Final week in NZ

It's my last day in New Zealand as I write this. These three weeks have come and gone so fast!! It's been good fun though, to travel around in this beautiful country :)

So last time I left you on my first night in Christchurch. The good first impression I had of the city lasted for the second day I spent there. After a very much appreciated sleep-in I went to a guided tour around the cathedral late in the morning with Ceara, which was quite good. It's a pretty nice cathedral!! Then Ceara and I parted ways and I made my way to the Art Gallery. That was so good!! It was pretty small, but I spent nearly 3 hours in there :) By the time I got out of the gallery it had started raining again, so I went back to the hostel to settle in for an afternoon/evening of watching movies.

After Christchurch I only had one-night stops left, and the first one was the ocean-side town of Kaikoura. A pretty town, but as there was a storm over the north island that made the seas a bit rough, all the possible activities like whale-watching were cancelled and there was absolutely nothing else to do there in winter. So that was a bit of a shame. Next morning we made our way back up to Picton and back to the north island. Because of the storm the upper deck was closed this time, so no pretty views along the way this time around. Arrived in rainy Wellington in the dark and just chilled at the hostel with my roommates.

From Wellington we drove up to Napier, where it was a surprisingly beautiful sunshiny day enveloped by lots and lots of rainy ones :) My hostel was right on the pebble beach and the waves were huge because of the storm of the previous days. I loved it!! There's something about waves crashing onto shore with such power... So I walked along the beach for quite a while, then walked up to Bluff Point Lookout to look out over the Napier port and went back to the beach again to watch the sun go down. So pretty!! Napier was definitely a good place to be :)

From Napier I only had a short day in the bus back up to Taupo. Unfortunately a second storm came over the north island quite early in the day, which sort of washed away the possibility of doing anything outside of the hostel. So I read my book and watched a lot of movies that day, haha. Nice and relaxing though :) Through bucketloads of rain and small patches of dry weather we made our way up to Mt. Maunganui. We arrived there quite late though, and because it was another one of those beachy places it was more a summer town than anything else. Had a great night at the hostel though with my fellow Magic travellers :)

And then it was my last day on the bus: I went back to Auckland!! We had to make a massive detour because of the storms, so we didn't arrive into rainy Auckland until later in the day. When I got to my hostel, I realised how tired I actually was from all the travelling around and being on the bus pretty much every day for 3 weeks. So I just had a quiet night in :) The next morning I had booked myself onto a free Auckland tour with KiwiExperience. Got picked up around 10.30 from my hostel and first stop was the Auckland Harbour Bridge. We did a Bridge walk, from which we had pretty views over the harbour in the middle. Saw some people do a bungy jump off the bridge as well. We were lucky it was a reasonably sunny day in Auckland and we dodged all the rain showers that day!! So when we got to one of the many volcanoes that Auckland is built on for a bit of a walk around it and its tunnels, it was muddy but dry :) And it was nice!! We had our own daytrip dog along as well, haha, and he loved being walked by so many people... Anyway, obviously from all that walking we all got hungry, so we went to Devonport for a one-hour lunch stop, which was very nice. Then we went up Mt. Victoria for another nice look-out over the city skyline. It was so windy up there, it was crazy!! You could literally lean into the wind :) By late afternoon we were dropped back at our hostels, having had a great little tour of Auckland's surrounding areas :) Good times.

Then today I've just been walking around and exploring the city centre for a while. Auckland itself is not that interesting though it seems. Or maybe I'm just not really in the mood for wandering today :) Tomorrow I'm off to Melbourne again, which I'm quite looking forward to. I've had a great time here in New Zealand and I'm so happy I got to spend three weeks travelling this beautiful country, but like I said, all this being on the bus almost every day with lots of different people is very tiring too. So I'm excited to be going back to Melbourne tomorrow and spend some time there with some special people before I am on my long-distance flights back to Holland in two weeks...

So that's my New Zealand adventure coming to an end!! I look forward to seeing you all soon and hope you're all doing well :) And for those that are on their summer break, hope you're enjoying your holidays!!
Love Carine

PS. Photos will be added once I am back in Melbourne!!