New Zealand!

We have quite a lot of family in Auckland, New Zealand: Two of my first cousins married New Zealanders (Kiwis), and another cousin and an aunt have also emigrated here. So, naturally, Auckland is the place for us to start our time in New Zealand! We arrived in early November, just in time to find out that a new cousin had just been born that morning! We received a great welcome from everyone, and a wonderful treat from my aunt—she let us have her flat as a base, while she went to stay with my cousin! After so much time staying in close company with others, it was absolutely amazing to have a bit of time with our own space.

The first several days were a lovely blur of visits back and forth between cousins’ houses, getting to know one another again after many years, meeting spouses and children, and cuddling the two brand new babies—one newborn and the other just born in September. It was great! We also went for trips to the Auckland Museum (where we saw a fabulous Maori cultural performance, as well as some first-rate exhibits), a country drive to a local woodworking shop, a tour along the bays around which Auckland is built, and a guided tour of Rangitoto Island. As New Zealand’s most recently formed volcanic island, Rangitoto is only about 600 years old, and a raw accumulation of A ’a basalt.

What a foreign landscape that makes! The black, porous rocks look for all the world like freshly churned earth, but when you touch it, it is hard and almost glassy in texture, not soft and malleable as it appears from a distance. The illusion of earthiness is perpetuated by the Pohutukawa trees, which happily seed themselves in the nutrient rich basalt fields, break the rocks down into soils, and create entire islands of ecosystems in an otherwise barren landscape.

Here's the view back to Auckland from Rangitoto

One of the activities we wanted to try in New Zealand was driving around the countryside on our own, checking out different towns and activities on our way. Our cousins had done precisely this on previous occasions, so they gave us lots of recommendations for a great adventure. Combining their recommendations with some things we had read about in advance, we started off for six days of travel, staying in cabins at the camping holiday parks that cover the North Island (and the South island, but we don’t have the time to go that far this trip), and driving the car my cousin so generously lent me.

Our first stop was Waitomo in the western hill country, which has been carved out into a true karst landscape, as the approximately 30 million year-old limestone has been eroded by both over- and above-ground streams, creating hills, vales, caves and sinkholes:

The caves were what drew us to Waitomo, as we had reservations to go tubing through one cave system, known for its population of glow worms, then walking through another system the following morning. Here are photos from inside the cave (I don’t know if that is one of us or a member of our group tubing there) and of the cave’s exit point in the lush forest we walked through before and after. It was really cold in there! The water doesn’t change significantly from its 12°C norm all year round! The glow worms were incredible, though! So were the rock formations! We got to see more of them the next day when we went for a guided tour through Aranui cave:

As both of us are fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and the more recent movies that have been made about the adventures in Middle Earth, we decided to check out some of the locations here in New Zealand where much (if not all) of the filming was done. Our next stop was a temporary one in the middle of Tongariro National Park, where we went to the area where the Mordor sequences in the last Lord of the Rings movie were filmed. That was on the flanks of Mount Ruapehu. That was a totally different basalt landscape! Unlike the almost fluffy appearance of Rangitoto, this was a smooth basalt that didn’t break up easily, but rather depended on the slow growth of lichens to create a place for other life-forms to flourish. There were large unbroken stretches of blackness, interspersed with tundra-like stunted trees and low brush on the lower slopes. There was still snow on the mountain, and heavy mist that day, so we were limited in how far up we could go, but it was easy to see why the movie director, Peter Jackson, chose this location for Frodo and Sam’s arduous journey through Mordor.


After we left the park, we continued along its borders to the north, so we were able to see the base of two other volcanoes, Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe. These were also sights of filming for the movies, as the Plains of Golgoroth scenes were filmed at the base of Mt. Tongariro, and Mt. Ngauruhoe was used as Mt. Doom. We couldn’t see the peaks of any of the volcanoes, as the clouds were too low, but the sight of even the lower reaches was awe-inspiring. It turns out that a certain level of nervousness in the presence of these giants is well warranted, as Mt. Tongariro has erupted since our visit last week, pouring out ash and gases. I don’t know if further activity is expected.