Unfortunately I don’t have much to say about Hanmer Springs because I got sick with a cold and couldn’t go to the hot pools, but as far as I know it was pretty similar to the Polynesian Spa in Rotorua. The trip from the North Island to the South Island was pretty scenic though. In Wellington we got a ferry to Picton cruising the beautiful Marlborough Sounds on the way and then travelled the Kaikoura Highway along the coast to see some seals. It was a long travel day, but it was perfect to just relax and watch the New Zealand scenery unfold. The next day was an even better travel day with views of the Southern Alps and Arthurs Pass, plus a stop to see some greenstones (jade) being carved into beautiful jewelry. South Island is definitely as picturesque as it gets.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Wellington is the capital of New Zealand and its third largest city, located on the bottom of the North Island. Here are the highlights:

Mt. Victoria – The summit has a beautiful panoramic view of the city and on the way there you can see the Victorian style houses like the ones from San Francisco.

View from Mt. Victoria

Just like San Francisco

The waterfront – Because of the cold (and my laziness), I hadn’t gone on a jog in NZ yet, but I had to do it here since it was our last stop in the North Island. The waterfront was the perfect spot for it, alongside the harbor and the super clean beaches.

Wellington

Parliament Buildings – Nothing special besides the weird beehive building and Katherine Mansfield’s house a few blocks away. She is NZ’s most famous author and now I’m eager to find some of her short stories after reading this quote: “What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?”

Parliament Buildings

Bee-hive building

Katherine Mansfield’s house

Cable Car and Botanical Gardens – An old fashioned cable car takes you up the hill to the gardens, where you follow a path back down to the city. There are many different trails that make it one of the most beautiful city gardens I’ve seen.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Te Papa Museum – full of history about New Zealand and its earthquakes, marine life, Maori natives, and immigrants. Too much information, but I enjoyed a house that shakes as if in an earthquake and the giant squid they caught in 2011. They were also having a temporary exhibit on Impressionism and Renoir (yay, my favorites!) and another one on Andy Warhol that was amazing. I finally got to see his Marilyn Monroe pop art work up close.

Te Papa Museum

James Cook’s “Endeavor” cannon

Cuba Street – The place to go shopping and see the famous water bucket fountain.

Water Bucket Fountain

Courtney Place – The theater district full of bars and restaurants, but unfortunately I still haven’t had a superb meal in NZ. Everything is super salty. The highlight was watching “Swan Lake” by the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Wellington was the perfect place for my culture fix (especially after watching all the bar games the night before).

Swan Lake

My German roommate and I

Lake Taupo, the largest one in New Zealand (a bit smaller than Lake Tahoe though), is also a volcano, so there are many hot water springs like the one we went to in Spa Park. From there, it’s a short hike along Waikato River, which is also the longest in New Zealand, to the majestic and bright blue Huka Falls. We also watched a couple of people do bungee jumping at the lake, but I didn’t have the courage to do it, especially after they all said they felt they were going to die. To end the day, I took a long walk around the lake and watched the sunset while drinking some wine.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The scenery so far in New Zealand has been amazing. Everything is green, picturesque, and full of cows and sheep. On our way to Rotorua, we attended a sheep show at the Agrodome where they sheared a sheep  and showed us how the dogs herd them.

Sheep Show at the Agrodome

Sheep

New Zealand loves to invent new adventures, like the black water rafting in Waitomo. In Rotorua we got to see another invention: zorbing, where they put you inside a plastic ball and shove you down the hill. It looked pretty fun and not too scary, but I didn’t do it because I knew I would throw up inside and roll down in my own vomit. But I did try the small race car called luge down the hill. First you have to take a gondola (cable car) up the hill where you have a beautiful view of Lake Rotorua. Very similar to Lake Tahoe and the gondola at Heavenly, but I don’t think you could use the luge to go down with all the ice and snow in Tahoe.

Rotorua is actually a city INSIDE a volcano. The city limits is pretty much the crater rim, so when you’re in town you are actually in a caldera. The area is full of geothermal activity and everywhere you look there is steam coming off the ground along with a pungent smell of rotten eggs because of all the sulfur. In the 1800’s they capitalized on the thermal hot pools and built a bath house attracting tourists for its medicinal purposes. Now the bath house is a museum holding tons of Maori artifacts.

Speaking of Maori, we went to two of their villages. Ohinemutu is a functional one by the lake where they live and worship. We learned a bit about their culture (they take pride in tracing their ancestors and sometimes tattoo their genealogy on their faces) and their mythology (like the one princess from Lake Rotorua who swam to the island to be with her lover after he played the flute for her.) There is an Anglican church carved with beautiful Maori art and a Marae, which is a meeting house used for ceremonies. In Te Puia we also visited a Maori carving and weaving school, but the most beautiful area was the Pohutu Geyser, full of hot-water springs and mud pools, with a geyser going off every few minutes.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Back at the hotel we relaxed at the Polynesian Spa and their thermal hot water pools overlooking the lake and had a hangi, which is a dinner cooked under hot stones on the ground. For dessert, we tried some pavlova, a merengue cake with fruit.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We first stopped at Otorohanga near Waitomo to see the endangered kiwi bird. They are flightless birds that only exist in New Zealand and are hard to spot because they sleep up to 20 hours a day and come out only at night, but at this kiwi house they have two little ones in special enclosures and, lucky me, they were awake when I got there. I couldn’t take any pictures because it was too dark, but they have a big body and tiny heads with a long beak. Very cute, of course.

Kiwi Bird

In Waitomo we went to the Ruakuri caves to see a beautiful underworld of stalagmites and stalactites. My dad is a geologist, so I’ve been to many caves in my lifetime, but this one was by far the best. Inside them you can find glowworms that look just like glitter on the dark cave ceilings. They are not really worms, but fly larva, (yes, maggots advertised as worms so it doesn’t sound too gross). They also have black water rafting which is pretty much just cave tubing at a faster pace.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Auckland is the largest city in New Zealand, with 1.4 million people, and, just as any big city, it has some iconic high rise buildings, like the Sky Tower one, lots of restaurants, parks, and, since it’s by the Tasman sea and the Pacific ocean, it has a large harbor and marina. Auckland actually has the most boats per capita in the world and has hosted the America’s Cup sailing match twice. The day I was there, it was so foggy I could barely see anything, but it reminded me very much of San Francisco.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

BTW, as soon as I got on the plane I knew I would like New Zealand. Just take look at the airline’s safety video.

After a 10 hour drive we finally arrived at our last destination in Australia: Cairns, the getaway to the Great Barrier Reef. The reef is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it’s the largest living being in the world covering over 344,000 square kilometers. It is also the only living being that can be seen from outer space. I had high expectations for this day since scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef was on the top of my list of things to do before I die, and I’m glad to say I wasn’t disappointed. In this trip I had many “wow” moments, like when I went jogging in Sydney and saw the Opera House across the bay, or when I held a koala and pet a kangaroo, but being underwater watching colorful coral and neon bright fish was definitely the biggest WOW moment of Australia for me.

Great Barrier Reef

At first scuba diving was a little hard because you have to get used to the breathing in addition to the pressure, which kills your ears just like in skydiving, but after I remembered my breathing techniques from yoga, my anxiety dropped and I was able to enjoy the ocean (always holding the hand of my hot instructor, of course). I thought scuba diving would be very similar to snorkeling, but when you’re 6 meters underwater, everything is more colorful, more abundant, brighter, bigger, and better. There were sea turtles, reef sharks, barracudas, sting rays, giant clams, and tons of clown fish. It was not hard at all to find Nemo.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Unfortunately my underwater camera broke after I took my first picture, so I had to buy a disposable underwater camera and go on a second dive to take more pictures. We’ll see how they’ll turn out. By the way, everybody thinks I’m crazy when I say I’m bringing four cameras, but I’m glad I did this time because one of my cameras broke during the first week and now the underwater one is done as well. All I have left is my big DSLR one and my crappy camera phone.

After my dive I was rewarded with some more kangaroo meat. This time it was a delicious steak and it tasted like venison. Kangaroos are also just like deer in Australia. On our way up the coast, we would always see some hopping on the fields and just like deer in the US, they cause a lot of accidents down here too.

Kangaroo Steak

Later that night the group I’m travelling with went to a pub crawl. It was actually a good deal: five drinks for $20, but I went to get a massage at the Night Markets for the same price and buy some more souvenirs. Call me anti-social, but I’ll take a massage over beer anytime.

Cairns is right on the water, but the beach is not suitable for swimming because of the crocodiles. Australia is known for its deadly animals: the taipan is the world’s most dangerous snake, for example, and crocodiles can eat you in the blink of an eye. Nevertheless, you can still enjoy some sand and water by the man-made lagoon they have, just like the one in Brisbane, and that’s where I was all day long during my last day in Australia. The weather was perfect – any hotter and I would’ve complained. And remember my two great finds in Sydney? The restaurant Grill’d and the paintings of Lloyd Rees? Well, right in front of the lagoon, there was a Grill’d place awaiting for me and right around the corner the local museum was having an exhibit on Lloyd Rees and his early paintings. My trip to Australia had come full circle.

We finally crossed the tropic of Capricorn line and the weather is so much warmer! Summer vacation is definitely on now and nothing better than a sailing trip to make it memorable. We stayed at Daydream Island, one of the 70-plus islands at the Whitsundays. The resort had rainforest walks, kangaroos hopping around, stingray feeding, and best of all, unlimited food and drinks at the Camira sailboat that took us to Whitehaven Beach, which was voted #3 in the Top 10 Best Beaches in the world. Anyone interested in hiring a sailboat and go island hopping like I did in Greece a few years ago?

Kangaroos are everywhere!

Camira Sailboat

Sailing at The Whitsundays

Beautiful Whitehaven Beach

Sailing

Clear waters of Whitehaven Beach

Australia is a very very large country, so we had to make a few stops between the 1,000 kilometers of road that we had between Fraser Island and The Whitsundays. Our first one was in Childers, a one street kind of town only (in)famous because in 2009 15 backpackers died at a hostel fire there. Then our last stop was in MacKay, a city known for its sugar cane production, where we pretty much just toured their giant shopping mall. In between, we stopped at a cattle farm, learned to use a whip (no, not the “Fifty Shades of Grey” kind…) and had a delicious home cooked meal to offset my pie and pastry diet.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Fraser Island is the world largest sand island and the best way to explore it is to rent a 4×4. We started at 75-mile beach, which also happens to be a highway. Seriously, one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen with colored cliffs on one side and spectacular ocean on the other. Inland there are many lakes, like the one we swam at, Lake McKenzie, and trails through the rainforest. We got to stay at one of the resorts at the island, where I bought a bottle of wine to watch the beautiful sunset. Not that I’m a morning person, but I just felt I needed to see a little more of the island, so the next morning I woke up super early to go on a jog. Since the island is home to plenty of dingoes (wild dogs), I had to go with a German girl from my group through the woods to the beach and back. I think I’ve found my new favorite place in Australia.

Fraser Island

Camouflage Tree

Lake McKenzie

Fraser Island

Sunset