New Zealand here I come

A little bit confused I made my way to the airport...Again another country was lying ahead of me and eventhough I knew I would meet those two Irish girls it felt strange. My flight was 1,5 hours delayed and seriously-there is nothing much to do at Melbourne Airport. After take-off I tried Qantas inflight entertainment and was even more confused. You can chose of hundreds of movies, CDs, comedies, and other things on demand. I spent the three hours just zapping around cuz I did not know what I wanted to do. But I thought "hey, you've got an 11 hour flight to L.A....enough time to watch several movies, comedies, and listen to several CDs. I was quite exhausted when I arrived at my hostel, the ACB, one of those party hostels. It was already after 21h and so I went down to their bar with my 2-4-1 beer voucher. I just sat down at a table with my two huge glasses filled with delicious tap beer when that girl appeared from the dancefloor. She asked me if I mind to dance and because she seemed to be nice I followed her back to the dancefloor and as it is difficult to dance with two beers in your hand, I gave one to her. We ended up spending all night together doing barhopping. The next morning we met for breakfast. I wore this nice shirt Nina gave me for my birthday present. Emerald, that is her name, and I sat down at Auckland's Marina and enjoyed our coffee and a nice choclate croissant. Not for long though...In front of us were tons of sea-gulls and sparrows waiting for us to feed them. Except for one little sparrow-bas....This small little bird suddenly jumped up, opened his humangous beak, stole my choclate croissant out of my hand, and after that, for a faire punishment, got attacked by the other sparrows and sea-gulls. I frightened so much, that I spilled coffee all over my shirt-Sorry Nina!!!

I had to wait two more days for Eithner and Andrea till we could pick up our campervan. I found out that Auckland is not the most beautiful city but yet learned some stuff about the Kiwi culture when I did the free STRAY-bus city tour. This experience made clear to me, why the STRAY Bus or the Kiwi Experience Bus is called the "vagina liner". Anyway, ouir first journey in our orange spaceship lead us up north to the Bay of Islands. When we arrived we could not quite understand what we were doing there. It was nice but very touristy and also raining. The only thing we really did was finding a place to spend the night so that we could go down south the next morning. And so we did, all the way passed Auckland down to the Waitomo cave where we had our first adventure: Blackwaterrafting. Pretty much what it is, is putting a tube under your butt, hock into the person in front and behind of you and have somebody pull the whole group through dark caves in really cold water. A highland was to jump of a small waterfall. Because it is so dark you can see thousands of glowworms. Amazing and the hot shower and tomato soup afterwards made up for the cold water! After we were done we took-off to Rotorua, a small city where we faced our second challenge: Wildwaterrafting including the highest commercially raftable waterfall-7 meters. The guys leading the group were those smoking weat chilled sort of guys which really did not seem to be trust worthy. But hey, we were in New Zealand-the country with thousands of adventures. We took a raft, brought it to the starting point, went for a pee, learned what to do at what time so we wouldn't fall out of the raft and finally started. The first burden was to jump about 2 meters into that freakin' cold water and swim to the raft. The first rapids were easy. Eventually we came to that high waterfall and after we managed the drop we went down along the river till we arrived after 45 minutes. All save, some wetter than others. At the end we did wave-surfing during which a small English girl had to sit in the front and was covered by that wave for minutes. We had fun, if she did I don't know :) If you do not understand what I mean look at the picture!

After we had dried we continued to Taupo. We were on a tight schedule because neither the Irish nor I had enough time left for New Zealand and we knew that there was a lot to do on the south island. On the way to Taupo we stopped the famous mud pools and hot springs in which we chilled with a couple of beers and those small brown fatal miningitis worms that get into your body via nose and mouth. I told this story to everybody who entered the pool. The idea to share a pool with those annoying little creatures was kind of scary but if you kept your head above the water you were fine and the skin enjoyed a free Spa sulfur treat. The mud pools were nice to watch because the boiling mud shot out of the earth. The smell was not very entertaining-neither was the piece of boiling mud that hit me on my arm...The next stop was Taupo were the girls skydived. I would have loved to do another one after Rainbow Beach in Australia but I was out of money and decided it was fun enough to flirt with that overly beautiful looking girl at the reception of the skydive place. Before their jump we had breakfast at Lake Taupo, a huge lake, and while eating my Fruit Loops I discovered the joy of feeding them to the ducks. Unfortunately they could not chew them but still, I had fun. After the girls had safely arrived back down we drove all the way to the Tangorio Crossing. It is a one day hike along vulcanoes, apparently the best in New Zealand. We spent the night listening to the rain and when we woke up the next morning it was still raining and very cloudy. No way we could do this hike! Very disappointed we took of to Wellington where we crossed over the next morning to Picton on the South Island. The evening before we went to the Te Papa Museum (Kiwi culture and all about New Zealand), the best I've ever been to. Besides its interactivity I could to a virtual bungyjump which was to prepare me for Queenstown where I did the real thing....