 top favorite countries (dont ask me which the other 4 are..its too hard of a decision). I cant comment too much after beeing in New Zealand for only 5 days of which I have only trully had 3 full days here but the country is beautiful. New Zealand is one of the countries with less persons per sq. kilometer in the world having a total population of 4 million. You dont have to drive that long out of Auckland (the largest city of New Zealand) to start seeing lots of green hills, full of dairy farms. The greeneness of the country remineded me of how beautifully green Holland is. However, NZ had a plus first there were lots of trees and in addittion there were very intrestingly curved hills everywhere. Beautifull coastlines,lakes and rivers were to be found everywhere. Driving to Rotorua (about 3 hours south of Auckland) it seemed like everywhere you looked a landscape picture could be taken. You just had to leave the city to see that all roads had only one lane in each direction. This uncondensated roads were also a great contrast with Holland.

It was trully amazing how calm and beautiful the place was. Not to mention how nice and layed back the people from the country were. Policeman at the airports never are too nice. They tend to always look skeptically at me and ask me 1,000 questions. This is what happened when I landed in NZ. I give the passport in to the police man and he starts to speak spanish with me. As they do in Holland I thought he just wanted to test if I really speak spanish and if im really spanish. Then he sais " is it fine if i carry on in spanish, i just really like the language and need to practice. Actually, you know i lived in Valladolid for who knows how long. And well, i had to stay with a family and they only spoke spanish..blabla.." I was SHOCKED! Of course the real questionaire started afterwards with. Who bought you the ticket?Where are you staying?Why do you go back to Australia?What will you see in NZ? Why do you live in Holland?What do you study? All in all to end up with a big smile and a comment " The story seems good enough, you can pass". Its true it took ages for them to let me pass, but half of the time was in practicing his spanish!!

In New Zealand and in Australia they are extremly carefull about what you can and cant carry into the country. You are not allowed generally to take any food with you, and also not allowed to take wood, medecines made out of herbal stuff etc etc. So believe it or not but I had to declare that I was carrying with my 3 m&m bags. Even after having declared that i had food with me they passed my bag through a scanner (they do that with everybag, in both countries) and then they asked me "we saw you have candy in your bag, what is it?"..... Im so not gona risk taking a good Jamon (typical delicious spanish ham) into Australia...Imagine seeing your Jamon Serrano ending up in the hands of the Police :(

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Unfortunately the weather was horrible almost all the days I was here. Actually when I left NZ the policeman asked me what i had seen. Then he asked if i had liked it and i said "yeah had lots of fun but the weather wasnt that great"..then he said "oh that is a wrong answer! i cant let you pass" then i said "its a great country...had lots of fun" ..to which he replied " good answer.. you can go ahead, have a nice flight"... these people are just really nice! :-) I think im moving here rather than to Oz...!!! ( ...my thoughts of moving to Oz are slowly decomposing due to visa issues...that goes for another blog entry).

As I was saying when I first arrived after a 1 hour delay of the plane I got a taxi to go to the house where I was staying. The taxi got lost and coudnt find the place but after 4 U-turns he finally found it! Got soaking wet just walking from the taxi to the house. I stayed at the house of a friend of my dad. He had 3 sons (8,6,3 years) and 1 girl of 9 months.. They were sooooo cute and nice!! :) I just love kids....

The next morning we went to Rotorua with the 3 boys and the father. Their grandmother lives there so we slept over there. Trust me 3 kids can be so exhausting i did not go to sleep any later than 10:30 on any night and the latest i woke up was 8:00 .... In Rotorua we went to see the Agredome, which is this farm in which they have all type of sheeps and animals and they explain you how farming in New Zealand is done. We went to this show about sheeps and it was great! They got the wierdst kinds of sheep ive seen in my life. Then i got to feed a little sheep..so cute!! Later we went to see other touristy attractions they have. For instance you can go into a huge plastic ball that they roll down a hill...you can bungy jump, you can fly..they put warm air under and you "fly" like a bird for 4 minutes. Quite awesome all the things they had! :) The next day we went to the glowing worm caves of Waitomo.Really impressives. We went to these caves were you can sit on a boat and then the walls are full of worms with glowing tales. So when you sit and look up all you see are blue dots all over the black cave. Trully amazing! Unfortunately there had been a flood the previous week so we couldnt go too far into the cave,but we still got to see quite a large amount. Later we drove back to Auckland. I do want to return to those caves cuz you can actually do rapelling and intresting activities in the caves with tours that last from 3 to 7 hours! Awesome!


The next day I went on a tour to the Bay of Islands. About 3.5 hours drive north from Auckland. Lucky me, it was a very personalized tour. Because its winter and the weather wasnt that great we had a huge bus, but it was only 3 of us in the tour. Me and a 74 year old couple. The couple though were amazing world travellers. The man was a physics and electrical engineer proffessor who was about to retire. Unfortunately after 30minutes of traveling he started to feel quite sick. So he sat and slept in the bus all day long. That left me with his wife. His wife decided she had a need to practice spanish with me. She had learned it all on her own and spend the next hours (tour lasted 12 hours) talking to me about her past life, about history etc etc all in spanish. It was inspireing to see how much knowledge some people had. She was challenging the bus driver/tour guide all the time with questions, hahaha! But at somepoints i just wanted to look at the landscape. After arriving in the bay of islands we both took a catamaran with some more people. Unfortunately the sea was a bit too rough, so we didnt get to see the famous hole on the rock. We traveled from island to island with beautifull views, but it was raining. At some points the ocean was really rough and ill admit i got really scared. Some stupid kids were shouting which for me made matters worse. Later though the best of all happened. The capitan said he had seen some dolphins and was going to try and get closer. I wasnt expecting much, but the dolphins got closer closer closer and closer. Until they were touching the boat!!! they were jumping up and down,there were at least 10 of them! It was amazing! Then another boat came and they were jumping right infront and behind the boat (like one sees in the movies!) it was GREAT! I have always wanted to swim with dolphins and never done it as the only places that I have found you can do that is in Aquariums. And I have been waiting to find the right place to swim with the dolphins. I dont want to waste 200 US$ to go to an aquarium and swim with a dolphin for 2 minutes. However, I have discovered that in the bay of islands you can swim with them in the ocean. Having seen how close they get to the boat i have no doubts that its very easy to swim with them, and im quite determined to come back just to swim with them. Unfortunately my camera did not recharge itself during the night, so I dont have that many fotos of the bay of islands :( After our boat ride we came back to Auckland....that was one long ride. However,the view of Auckland skyline by night was really beautiful.

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This morning i decided to visit Auckland,but it was raining a lot. Therefore, I couldnt go up the sky tower to see the view. I was quite excited about seeing the view because I have been told the view is beautiful...but there is no much point in going up if the weather suxs, is there? I ended up at Dymocks where i went to buy a book of the history of new zeland and came out with two books non of which were related to New Zealand...tsk!So now i have more literature to read..... Due to the coldness and to the bad weather I decided to come to the airport earlier so now i have a long waiting time. Fortunately I got into the lounge so im taking the opportunity to send a few emails and update the blog! I do have the feeling the flight will be delayed as the flight to Brisbane and to Melbourne have both been delayed...fingers crossed! So that is all folks... just one suggestion:

If tommorrow someone knocks on your door and sais you have won a trip wherever you want in the world. I suggest you answer New Zealand... (that is, if you aint Australian. IF you are from Australia then I suggest you go to the other side of the world.... my choice would probably be Italy... just adore that country!).

Do expect more entries on New Zealand...do you know they have 3 official languages? English,Maori and NZ sign language? !!!