At the moment I'm in a little seaside village called Tairua on the Coromandel Peninsula.  It's a really nice place - small & rural and the people are really easy-going.  The weather is still fantastic up here too (apart from a big rain storm last week) and I've been taking advantage by refining my pretty pathetic skills on a surfboard.. I'm having a lot of trouble even standing on the board up here - the waves are huge & have no trouble in flattening me everytime I think I get close to riding one.  Apart from surfing I've been working in a restaurant as a kitchen-hand (doing prep & washing dishes) - the hours are drying up (summer season is coming to an end) so I'm not sure where I'll be this time next week..

 

Had a good time roadtrippin around the North Island with Niamh - we saw lots of interesting things including (can't believe I'm putting them all on a list - makes better reading than a big long sentence I guess):

 

- the longest pier in NZ (well it wasn't that interesting really..)

 

- a lighthouse on the East Cape overlooking the Ocean.  We were supposed to watch sunrise from here - the first in the world, but the car got stuck in the grass when were trying to leave.  We also had to endure a one-way conversation from a local farmer whose land we were
camping on - he was going to charge us to stay but then heard we were Irish.  In hindsight we shouldn't have mentioned a thing as this launched him into an hour-long description of his ancestry (parts of which were repeated over and over for effect).

 

- geysers & bubbling mud pools in Rotorua.

 

- Cathedral Cove & hot water beach in the Coromandel, where you dig a hole in the sand & thermal springs fill it up.  This has to be done around low-tide so we were down before dawn equipped with pots (ahem..) to dig with.  Turned out to be a disaster so we tried again in the late-afternoon when we had a bit more success & eventually gate-crashed into a big communal hot pool.  So nice...

 

- big waves in Raglan where I managed to surf for the first time.  I tried not to think about the shark attack that happened at the start of the summer..

 

- Lake Taupo, where we got wet in the tent & Niamh couldn't do a skydive because of bad weather.  We did get to see the buried village of Te Wairoa though (which was a load of shite by the way).  A volcano erupted in the 1800's sometime & buried a few things that have been excavated since.

 

We even managed to fit in some white-water rafting (where we got deliberately tipped by our guides - for a split second we all thought we were going to die) and jet-boating, a concept unique to New Zealand where the boat is propelled by a jet of water coming out the back.  They can operate in really shallow water - something crazy like 15cm...  After Niamh left, I hung around in New Plymouth looking for work & waiting to see the elusive Mt. Taranaki - a huge (dormant) volcano which looks like Mt. Fuji in Japan.  Didn't find any work (although I did wwoof for 10 days in a motel) and didn't manage to see the famous mountain until the day I decided to leave.  So here I am back up on the Coromandel Peninsula (where I met up with Lynn & did the hot water beach thing again - we managed to dig our very own hot pool this time) lapping up the beautiful scenery & weather and plotting my next move...