Our week in Wairoa Valley ended up being our very last week of WWOOFing. We decided while we were there that we wanted our very last week and a half in New Zealand to be spent the way we wanted to spend it, so we ditched the farms and headed off to Taupo. We took the ferry from Picton to Wellington and it was such a perfect sailing yet again. The weather was amazing and the views were incredible yet again. We spent the night in Wellington, hanging out at the harbour front watching stingrays swim by (incredible!!) and eating another passion fruit sundae! We were surprised with a room to ourselves which was amazing because we were expecting a night with two roommates. We sat on the docks at night and stared at our favourite view of the lights across the way one last time.
The next day it was back on the bus and up to Taupo in the middle of the north island. Taupo was the cutest little beach town on Lake Taupo with incredible views of the mountains in the Tongariro National Park (one of which was Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings movies… whaaaa?). We had perfect weather the whole time we were there and took in some of the most beautiful sights. We had four nights there and spent every evening watching the beautiful sunsets from the beach.
Our first full day was spent doing a bit of souvenir shopping in the morning and a bit of an adventure in the afternoon. We walked about half an hour to the Spa Thermal Park and checked out the natural thermal pool. On the way we passed a bunny jumping place and watched a couple people dive down this gorge with the most incredible river below. Seriously, the colour of the water in this river! It was just insane! It looked like glass or Jell-O and was crystal clear! The thermal pools were busy but so so cool. The hot water came into the river by a couple waterfalls and the water was incredibly hot! But you could sit closer to the river and get the cold river water mixing in with the hot spring water. Man it was so cool! We sat in there for quite a while just relaxing! So nice!
The next day we set aside for a nice long hangout on the beach. We soaked in some rays (way too many actually… we ended up with some impressive burns despite our sunscreen) and had a little picnic lunch. The water was pretty cold and there was quite a breeze so we didn’t end up swimming but it was so nice to spend a long chunk of time just relaxing on a beach! It was pretty crazy lying on a beach and looking at Mount Doom in the distance. Kind of spooky but so cool at the same time!
Our last day in Taupo we decided to check out the Huka Falls. Someone in our hostel really recommended we go check them out. We weren’t too sure because we were like well we’ve seen Niagara Falls, how interesting could these be in comparison? But we were quite wrong! It was about an hour hike to the falls past the thermal pools we visited a couple days before. The hike was awesome because we got a ton of cool views of the gorgeous river along the way. Then the falls themselves were so cool! It was kind of more like a channel of water that was super long and the water just rushed through at such a fast rate. There was a bit of waterfall at the very end and the sound was just incredible! And the colours were insane! We were much more impressed than we expected and were so glad we went to see them!
We stopped for one last swim in the thermal pools on the way back out of the park and had a nice little soak. In the afternoon we headed down to a nice park in town with our lunches and just relaxed on the super soft grass in the shade. We made friends with a few ducks and saw our very first Tui (no picture, unfortunately!). It was nice to relax after all of the walking we had done in the morning.
Though our time in Taupo was short we had a lot of fun and saw some really cool things. We didn’t have the money to do all the crazy adventurous things you can do in this little town but we still had so much fun and had some delicious passion fruit waffle cones and frozen passion fruit Fanta’s (can you tell passion fruit is our new favourite?). Next we were off to Auckland for our final four nights in New Zealand, but that’s a tale I probably won’t be able to tell until I’m back in the homeland!
A Couple of Runaways 