Left Side!

So, the last few days have been pretty interesting!

For those of you that don't know, Tyler is here for a year to do a working holiday. I knew he was coming down, and so I met up with him when he got into Auckland.

On Saturday we rented a campervan for 5 days, and headed south to the interior of the north island. We went to places that don't really have good bus service, so that's why we got the van. It was a lot of fun though! A little cramped, but nice to have a space to ourselves, and not sharing a dorm room. I even took a turn at driving, and I think I did pretty well on the left side of the road!

We went out to Hamilton and Matamata, and went out to Hobbiton (from Lord of the Rings for those of you that might not know)! We took a tour of what is left of the set. It's on a 1250 acre family farm. The family bought the rights to keep part of the set up after the filming was done and now does tours out to it on a daily basis. It was so neat to see the place almost like it was in the movies. The party tree is a real tree! I thought it would have been fake or something, but it's still there. We got our pictures taken in the hobbit holes and everything. Back at the gift shop, I had to buy a bottle of the beer that the actors drank in the movies. It was actually brewed just for the movie, and they're still brewing it here today in NZ. I had to buy it because as I was looking at it, (it's called Sobering Thought, and has Lord of the Rings stuff on it) I realised that it is made by a Harrington Brewery. So I mean, come on! Pretty cool!

After that we drove down to Waitomo and stayed down there for a few days. We went on a really cool caving trip that lasted for 5 hours, and included a 27 meter repel down into the cave, tubing on the underground river, seeing gloworms and gloworm caves, doing some caving and cave crawls, and then a rockclimb back to the surface. The gloworms were amazing! When we turned off our headlamps and just looked up, it was so beautiful. There must have been thousands of these tiny green lights all over the roof of the cave and the walls. Better than looking at the sky on a clear night. Just... wow.

Today we packed up our van and drove back to Auckland to return it. We stopped at the Hamilton Zoo on the way back, and I loved it! It was such a beautiful zoo! And lots of neat animals always makes me happy of course. I'm kinda sad to have to go back to dorming it, but also happy to be in a real bed again. And to actually have a little bit of room to move!

I'll try and get some pictures of the last week or so up tomorrow, I'm pretty beat after today for some reason so I'm going to head to bed early.

Please guys, if you read my blog can you leave a note? Just so I know who's read it. I get tons of hits a day on my counter but almost no notes. Even just your name lets me know and makes me happy! I miss you guys, hope you have a Happy Halloween. I don't think they do the whole Trick-or-Treating thing here... I haven't seen any candy for sale. Darn, I was looking forward to the discounted candy in November like back at home.

Hope you all are well!