Christmas Break (Days 1 - 2)

Here in New Zealand, everything tends to shut down for about two weeks over the Christmas / New Years holidays. Most people take off on their holidays around the country over this time and it's quite noticeable as Auckland pretty much empties out. I had off from about the 20th of December until the 5th of January. My buddy, Dan, from the U.S. flew out to New Zealand to join me for the break. He arrived on the morning of Christmas Eve, but unfortunately, his bags did not arrive with him. At least we were not planning on heading out for vacation until the following day. We spent the first day calling up the airlines, visiting the Air NZ office and trying to track down his bag. Nobody could give us any useful information as to where it was or when it was expected to arrive. We did a little shopping for things just in case his bag didn't show up. Fortunately, when we woke up Christmas morning and called the airlines, his bag had arrived on the overnight flight from San Fran and they had it at the airport. Rather than waiting for hours for it to be delivered, we packed our things and headed to the airport to pick it up so we could take off on our trip immediately from the airport. We didn't have a whole lot planned for the trip as there is so much to do in New Zealand. We only had the first couple days figured out then would play it by ear from there. We would start out by heading down to Abel Tasman National Park to do some sea kayaking and camping which meant that we had an 8-hour drive ahead of us to get to Wellington for the night before catching a 5:50 AM ferry over to Picton on the south island from where we would drive another 3 hours to Marahau where the kayaking would begin. Check out the map below where I have roughly drawn our route from Auckland to Marahau (Abel Tasman National Park) so you'll have an idea of where we were.

We noticed right before setting out that my car appeared to be leaking a little bit of oil so we took it to the shop on Christmas Eve and made it a few minutes before they closed. It turns out that one of the valves has a slow leak or something but since we didn't have time to get it fixed and the shops were all closing anyway, we just stocked up on a few liters of oil just in case. Fortunately, we didn't need them over the trip, but I was skeptical due to the amount of driving we were about to do.

So we headed off from the airport on Christmas day and made our way down near Wellington to stay at a place called Hutt Park Holiday Park. In New Zealand, there a bunch of what they call Top 10 Holiday Parks which offer camping or basic cabin-like accommodation where you have a couple of bunks without sheets for about $50NZD per night. Since we knew we were arriving late and heading out early the next morning, we opted for one of these cabins the first night to make things easier.

The drive down was really pretty through a bunch of mountains, along the coast, and a LOT of winding roads through sheep farms. I started to get tired of the winding roads but at least it was scenic. Here are a few pictures taken along the drive down and a picture of our cabin.

Heading out from Auckland (We also decided not to shave our beards for the entire trip)

And we're off...(video)

Since this was Christmas Day, we thought it was pretty fitting that we came across a random farm with nine reindeer on it.

View of Lake Taupo (NZ's largest lake) from the road.

Dan in front of Mount Ruapehu (This is Mt. Doom in the Lord of the Rings)

Here's my Subaru Forester that took us on the trip and fortunately held up. We called it the "Beast" and took some "Beast in its Element" photos along the way. Here it is in front of Mt. Doom.

The Beast on Waitarere Beach near Wellington. The beach here is actually considered a road.

Driving on the Beach Road (Video)

Dan was obsessed with this shipwreck on Waitarere Beach. It is what's left of the Hydrabad Shipwreck (Not Much)

Me on one of the lookout points of a mountain we had to drive over near Wellington.

The inside of our "cabin" at Hutt Park Holiday Park.