New ZEALAND EXTREMEE MATTAFAKKAA, best holiday ever, probably the most memorable week in my life or what ever you like to call it. This blogpost is going to be a review of our trip and its point is to inspire people who are going there on these next few weeks to try to get as much out of their NZ holiday as they can. New Zealand, in its most diverse landscapes and myriads extreme activities is the epic'st place I have ever been in and is as my friend Mikko said, one of those few places where you actually want to go again, because there is just so much to do!
Our trip started as every good journey begins, packing and planning! We had two to three gatherings where we all sit down and discussed things and places and what every individual would like to do. I had a collection of ideas from my Semester 1 friends, so I already had a quite good picture in my head what should be done and what is possible to do in just under 10 days. I wrote an itinerary but as you can see we had to improvise half of the trip on the spot because he had some bad luck with roads, which I'll be covering more later on on this post.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lp7kpyobq8xhr8m/NEW%20ZEALAND%20EXRTREEME%20MATTAFAKKA%20ITINERARY.pdf
Our group was formed by me posting an ad about the trip to our Facebook channel, where every inbound exchange student in University of Canberra could see it. So the forming of the group and the participator selection process did not contain any discrimination or subjective opinions. Everybody who wanted to go, was welcome to join in. So as you would guess, our group ended up being a really diverse group of people all over the world with different ages, backgrounds and perspectives. We had Manuel, Yoshija and Mansur from Switzerland, Julien from France, Jenna from USA and me and Risto from Finland. Also one night I was talking with my friend Mikko(who is on an exchange in South Korea) in Facebook about the trip and he was saying that he actually has a study-free week during the period when we are going. So he showed me some flight prices and asked that should he buy them and I said Yes. So he clicked Confirm and was then baptized to be the eight member of our fellowship of Extreemee Mattafakka.
My trip started in a bit different way than others. I went to meet my friend Jasmin and her friend in Sydney, who had just arrived for their maybe a year long holiday in Australia. I actually finished my last paper in the hostel kitchen with Jasmin's computer before we went out for a dinner and few drinks. We went to nightclub Eve, which was actually a positive surprise despite 30AUD beer jugs but I guess it is expensive to go out anywhere in the middle of Sydney, so yolo.
In the morning it was an early wake up because we had saved money and bought the cheapest early morning flight from Sydney to Queenstown.
Finnish girls had brought me some samples of one of those Finnish foods that you can actually be proud of, Super Salmiakki and Fazer chocolate! They where graded by the Toblerone-people and French cuisine specialist so the outcome should be quite accurate verdict of their potential. The chocolate actually got really high marks from the respected jury but Salmiakki was chosed over the chocolate only by Risto. :D
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ckdr10mfiadtjm/G0030004.MP4
So there might be a market for Fazer in Switzerland after all!
I highly recommend flying to Queenstown! The views where amazing.
Mikko had flown from SK for almost 24 hours so he was a bit more jetlagged and all compared to us who had just 3 hour flight from Sydney behind us.
Queenstown was a beeeaaaautifull place!
Julien haven't told us about his surfer modeling past which he was still happy to redemonstrate to us.
On the first day we just browsed the city, went for a dinner with Tuomo and Juho who also just arrived to Queenstown on their few weeks around the southern island trip and in the evening we went to bath in Onsen hot springs!
One thing we realized on early stage was that New Zealanders are not the most friendliest customer servers in the world. As a Finnish man I didn't have problems with them but I can see how some people could get very offended by their authoritative way of giving instructions and lack of interest to being polite.
We had to go do some grocery shopping because Manuel tried to bring his new deodorant and shampoo bottles in the hand luggage which were of course, way too big containers, so he had to chuck them out at the security check. Risto's vibrant humor made an appearance in the car when he commented on Manuel's explanation of what happened with her toiletries and asked him "Soo you have never flown before?"
Jenna was trying to find Finland from the map. Some people might say it was quite funny.
The Subway with the best view in the world!
In New Zealand you usually need an english translation of your driver's licence if you want to rent a car. Remember this when planning your trip! Me, Manuel and Jenna of course had english ones but we decided that I am the only one who is going to drive on the south island.
And Jenna decided that she likes her NZ wines the same way as Risto likes he's eggs; smashed!
So the first activity on the saturday morning was Kawaray Bungy Jump! The place was actually the first of its kind in the world, so it was the birth place of the whole sport you could say. It was only 43m high but you get a chance to dip your head in to the water as your falling, which gave it an extra spice I think.
I got a nice set of boxers from my fellow travelers, as a gift for organizing the trip. And they were amazing I think! Btw, I have been uploading pictures for this blogpost for over a month and actually blogger.com said that I have reached the maximum now, so I guess I will not show all the amazing pictures we took on the trip but I try to show the best ones.
Here is the video of my JUMP!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xoquc93iy6wm4a3/Bungy%20hyppy.mp4
As you see me and Julien were the only one s that didn't dip their head to the water.
After Bungy jumping we decided to go to a NZ winery. Our randomly selected "Lazy dog winery" or something was probably the best one in the area, at least we loved it!
The sceneries were amazing.
The cat was amazing.
Feeding baby lambs was amazing.
The lazy dog who liked to lick baby lambs butt was amazing.
And the weather was amazing.
You can see how freaking diverse the landscape is in NZ.
Then we started to head towards the west coast and Haast highway where we had a hostel booked for the night.
But as it turned out after 2 hours of driving, because we had no connection to internet, we had made some civilized guess about the turning in a few specific crossroads and then ended up on the wrong one of course. For the future travellers I HIIGHLY recommend buying the normal old school paper map because in NZ you can never rely on internet nevertheless getting a reception to your phone.
So there we were, betrayed by the iPhones navigation system, drove two hours in the wrong direction and finally got some internet on our iphone, which then illustrated us that we are heading towards Christchurch and not the West coast. Mikko asked me a tender optimistic question "Turo do you think that there could be two Haast's in this island because I found one and this road does not go there". After deciding to turn back and driving to Wanaka (which at some point we were maybe 30km away from) for the night, Risto wake's up in the backseat and says that "mm guyss, I do have an iPad with all the map's preloaded to it if you need to read map in the future". You can imagine the moment in the car.. :DDD
The night ended up being quite fun with some NZ wine, getting to know each others in the kitchen of our hostel and planning the next move on our trip. As it turned out the Haast highway was actually closed due to a landslide and rockslide so even if we haven't driven wrong way we would have still ended up in the same place which was Wanaka. For fellow travellers I recommend reading this site http://www.nzta.govt.nz/traffic/current-conditions/highway-info/ it has all the info of closed roads and opening estimates.
So the website said to us that the next update about the Haast highway will be given on monday morning at 8am and it is closed until then at least. We then decided to find something to do in Wanaka. And the activity that almost everybody agreed on was mountain biking. Everyone else was really keen on this activity except Ms America, who in her own words "hate's biking in general". But anyways we rented bikes for the day and started heading to this mountain bike trail on the north side of Wanaka.
Having a lunch brake.
I was buying water from the shop before we head of on our trip and the cashier lady looked at me with a suspicious glance in her eyes, when I was explaining that we are going for a bike ride and said "why you don't just drink the water from the river?" I didn't realized what this meant until we got to the river and saw it. It was amazing. The purest water probably in the whole world! You could actually see the fishes in the bottom even though it was maybe 3 meters deep.
The whole biking day was amazing.
Mansur show: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtliya4asew4eb8/G0290046.MP4
At this point Jenna was totally sick of biking and running out of humor as you can sense it from this video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sy523lp56lx5rsp/G0360053.MP4 I think everybody's favorite thing in this video is the way she abandons her bike :DDD
Risto was amazing. He should totally make a postcard from this :DDD
You could see the fishes!
All and all the biking trip was a GREEAT success full of views, easy and some hard terrains and of course some situation comedy :DD
Next morning we woke up early to be ready for the 8am update about the Haast road. Well.. at 8am they announced that a new update will be at 11am. Hmm, ok.. we decided to go to the gate to wait for the new update. We stopped at Lake Hawea, which had AAAMAAAZING scenery.
Our artistic sensitive almost professional photographer team made some awesome work in this place! Btw credits for all the good photos in this blogpost goes to other members in our group, especially Risto, Manuel and Julien!
We waited and waited and when the clock was finally 11am, we refreshed the website just to see that now they say that a new update will be at 2pm! F*ck this we thought and decided to head back on that road that we once already drove to the "wrong" direction!
Well the scenery's... again... We also found a competitor for the well-known windows background view :D
The landscape changed again to something totally new that we haven't seen before!
We drove to Lake Pukaki and asked a nice tourist info lady that what could we do here and she recommend to go see the New Zealands biggest glacier the Tasman Glacier. The views were quite good again..
Risto was amazing again.
Due to global warming, the Tasman Glacier had retreated 180 meters a year for the last 70 years and because of this the actual tourist site was a bit far away from the actual ice, so we ended up only looking at it from the distance. In the foreground you can also see the the Tasman Lake which is of course getting bigger and bigger every year.
Julien was able to break his pants on our trip! :D But as a urban guy from Paris he was able to sew them back together in the car :Dd
Lake Pukaki is one of the must dooos in NZ for sure! After that we continued to Lake Tekapo for the night and luckily we got there 7.55pm or something because all the hostel receptions where closing at 8pm. Well we again made some food and drink some NZ wine and watched all the photos from the day because they were amazing!
On the next day which was tuesday, we didn't quite know what we would do. We still had two days that we were supposed spend in the west coast but when we couldn't go there we just had to plan it as we go. One idea was to go fishing and another one was kayaking. I asked a reception man that where could we rent kayaks at this time of the year. The man said that hmm, are you professionals? Because if you fall down to the water you will be dead in 10 minutes, the water is still so cold. We were no professionals so we decided to leave that idea and just started to drive towards Christchurch. On our way we saw a Paintball arena placething! We called the guy and he brought us all the gear and we started playing!
Well paintball was amazing, of course!
Afterwards we went to take a nice refreshing swim in the river close by.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/szo0u5ynodaedfb/G0440061.MP4
They said that water was maybe 5 degrees so still warmer than in Finland!
Of course after paintball everybody was so tired that we all decided to take a little nap, including the driver :DD
We drove all the way to Christchurch and all over to Kaiapoi, where we rented some rod's and went fishing!
Jenna was not interested of fishing so she bought some cider instead.
We changed fishing location to the wharf and got an awesome sunset!
Of course because I was participating this fishing activity, nobody got any fish!
We stayed the night on the beach at some beach camping area which was quite alright! In the morning we decided to go see Kiwi's in the Kiwi farm place thing.
New Zealand wild life in general is quite boring and insignificant. Basically only cool thing that they have is Kiwi's, a lizard and giant mountain parrots which neither of them is possible to see in the tourist places that we were staying in. For Kiwi's the park had like a little house where they had changed the night and day and therefore the inner clock of the Kiwis. Kiwis are nocturnal and all so they only move in the night time and so like this it was a pretty handy way to get to see Kiwi's in the daytime :D And as you can see from the picture above it was not easy to take pictures of them, especially when you where not allowed to use flash. Btw, the third most interesting native animal I can remember was New Zealand pigeon :DDDD
Then some other animals from the park. Which most of them were imported or didn't even actually live in NZ.
Julien made some AMAZING guacamole!
As you can see the collection of amazing view pictures has stopped. Basically when it was around 100km distance to Christchurch the scenery completely changed, to worse. In Christchurch it self there was nothing. They had a severe earthquake in 2011 and in that the whole city was basically destroyed! It was even difficult to try to find a place to eat! They also had a nice church in Christchurch but that got destroyed also so they had to built one out of cardboard, which in the beginning didn't sound like much but Risto really wanted to see it and actually I did enjoy it a lot!
After the church experience we finally found our lost group member who had just arrived from Melbourne to Christchurch on that morning, Yoshija. We decided to go see the water but actually we ended up on this little hill where they had gondol track thing. But we were cheap students who decided to walk up rather than pay 16NZD for a 2min ride :D
Christchurch's harbour was located behind this little mountain and all the traffic went through the mountain in a tunnel. This was a really different and interesting way to build the city I think.
We stayed over night in a little hostel and then on thursday we flew to Auckland.
Only me, Mikko and Jenna did not procrastinate with buying the flight tickets so we were able to get the cheap price for the daytime flight. But all the others in our group were late and all the prices had gone up so they bought the only one's left with decent price which was eeeaaarly in the morning. Due to some wine drinking again, when we called them from Cc on the daytime, that had they rented a new car for us, they had a list of stuff that was left to the car or to the hostel in the morning rush to the airport :D Luckily Julien's over 1000e camera etc was in the car or somewhere else and we were able to bring everything with us to Auckland.
I was hungry.
This one is for Jenna!
In Auckland guys had successfully rented a new minivan for us and this time you didn't need a translation of your drivers license to drive it! So everybody wanted to drive now and I get to just relax on the backseat!
Our hostel in Auckland was not the fanciest!
With Mikko, we decided to go to the Auckland tower. It was quite late when we arrived there and we asked that is there anywhere to drink a beer up there? They called a manager over and manager lady told us that let's make a deal. They have a restaurant above the normal tourist viewing area where we could get a beer in the entrance lobby. If we both buy 35NZD worth of drinks then we would get a refund of our tourist elevator ticket. Of course we said yes to this! We went up there, ordered some beers, some scallops and enjoyed the night time views of Auckland! Not in a gay way, totally heterosexual latino way.
In the evening everything in the normal tourist lobby was closed so I went there the next day to get a refund of our 18NZD elevator tickets and succeeded in it! :D
Next location was going to be Manuel's must see, Hobbiton which located in Matamata! So it is the shire from LOTR if somebody doesn't know.
Because Jackson wanted the movie to be as realistic as possible. He actually made that non-alcoholic beer for the actors to be used in the scenes so that it would look like they were actually drinking beer!
That tree was actually totally fake! Because it was not possible to build the house under a tree because surprise surprise there is a lot of roots! When they were thinking of starting to film the Hobbit which in chronically was timed a long time before LOTR saga. They needed to make the tree to look like a young version of the one that appeared in LOTR. This is why they decided to build the tree out of metal and fake leafs. You can almost see it from the next picture!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/abbn3n75crzwyr8/G0570078.MP4
everybody was having lots of fun!
Took a beer in the Green Dragon!
After Hobbiton we drove to Rotorua for some Zorbing experience!
In Zorbing you basically go in to this ball and roll down a hill. :DD Because it was so nice and warm day they only had water Zorbing in the menu. We did that and it was awesome.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0pwmyq448ahbcld/Zorb.wmv
Totally worth of 50NZD :DDD
As you can see our minivan was quite amazing!
In Rotorua we also got to see some volcanic activity! I don't know what you call these things but they smell bad!
After Rotorua we drove up to Lake Taupo for the Grand Final of our trip, Skydive and Rafting! In the morning when we woke up I had to call them and ask is the weather good for jumping and the lady said that it was perfect. I think she meant amazing?
On the saturday morning they came to pick us up with a limo! :D
Everybody needed to watch little safety video and some advertisement about different jumps with different extra filming and video packages. You could easily spend another 250NZD for the videos if you liked.
Getting ready and being excited! The jump it self costed 250NZD which is like 210AUD or 134 euros, so I think it was really reasonable price for that kind a activity!
Skydive is literately the best thing a man can do with he's pants on or without! Lake Taupo as a skydiving site was pretty good because on a perfect day like that you get to see the sea on both sides of the island and on the other side of the lake you see "Mordor" or in other words Mt Doom which is a working volcano and it was actually erupting a bit on that day! Amazing
After skydive we had only rafting left! Which was sad. They came and pick us up from the skydiving place and drove us on the other side of the lake where the rafting hub was. We were going to Tongariro river that day and the company was Rafting New Zealand.
River rafting was just a perfect way to end an amazing spree of extreme activities! I filmed maybe 2 hours of footage with my GoPro and obviously it is not possible to upload all of them to show you guys but I choosed this one:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ody31p8mq6easeo/G1140161.MP4
The river it self was like straight from Jurassic Park! It was so amazing that the word amazing can't even describe it enough! I saw few big fishes also and at that point I decided that I am coming back here for some more rafting and fishing experiences one day!
We ended the best day with a best possible meal at Burger Fuel!
And of course the weather was still amazing.
If you want to learn how to play golf, just watch this video:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/srm23w4dpepvz9v/IMG_1872.MOV
On sunday we drove back to Auckland for some city tourist activities.
I was practicing Risto's "Welcome to New Zealand, I am your guide 'pose'"
Risto was teaching he's apprentices about life in general and how to be successful in it. He also taught them the meaning of life.
Manuel was practicing the "pose"
In Auckland they have made some art and practical things like toilets out of containers which was a wonderful idea I think!
We went there for a beer of course.
First we though it was Steve Jobs's boat but actually it belonged to some Russian business man. But it has been built and designed by the same company!
We went to this weird photography exhibition and Risto was our guide.
And finally, back in Canberra! The south and north island in New Zealand are both amazing in their own special way. South full of beautiful mountains and crystal clear rivers and north with all the volcanic activities! The whole trip was so amazing and I am only starting to realize it now when I am going through the pictures! Luckily I have 40gb of them :D And what made it even better was the people I was traveling with, our Extreeme mattafakka group was amazing. We all had similar interests and abilities to do same kind of stuff on our journey which made it a success story! We also survived our minor setbacks with the landslides and stuff and turned them into victory at the end by planning together and then making our plans to reality. Hopefully you get some ideas of what to do on your New Zealand trip and enjoyed our pictures and my comments. I am sorry there is so many pictures but this took me maybe 20 hours all and all with uploading and writing so I really hope you enjoyed this! Lord Turo over & out!
