New Zealand Day Seven - May 30, 2009

It was time to say goodbye to Rotorua! We had thoroughly enjoyed all three days we spent there; it was the place we had stayed in the longest. We cleaned up our things and headed to the kitchen for breakfast. We tried a very strange fruit neither one of us had heard of - it was called feijoa. We had bought them earlier in the week at a roadside fruit and veggie shed because we were curious. I didn't like it much. After some research I learned that it's related to guava, and be over-ripe if not eaten the day it falls off the tree (yes - falls. That's when it's ripe). Could explain why I didn't like it. Our fruit was old.


I opted for some kiwis on the way out of town.


We headed West and drove through scattered showers to Hamilton; home of the first LDS temple in the Pacific Islands. It was dedicated in 1958. We attended a session there, and then looked around the grounds and visitor's center. From the hill you can see a church school that is still in operation farther away on the property.


We had to take a picture of these crasy trees that to me looked like they grew upside down. At the same time the picture encompases typical New Zealand: in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture you can see a random herd of cows.

We had already stopped once to see the Tasman sea earlier on our trip, but this time we stopped to see a beach that was different: it was made of black sand! It was still pouring so we left our cameras in the car, but we changed into our flip-flops and made our way down to the water. We stood under the protection of a lifeguard tower while watching the die-hard surfers brave the water in their wetsuits. After venturing out from our cover and strolling on the beach a bit we scooped up some black sand in a water bottle to take home with us.

It was time to head back to Auckland. We appreciated the break in the rain, and took some great sunset pictures while driving on the highway (pardon the telephone lines!).

By the time Ashley and I checked in to the hostel it was dark, and we were starving! We had managed to get an awesome parking spot just in front of the hostel, so we decided to leave the car there and find our way around on foot. We were surprised to find that even in Auckland everything shut down super early. We expected a larger city to have later hours. Then, Ashley got hit by a bus. At least it said "sorry!"

We finally did manage to find a couple of small restaurants that were still open, and decided to eat at the one offering food from Turkey. Talk about good! We stuffed our faces with kebobs, french fries, and falafel...it was really good food, there was just a lot of it!

This Base hostel was the busiest we had stayed in yet; we were in a small room with five bunkbeds, all of which were filled by the time we went to bed! We loved the lockers they had underneath the lower bunks to store your things though, and I had even packed a padlock which we used to secure all of our stuff.

Since it was our last night in New Zealand we decided to stick with tradition and play Phase 10. This time however, we made friends with a couple of German girls and convinced them to play with us. It was fun explaining the rules to them; they had never seen anything like it before. We're pretty sure they thought we were crazy by the end of the night.