Patrick and Kari's Travels

Today Pat and I will depart from our third WWOOFing address. Though our original plan had been to travel south directly after staying here in Waikanae, circumstances at the WWOOFing address led us to slightly modify our plans (don’t worry it wasn’t all bad the family was nice; the room had an amazing view of the sea and we had a hot tub at our disposal…however the food was mediocre at best and apparently our hosts hadn’t realized the word organic is a key component to the WWOOF acronym and at the end of the day we’re WWOOFing to learn about organic gardening and farming or at least get fat on delicious wholesome foods). So we are now planning on driving back up north briefly to visit Tongariro National Park.

Tongariro National Park contains three active volcanoes and was the site of Mt. Doom in the Lord of the Rings. We plan to tramp in the park for four days and stay in our first NZ backcountry huts. Then on the last day we will throw the one ring into the fiery pits of Mordor from whence it came and the world will be freed of evil, or at least that’s the plan.

Hopefully the weather will hold, though we’ve decided we will set out rain or shine – we’re both aching to do some backpacking.

We’ve fallen a bit behind with the blog, it’s difficult because the internet infrastructure in NZ is quite different from the States (generally pay per upload) so here is a quick synopsis (in photos, you know a pictures worth a…) of our last two weeks.

Pat and I exploring mature Kauri forests.

A.H. Reed Memorial Canopy Walk

Gorgeous Whangarei

Morning outside of Auckland

In Egmont we stumbled across hundreds of people waving American Flags in celebration of Americana, a classic car show. Naturally we stopped and had a look around, we even enjoyed a Coney Island hotdog (or so they mislabeled it).

The coastline of the South Taranaki Bight

Hiking in Whanganui River Valley

Also I haven’t seen a possum yet, but I have sadly added hedgehogs to my list of road kill mammals.

Kari