A good start to the new year

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone!

I spent the last few days of 2016 in Rotorua and Taupo. In Rotorua, we visited the Redwoods, a truly impressive forest, and the Okere Falls. On the evening of the 30th, there was a movie festival at one of the lakes in Rotorua, where 'Finding Dorie' and a Maori film were shown. The next morning, we made two more stops on our way to Taupo. The first one was at a hot pool, which was a really strange experience because I couldn't imagine beforehand that there would be a river flowing through nature at around 40 degrees Celsius. After relaxing there for a few minutes, we continued to a thermal village. There, we could see different types of thermal pools that were created, for example, by substances like sulfur or iron oxides.

On New Year's Eve, we celebrated together with friends from the apple plantation in Taupo. We went to an Italian restaurant, watched the fireworks at the beach, visited an Irish pub, and last but not least, witnessed the first sunrise of the new year, which was also the very first sunrise in the world in 2017.

On January 1st, we continued our road trip in the afternoon and headed to Coromandel, where we visited the Hot Water Beach, where you can dig holes at low tide and then sit in your own little hot pool, and saw Cathedral Cove. Despite the cloudy sky, I got a nasty sunburn, and since the weather wasn't great the next day either, we decided to go to a swimming pool. There, we happened to meet the 4 German guys with whom we had worked and traveled together - it just shows how small New Zealand is. Yesterday evening, we visited a cave where we could see glowworms, which was truly spectacular and looked a bit like the night sky full of stars. However, the path there led us through water that was almost knee-high and quite a lot of mud, but the sight was worth it. In the next few days, we will drive to the northernmost point of New Zealand before heading towards Wellington, as we want to be on the South Island in 3 weeks.