Category New Zealand
One last adventure!
We had to be out of the house in Rotorua by 10:30am (though, because of priorities (kiwis!) and a mix-up in Kevin’s notes, it ended up being closer to 11am) but we didn’t need to be in Auckland for flights and cruise ships until early evening. None of us wanted to waste the extra hours, […]
Kiwis and geysers
My last day in New Zealand dawned and I still had not seen a single living kiwi bird. Stuffed dead ones? Yes, in the museum in Auckland. Living ones? Not a one. Apparently they are “elusive” and “on the verge of extinction”. But so help me, I was not about to get on a plane […]
Redwoods treewalk
Too late in process of deforesting their island for timber and agriculture, the New Zealanders discovered that their native trees took much longer to regrow than the trees they were used to in Europe and the Americas. They needed to figure out a way to replenish their forests and timberlands without having to wait hundreds […]
Kuirao Park
One of the best rules for traveling with friends is that you don’t always have to do everything together. Another good rule for traveling with kids, is that sometimes, after several days of unstructured vacation, they just need to have dinner and go to bed early. By the time we got to Saturday night, it […]
Rotorua canopy tour
New Zealand is a land of nature adventures — we had already glimpsed this during our hike to the waterfall, and Karl’s and my trek through the volcanoes, and on Friday we continued with a ziplining tour of one of the regions virgin forests. Because the little kids were too small for the harnesses, we […]
Maori evening
Friday night, after ziplining, we went out to a nearby Maori cultural center to have dinner and learn more about the Maori traditions. We were led down a small ravine to the banks of a crystal-clear stream that flowed from a nearby freshwater spring. The Maori men rowed up the river in a traditional boat […]
Tongariro Alpine Crossing (or tramping past Mount Doom)
Aside from hanging out with the Hettingers and Kallmeyers, my only agenda item for New Zealand was to go “tramping” (as the locals call hiking) through the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Touted as one of the best day hikes in New Zealand, the 12-mile trail takes you through a nest of volcanic cones — including the […]
Okere Falls hike
What to do on New Year’s Day in Rotorua? Nature walks! We took our time getting up in the morning, enjoying the leisurely pace of holiday life (and in some cases recovering from jet lag). We had no concrete plans, but the weather was sunny and warm, and we saw no reason to stay indoors […]
Playing house in Rotorua
After polishing off our ginger beers at Hobbiton and leaving the bucolic hobbit holes to their New Zealand evening, we all piled into the cars (me into my compact Toyota; everyone else into the giant people-mover) and drove to Rotorua, where we would be staying for the rest of the week. Rotorua is a smallish […]
Hobbits!
New Zealand was the Middle Earth of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, and Hobbiton is one of the Things To See when you’re here. On top of that, it was also my rendez-vous point to meet up with Heather and Taryn, two friends of mine from high school, and their spouses and, in […]
A More Gentlemanlike Manner 