One Year Into The Unknown: The stray adventure continues

Wow, the days fly by!

I travelled heaps around the north island in the last few days and visited places of which most I can't remember the name. Might have something to do with the fact that they are mostly in Maori and very hard to pronounce and even harder to remember.

Let me try to get this in some kind of order though. After I left Raglan (remember that's where I surfed until my leg told me not to anymore) we headed to Waitomo. Waitomo itself is a little town with maybe 100 inhabitants. What's special about this town though is the fact that is sits right on top of a huge cave system. Naturally the Kiwi's have found a way to exploit this. You wouldn't believe how many adventure activities that can be done over here!

Long story short, I went caving!!! An expensive thing but lots n lots of fun. We crawled through tiny spaces. Swam and tubbed through ice cold water. Saw eels and glow worms and just had a good time.

You might think that was enough excitement for one day but no. It doesn't end here. After that it went straight on to Maketu where they promised an authentic Maori experience. I was rather sceptic about this and expected something really cheesy. I was kinda right but it was fun anyway. We were welcomed into a traditional meeting house, in the way a rival clan would have been welcomed in the old days. After our clans "made peace" we watched a group of Maori's perform some traditional dances. After that we were asked to learn the "Haka" (see movie below) and the perform for the girls (only about 30 of em). It was awesome. I couldn't remember the moves but I have a good scary face! To end the day, the whole group slept in the meeting house.

In the morning I left that bus to head to the "go east" part. This part is only included if you have the most expansive tour booked with stray. Naturally we were only a small group then. This part of the stray tour is the "get to know Maori" part. In the following 3 days we had a Maori driver (Jason, he was awesome!). We had a lot of Maori culture and history explained to us. Visited some Maori towns and went to see how the traditional carvings are done and so on.

The best part of that trip was the Hostel on first night though. It was in a little cove, just 5 meters away from the water. It had a tree house (dunno how to better describe it) feel to it. Really really cool. As it was only 11 of us on this part of the tour we all had BBQ together.

We did lots more like hot pools, scenic lookout stops, wine tasting and eating traditional Maori food (Hangi). But I am cutting the post short now because I could go on and on and on.

let's conclude with the fact that it is all very good fun and that I am really enjoying my stay in NZ

enjoy the pictures and prepare for some more awesomeness very soon (with stray there is hardly room for a breather)