The islands of New Zealand are beautiful and wild. Teeming with wildlife, beaches, streams, waterfalls, and trails New Zealand is a magical destination you will want to explore. Put New Zealand on your bucket list! This is a recap of our vacation in New Zealand with photos and commentary.
Take a Trip to Beautiful New Zealand
Last week I wrote about our Australian adventure. Titling it When Not to Go to Australia, you can see that it was an adventure, just not the “good kind” of adventure.
This week, I am giving a recap of our New Zealand vacation. Let me start with the spoiler: we LOVED New Zealand. I would like nothing more than to go back for a month and further explore the South Island. It was simply breathtaking. The North Island was nice, the South Island… simply phenomenal.
New Zealand was a place Hubby has long wanted to go. He was a great fan of Xena: Warrior Princess {insert eye roll} I swear he still has a crush on Renee O’Connor (yes, I am sure he is aware she is from Texas), and he watches everything Lucy Lawless is in.
When we planned this trip the New Zealand portion was planned first. We found a cruise on Celebrity that looked interesting and booked it. New Zealand and Australia drive “on the wrong side of the road” and Hubby and I had no desire to attempt that. We figured we would use the cruise ship as a floating hotel in New Zealand and get our taste of the country that way. (Cruises are a destination “taste” to determine if you would like to go back to an area for a longer trip, in my opinion.)
We booked back-to-back cruises featuring Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and New Zealand fiords and then made our plane reservations. Since the Australian cruise was first, and they both departed from, and returned to, Sydney, that is the airport we flew in and out of.
At the end of the first cruise, I went to get my hair done in Sydney. We were given a card that showed we were back-to-back cruisers and so didn’t have to do much to re-board except show our passports, get new photos, and seapass cards. It was then on to New Zealand!
Hubby wanted to visit some specific places in New Zealand if at all possible: Lord of the Rings filming sites, and Xena: Warrior Princess filming sites. He was disappointed with the Xena sightseeing… there was no such thing. He found a random blogger who had pieced together areas where filming had occurred, but nothing concrete or actionable.
LOTR was a different story. We were able to visit “Middle Earth” on the South Island, and Hobbiton on the North Island. I plan on breaking out a full post on that. Another spoiler alert: I am not a big LOTR fan (basically I have read the book and seen the movies) and I thought these tours were FABULOUS!! Hobbiton is so idyllic I can see why Sam wanted to go back to the Shire.
We cruised to Fiordland National Park and through three of the five fiords. Fiordland National Park is in the southwest of New Zealand’s South Island. There are glacier-carved fiords of Doubtful and Milford sounds.
As we cruised through the park we encountered sunshine, clouds, rain, cold, and warmth. It was several seasons in the matter of a few hours. We were told you could walk in and it would take several days.
While there was an overnight excursion from our cruise ship to camp overnight, we did not even consider it. My idea of camping is the Four Seasons.
On our trip in New Zealand we saw quite a few dolphins. Besides birds, the dolphins were actually the wildlife we saw the most of!
At our stop in Dunedin, Hubby and I decided to walk around on our own and now take a tour. It is a lovely town with a beautiful train station, adorable shops, and art galleries.
We were told by one of our tablemates to make certain we tried the seafood chowder on the South Island if we got a chance, and so we did when walking into a random beer pup. If I had been alone I would have licked my bowl! I have no idea what went into this soup, but it was amazing.
On our way to this beer pub (Hubby found it on thefork which we had also used to get discounts and discover great restaurants in Italy), we saw this street. When Hubby pointed it out, I immediately said, “no!” He started laughing, he didn’t mean for us to walk up it. Baldwin street is the third steepest street in the world!
We took several nature and food trips while in New Zealand. We got to see how kiwi grows. The green kiwis are most plentiful, grown to export and the “best” are indeed shipped overseas.
The gold kiwi are more expensive to grow and ship, and less plentiful. We were told they are experimenting with a red kiwi that will taste like a cross between a berry and a kiwi fruit.
We saw some enormous avocado trees on an avocado farm. They had to have been 40′ tall and loaded. Avocado growing is a big industry in New Zealand and growing larger every day (no pun intended).
Now, there are three types of kiwi: a fruit (always called kiwi fruit), a person (a New Zealander), and a bird. The bird are nocurnal. We visited a Maori Cultural Center in Rotorua that was more about the geysers and spitting (boiling) mud. Our tour guide told a gruesome story from when he was an EMT and someone had fallen into the mud pits. “Cooked chicken” were the words used. Gross (and that poor man that fell in died).
It did have a kiwi bird though. To see the kiwi you entered a completely dark facility. I am surprised I didn’t kill myself or at the very least, trip over the person in front of me. In the US the nocturnal exhibits have red lights to prevent accidents. There? They were more concerned about the two birds than the people (there are only about 68,000 kiwi birds left). The kiwi itself looked like a bush, and because it was so dark it was almost indistinguishable from the rocks and plants in the exhibit.
The silver fern is one of the unofficial symbols of New Zealand. If you lay the silver fern upside down while walking on a path, it will shine for you on your way home in the dark, guiding your path so you do not get lost!
The beaches we saw in New Zealand were lovely, but harsh. This was a beach in Bay of Islands. This was a very interesting stop. It was a tender in, not a dock, so I know what I wish could never happen, buuuut…
This stop needed to be overnight so people could take advantage of the fishing, hiking, and camping in the area. When we tendered in we immediately got on a (free) city bus and were taken to the teeny-tiny central business district. After walking the three streets, we walked the 1.5 miles back to the tender area to get back on the ship. There was just not enough to do in the area outside of a longer-length nature excursion.
Speaking of getting on the bus; after we were loaded and moving the bus driver told us the power was out in the city center (good thing we had cash!) The plates are constantly moving below New Zealand and that can result in power disruption. The New Zealand Prime Minister was due to arrive that afternoon (our tablemates got photos of her) and they has emergency generators on standby for her!
A few tidbits we learned about New Zealand… there were no mammals on the island before man imported them. There are no natural predators (coyote, wolves, fox, etc.) and no poisonous snakes. For all that “everything in Australia is trying to kill you”, almost nothing in New Zealand is looking to harm you.
That doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. Because there are no natural predators the possum that have been imported have flourished (millions and millions). Rabbits and hare can destroy crops. Sometimes nature balances its own, and there are plans to contain these mammals that have caused ecological destruction.
We took a 13 day cruise that gave us nine days in New Zealand. It was far too short. I would love to return someday to see more of the countryside as this was a rough, wild, and beautiful destination.
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