I’ve been busy!  The summer (winter… whatever that thing was that’s over now… you know, before I went to school, back when I did lots of laundry) was really lazy, but the past few months have been one thing after another.  We ended up in New Zealand last month, and in a couple of weeks we’ll be heading to Singapore and Vietnam (T’s job is travel-intensive and I tag along when possible).

New Zealand was fun.  It rained the five days we were there, except for the last day, when it only rained sometimes.  But everything was extremely green, which was nice.

Auckland is pretty charming and stuff.  It’s a small city, with painful to no public transportation, but if it wasn’t for those two things I think I would be pretty much smitten.  When the plane landed, we came down out of the fog to see a bunch of cows munching on grass like that up there in the picture.  It’s a very spread out city, much like Sydney, and it has a bunch of weird little grassy hills sticking up everywhere, which are dead volcanoes.  The houses had clapboard siding and looked all 19th century and that sort of made me feel a little bit at home.

That picture up there and this next one are both of the crater at the top of Mount Eden, one of the more famous dead volcanoes.  We walked up it one night after T got off work.  Look at it!  It looks like a unicorn is going to come floating up that hill.  No wonder they shot Lord of the Rings in New Zealand.

They have a really great museum in Auckland, called the Auckland Museum.  If you like museums as much as I do and you find yourself in Auckland, you should check it out.  They have all kinds of stuff: natural history, Pacific islands cultural stuff, New Zealand design, history, and an interesting part about the wars that New Zealand has participated in.  They also have a floor for kids that would be really awesome if you were a kid.  I used the restroom on that floor and it was a train or airplane-style restroom, one stall with a sliding door to outside, and I got sort of worried that we were all going somewhere.

(You think the cars ruin the picture, but they don’t, because they left them there for all the pictures that became postcards.  I think they just really love cars in Auckland.)

On Saturday, we had one day together to do something, because T didn’t have to work anymore and we had paid for an extra night in the hotel so that we could see something together.  We rented a car and drove down to Rotorua, which is a tourist trap town about three hours south of Auckland.  It’s a tourist trap because they are famous for having steam pools and geysers, and bubbling mud spring stuff.  There are lots of things you can pay to do in Rotorua, and I kind of wanted to have a mud massage or go see the buried Maori village (a Maori village got destroyed by a volcano there in the 19th century) but in the end we spent all day walking around the town park, which is free and which has lots and lots of little steam holes and mud pools where water is boiling in the ground.  It was really cool.

Most of the irregularities had fences around them, so you couldn’t fall in and scald yourself, but T’s favorite one did not.  It was boiling so violently that we wondered whether we should tell someone.

There were some that boiled mud.  Those ones smelled like bacon.  Actually, T thought they smelled more like the steam from a hot dog cart, but we both had similar thoughts independently.

Yeah.  Yeah I do think it looks alien.

They also have a couple of lakes of steam, with dead trees along the sides:

And basically there are little clumps of bushes all over the park with steam rising up out of them, so you can just walk around and find the steam clumps and see weird things.  And hope that you don’t fall into a developing one, because apparently they just open up like that.

The town park also had some gorgeous flowers, and tons of giant bees that T kept trying to get a photo of.  The nature we saw in New Zealand was cartoonishly pretty.

New Zealand - fun and pretty.

Filed in Out and about, Travel on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 ·