New Zealand Day Three - May 26th, 2009 (Part One)

Having gone to bed much earlier than our first night in New Zealand, Ashley and I both woke up way early - in fact, it was still dark outside. I leaned over my bunk to see Ash check the time, and when we learned it was not long after 5am we attempted to fall asleep again. This however, did not work. After a few minutes of laying in silence I announced "Well, I'm awake now," and laughing, we both rolled out of bed and got moving. We made breakfast in the hostel kitchen, packed up, and got rolling out of town as the sun was coming up.


Since we had extra time on our hands by not going to the South Island, we decided to turn off on whatever road looked interesting and do some exploring. The landscape is beautiful, and it changes so quickly!

We became big fans of the panoramic shots. The first dirt road we wandered off on took us up some rolling hills past hundreds of sheep (very common) where we could see the light fog move across the area we had just driven through.

Another road took us off into a forest and then out to a small camping area next to a river and a ribbon-like waterfall. This was one of my favorite areas.

After our forest adventure we were once again in pasture-land, and even pulled over to take some close ups of the sheep, but they were all afraid of us and ran away. FAST. Nearly the entire day I was constantly saying that New Zealand seemed to remind me of somewhere else - no matter where that somewhere else was. On top of the hills in one pasture area I could have sworn I was in Ireland.

Having heard much about these cookies when people discovered I was going to New Zealand, Ashley and I broke out the package of Tim Tams and thought they would go great with the laid back feel of the day. Our first impressions of the cookies weren't anything amazing... we thought they were good, but didn't quite understand what the fuss was about. I thought it was comparable to E.L. Fudge. However, over the next day or two we quickly became addicted!

Ash and I got really good at reading the not-so-thorough maps that we had collected, and made our way to our next extreme adventure.