Our last week in New Zealand

And so after two months here in NZ, we're nearly ready to move along on our travels. The last week or so has been spent seeing everyone and saying cheerios. We had a party in Auckland in a pub for everyone we hadn't had a chance to see to come along to and for those we had seen to see one last time. And it's also a week of family dinners too.

The last of the sightseeing involved a trip to the very top of New Zealand at Cape Rianga which involved a 22km drive along a rugged gravel track. It wasn't really a fitting way to reward the car for all it's given us but it was certainly something for it to remember us by. The journey end is rewarded by a light house and then of course, the road back.

Also we stopped to see the giant Kauri trees of New Zealand which are tens of thousands of years old and are very big. Then yesterday we climbed a hill, Mount Te-aroha which has sat across the valley from Nic's home waiting for us to climb it since we got here. At the bottom of this hill are three very unique things;

1. is the worlds only soda water geyser, which goes off every 30 minutes.
2. is a drinking fountain with the afore mentioned soda water, straight from somewhere deep under the ground, and surprisingly un-eggy for it, and
3. is a natural spa where you sit in a your own private giant old oak barrel fed with the previously described hot soda water from under the ground. You can control the flow of water into it yourself pouring more hot water in straight from the spring or adding cold water to allow it to cool. But it's all the real water, untreated and if you don't add any cold, it's too hot to get into, its well cool, or rather hot. For a total of $25 we got to splash around in our own barrel full of volcano water for 40 minutes.

And that is about the sum of it. To bring you bang up to date, I have spent most of the last 6 hours catching up with this blog so that I can leave NZ up to date with only our new adventures needing written up. We have had a truly fantastic time and met so many wonerful people. Nic's family have all been fantastic hosts, which was kind of obligatory to Nic, but wasn't to me but I have felt truly welcome and very much at home the hole time, so thankyou very much everyone.

The adventure continues next in Indonesia when we fly out of New Zealand on the 23rd. See you there.