Homepage
Dagboek
Archive for February, 2009
CardRecovery
So I was about to begin the task of recording all of our vacation in New-Zealand in some diary entries. The idea was to “quickly” do that in the weekend, before I would have to go back to work on Monday. Well, OK… I realized that this was not a realistic estimate, but people who [...]
Bye bye New Zealand
When we traveled to New Zealand, we had been going against the direction of the rotation of the Earth. This made us lose one day of our calendar in a mysterious way. This time however, we were going in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation and we gained an extra day! Thursday, January 15th [...]
Back to Auckland
Well, sometimes you have to face the truth: Even the longest vacation does have to end one day. Today was the day we had to go back to the airport, to catch our plane to the Netherlands. We ended the same way we started: On the bed together. But this time we did not have [...]
Hamilton Gardens
A very important sight to see in Hamilton are the Hamilton Gardens. These are not one garden, but a great collection of gardens together. The story of gardens is explored through five collections of gardens.: Paradise Garden CollectionGardens representing some of the most significant garden design traditions, tracing the history of ornamental garden design. Productive [...]
Lake Rotoroa
Hamilton has a lake too! It is called Lake Rotoroa and its area is “only” 54 hectares (I mean: 100 soccer fields ), which is a lot smaller than Lake Taupo (approx. 2000 hectares) of course, but one advantage of that is you can walk all the way around it. (Of course you guys have [...]
Hobbiton
We were very happy in Tauranga, so I asked the hotel manager whether we could stay for a few more nights, but unfortunately the hotel completely booked for the coming nights; our only option was to leave. But where would we go? We had seen all the highlights of the North Island that were on [...]
Mauao (Mount Maunganui)
Today we decided to take a walk around the foot of Mount Maunganui. Mount Maunganui is also the name of Tauranga’s sea-side place. If Tauranga is not fashionable enough to your taste, Mount Manganui is the place to go. Look for instance at the vehicles you see there, like this 1957 Chevrolet… but we had [...]
Waitangi Day
We said goodbye to our landlady and loaded all our stuff into the car again. I had found an ATM the day before already, so I could pay for our stay in cash. We were on the road again! Going from Te Kuiti to Tauranga we visited Cambridge. New Zealand (Country Guide): “The name says [...]
Waitomo Caves
We had not come to Te Kuiti without a reason. We had planned to visit the glowworm caves today. Julia had visited those twenty years ago and the last time we visited New Zealand together we had skipped them. I was very curious! There are many companies that organize trips for tourists to visit the [...]
Huka Falls
After we had had such a relaxing day yesterday, I got up very early. At 8 AM I queued up at the supermarket, waiting for it to open. I wanted to buy some nice rolls for our last breakfast in Rotorua. We wanted to travel from Rotorua to Te Kuiti, a distance of about 100 [...]