South Island Here We Come

Well, i'd say its been a pretty nice little January so far. We just got into Wellington, the southernmost tip of the North island, and will likely spend a few days here before taking the ferry across. This is a very cool city. Right now its about 80, overcast with 130km gusts coming in over Wellington Harbor. Pretty impressive to see. The museum here allows overnight parking in the heart of the city for $10 so that's where we're sleeping tonight. We haven't had to pay to camp up for about a month so we'll cough it up for a couple nights and explore the city.

We pretty much just finished a 3day canoe trip down the Wanganui. We got to paddle 88km in a very beautiful, secluded river gorge. It was also at historically low levels which meant it felt like we were paddling against the river at times. It was good though and it was nice weather, hot and sunny.

Before this we spent a few days hiking in a volcanic area called Tongariro national park. This is where the Mt. Doom volcano was filmed for all you Ringmasters out there. We've seen a few LOTR sights along the way but none that were really anything special, except mt. doom I suppose. I hiked up Mt. Ruapehu, which actually erupted very recently. There was still lots of snow up there so I got to do some JH slides on the way down.

Weather has been awesome. Very little rain. Mostly sunny and clear in the upper 70s.

I just put up a bunch of pictures at my online picture dump. http://picasaweb.google.com/stearnr

O-H-I-O

Hi all. We are currently back in Taupo at an internet cafe listening to the national championship game since we couldn't find it on tv anywhere. At halftime, things not looking so good, but we still have faith.

So, since last blog we have spent Xmas in Rotorua-a thermal valley complete with boiling mud pools, hot springs, and the smell of sulphur. We went through a couple of thermal parks and got to see some neat pools and springs results of volcanic activity many years ago. We have found several hot streams that are great to soak in. From there we spent some time in Taupo hiking and viewing Huka Falls, and headed into Te Urewera National Park. We were woken up by an earthquake on our first morning camping, just a small one. Then we headed out on our first Great Walk around Lake Wakaremoana. It was a 4 day/3night hike so we spent New Years in the middle of this trek and were asleep by 10. The last day of this trip also marked 8th day without a shower. There were a couple swims mixed in though.
After this grueling trip, we headed to Gisborne for the beach (this is the place that got the 6.8 quake a couple weeks ago) , then down to Napier/Hastings/Hawkes Bay to some wineries. It wsa great, we only made it to 5 considering they all had free tastings of 6-8 of their wines.
What's up next for us is Mt Tongariro hike and a 3 day River trip down the Wanganui. We plan to cross to the South island within the next 4 weeks.

More pics are up at http://picasaweb.google.com/stearnr and more to come.