New Zealand Pt. 1 – The Northern Island

Kia Ora!

If you’re reading this chances are you know my Mom, Susan, and in some capacity you know me her favorite son – Eric. As a reader of this blog, you’ve seen my parents travel all over the world, leaving me to sit and dream about some day going on a trip of my own. During my daydreaming there was always one place that sat at the top of the list of where I wanted to travel – New Zealand. It’s no secret I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan, I love the outdoors, wine, and Flight of the Conchords. When it was time to pick a honeymoon destination my wife Natalie knew that her best shot of getting me out of the country was to book a flight to New Zealand. This flight consumed almost two days of my life, but it was well worth the effort because we got to spend two weeks in the most beautiful place I have ever been.

TL;DR – For those of you with a short attention span or are just here for the pictures. New Zealand is amazing. The whole country is a photo-op and looks like it was photoshopped because it is unbelievably gorgeous. Meat (veggie) pies, wine, and coffee are amazing. People are super nice. We ate a lot of food, drank a lot of wine, saw a lot of LOTR stuff,  and hiked a ton of spots. If you don’t like wine and outdoors stuff, NZ might not be for you. If you do, it’s heaven.

Waiheke Island and Auckland

We arrived in Auckland at 7 AM and made it through customs without much trouble and we are immediately greeted with a massive dwarven statue from the set of Lord of the Rings and I couldn’t have been happier. We grabbed an Uber to our AirBnB and set out to track down some breakfast and explore Auckland. It took us about thirty seconds to find a cafe. Apparently New Zealanders love their coffee just as much as I do because every five feet in every city there was a small cafe with a barista making espressos. We took the sites in and forced ourselves to stay awake because that evening we had a wine tour booked on Waiheke Island.

Waiheke Island is the third largest island in New Zealand and they are known for amazing beaches, gorgeous scenery, and even better vineyards. We took a 30 min ferry from Auckland to Waiheke where we met our tour guide. On the thirty person passenger bus, there were only seven of us including a couple from Centreville, Virgina. Small numbers on tours are great and we learned that it is even better on wine tours. We walked two vineyards enjoying extra pours of wine, taking in the sites and history of the island. The night was capped with a dinner from the highest point on the island at Thomas Bach Vineyard where we bonded with our group over several bottles of wine and delicious food. After touring New Zealand from point to point I think it is safe to say that if I could pick one place to live, it would Waiheke Island.

The next morning was a very important day for me. It was my Christmas, Superbowl, the reason New Zealand was so high on list…. It was the morning we were going to visit Hobbiton. We met our tour guide before sun had risen and he drove us the two and a half hour trip to the movie set spouting off information about New Zealand the entire way. It was during this trip that I realized just how beautiful every inch of this island was. Around every corner of the drive was a scenic overlook all culminating to pulling into the movie studios parking lot. Our guide, who does this drive multiple times  a week with groups managed to get us into the first tour of the day and we began our trip down into Hobbiton. I could write an entire article on this trip alone from all the interesting movie trivia we learned but I will save you guys and simply say that every inch of Hobbiton is manicured to perfection. There wasn’t a blade of grass or flower out of place. The gardens were marvelous and the beer at the Green Dragon Inn at the end of the tour was the best stout I have ever had. This alone was worth the trip halfway around the world and our day was only half over.

We said goodbye to Hobbiton… some of us more reluctantly than others and continued another two hours to tour one of New Zealand’s glowworm caves. These little bioluminescent worms live in cave ceilings and light up to attract insects to long sticky spindles that hang from their little tunnels at the top of the ceiling. Our tour guide for the cave walk was impressed that I had been to Luray Caverns, which is apparently a very well known set of caverns within the cave dwelling community. We trekked down to cave to the river at the bottom of it and got on a boat to drift underneath where the glowworms nest. Once the cavern is dark enough these little glowing blue bugs fill the ceiling light stars in the night sky. It was a unique experience that is a very popular attraction on the island for good reason.

The last day in Auckland was spent pregaming and then attending a rugby match, another thing we felt that needed to be done while in New Zealand. For those of you that are unaware, New Zealanders love rugby and they are the best at it with back to back world cup titles and the favorites to win the cup again this year. Unfortunately the All Blacks, their national team, weren’t playing while we were in country (do yourself a favor and google All Blacks Haka and watch some of the videos if you want an idea how badass these dudes are) so we got tickets to watch the Auckland Blues take on the Dunedin Highlanders. When we got to the stadium we were a bit shocked at how few people were there and we then learned that the blues were considered the worst of the New Zealand professional teams and were currently on a 20+ game losing streak against New Zealand opponents. Needless to say, the good luck charm that I am brought them their first victory against a NZ team since 2016. You’re welcome. I offered to stay and attend all of their games to ensure future victorys providing they buy me a house but the ticket lady said that was a little above her pay grade to approve… as of writing this article they have lost both games vs NZ opponents… should have hired me.

Rotorua and Lake Taupo

We hit the road bright and early the next morning and started on what was one of our most ambitious days of events. We knew to see and do everything we had to keep moving, something that my fathers forced marches on every vacation prepared me for. Thanks Pops.

First stop was Rotorua where we took in a local farmers market and the hot springs surrounding the national park in the town. We then headed down to Lake Rotorua where we got coffee and went on a walk through town where we bought ourselves a pair of New Zealand jade rings. Seemed like the most appropriate gift since the Maori (indigenous people of New Zealand) used this stone in their decorations and tools and it was our honeymoon. Immediately after this we jumped in the car and went to hike the redwood forest outside of Rotorua. We were approaching midday at this point and still had to drive to our AirBnB in Lake Taupo so we jumped in the car and checked into our house for the night. It was still beautiful outside so we went on a hike at Huka Falls, which was some of the bluest water I have ever seen in my life. We were pretty hungry at this point so we drove to Lake Taupo where we walked the water and selected a place to eat dinner.

Tongario Alpine Crossing or better known as Mordor and Mt. Doom

All of the hiking up to this point were warm up hikes for what we knew awaited us on the fifth day of our visit. The Tongario Alpine Crossing is one of the highest rated hikes in New Zealand, which is saying a lot. It is also the film location of Mordor and Mt. Doom from the Lord of the Rings so of course we were going there.  We knew this hike was going to take all day and had planned for it, what we didn’t plan for or even know was that if you wanted to make complete the crossing from start to finish you needed to book a shuttle to do so. Ooops.

After learning this from a park ranger at the end of the trail where we tried to enter we went to where the tour shuttles were located. After learning that they wanted to charge us $60 for tickets, Natalie and I decided to do what we do best and improvise in the name of being cheap. We drove to the start of the trial and I went and found the ranger at this site. The gentleman working the post was beyond cheerful so I approached him and explained our situation. He informed me that if we kept a good pace we could make it to the summit of the trail and back down to our car in about 5-6 hours. I told him we were hoping to do the whole thing and asked his advice. He told us the back end of the trail was just walking downhill and boring in comparison to the rest of the hike so we wouldn’t be missing much. He suggested hiking to the top, taking our pictures and returning to our car and saving the money.  I pointed to the 4 hour parking sign and he waved his hand and told me it was a slow day, leave my car and enjoy the hike. Pictures do not do this hike justice. Mt. Doom (I forget the actual name of the mountain so I will only refer to it as Mt. Doom) is an active volcano and there are several signs telling you what to do if lava starts flowing. Because of this you can only hike to the summit of the adjacent mountain to a spot called the Red Crater, the site of an eruption that blew the top off the mountain. The start of the hike is through streams, fields of black volcanic rocks, and tiny purple and yellow flowers and unfortunately for us long white clouds that made any views of the mountains impossible. New Zealand is called the Land of the Long White Cloud for very good reasons. It wasn’t the easiest of hikes, but the views from the summit were worth it and then some. On the journey home the clouds had broken up so we got to see all the views that the people who were doing the whole trek missed in the morning. So we saved money and got to see all the best views, win-win.

Windy Wellington

Our last day on the North Island was spent in the capital of New Zealand, Wellington. Wellington is known as the windiest city on the planet which luckily we didn’t experience a lot of. The main reason for going to Wellington was to tour the Weta Workshop. Natalie said something about touring the capital city and culture significant… blah blah blah, but the real reason was for the Weta Workshop. The Weta Workshop is where all the armor, swords, costumes, and digital work was done for, yup you guessed it, The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit Trilogy. They’ve worked on something like 50 other movies, but let’s be honest, that’s not why we were there. The workshop was exactly what you want it to be all the way down to the life size troll out front. The tour was awesome and I instantly hit it off with the tour guide. He was one of the props painters at the studio. I asked him where he got his start and he told me he started off by painting miniatures for a science fiction tabletop strategy game called Warhammer 40,000 and Dungeons and Dragons. For anyone who doesn’t know me that well, these are my two favorite things on planet earth.

I was touring the forges where they made the swords for Lord of the Rings while talking about Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons. Need I say more?

After the tour was over we went to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa which is there national museum. We toured all the exhibits with two standing out above the rest. The first one was about New Zealand’s involvement in WWI that featured the most realistic larger than life statues I have ever seen that were made by the Weta Workshop we had just toured. The second was about the history of New Zealand. How the Maori first arrived and settled the land all the way up to present times. It answered a lot of the questions that had been floating in my head since we arrived. After the museum it was time for wine, dinner, and sleep because in the morning we were settling sail to the next leg of our adventure which will be continued on Part II of this post – South Island.