Mt Taranaki

Hello hello to everyone in quarantine, home office or forced vacation, to those who are still working (for now) and everyone else!

Corona (almost) doesn't affect me here in New Zealand but I'll tell you more about that at the end of this blog entry 👍

I decided to visit the north island and went through Blenheim where a friend of Amanda lives.

I met Emma again, Amanda's friend and sadly forgot to make a foto. It was a lovely evening tho, we had a couple of beers with a real Kiwi. Talking about Kiwis: The fruits here are super expensive and imported, usually from Italy. I think they are not in season or something.

I had to go more up north to Picton to get the ferry to the other island.

Since I had some time to kill in Picton I searched for a spot with good WiFi and chose... The local library! Because libraries totally rock here.

They are very comfy, have unlimited, fast WiFi, are quiet, well equipped and you can even get computers for free. Totally love them.

Anyway, later the ferry. It is a really big one, it fits many trucks and cars. Otto came with me, of course.

I arrived very late, half past midnight, drove an hour to a campground and went straight to bed.

First impression of the north island? It's fucking windy!

I posted something on couchsurfing, that I was looking for travel mates. Gigi told me he would be around and also traveling in a van. We were supposed to meet in the evening on another campground, so I went hiking during the day, a short round trip on 'the pinnacles'.

While I was in the mountains, Alice called. She also saw my post on couchsurfing and wanted to join, but was still in Wellington, where I arrived with the ferry and left the day before. I still thought to give it a shot and drove back to pick her up.

We went to the campground together and met Gigi, a fun french guy who had already a plan on what he wanted to do on this island which I really liked since I was clueless as always 🤣

We went to see a lighthouse in the next morning.

There was a wild seal colony which we almost didn't see.

We kept on driving, there was a funny looking rock I wanted to check out and we found...

Yes, there was a second seal colony, totally awesome 🤩

There was another seal group asleep and I, as the natural predator that I am, tried to sneak up on them as close as possible. I got super close, if I wanted to I could have lunged and hugged one (which I didn't do for good reasons). While I enjoyed my 'hunting success' one of them noticed me and alarmed everyone, resulting in a smaller panic and every seal oinking away which made me really sad. I hoped they would just accept me as one of their own.

Anyway, they didn't accept and left me behind, disappointed.

We then left and made our way to Palmerston, were we wanted to do another hike.

As the night came, I gave the night mode of my camera a shot again, resulting in really cool pictures.

Excited in the next morning, we went to our hike, it was supposed to be a medium one of 10km.

Our path split into two, one said '20 minutes, no exit' and we gave it a shot. We walked for 20 minutes, thirty minutes and after fifty minutes it split again. A pink sign said 'H21 over Diamond Ridge'. 'Sweet as' we thought, we wanted to go to diamond mine anyway and went straight into the jungle. The path became smaller and smaller, being barely visible and just disappeared sometimes. But there were more pink signs, guiding our way, even though it was sometimes really hard to find them. Ali and Gigi hated it a lot and honestly it was a big pain in the ass. At some point we weren't sure if this would bring us to the diamond mine, we had to climb up extremely steep hills and the terrain was very difficult.

This green ring is natural, preserved forest and actually goes all around the volcano.

Climbing the way down.

We had a chill day, lots of WiFi, I got Otto's oil changed and called the German embassy in Vietnam. And yeah, no fucking good news. Long story short, if I land there an officer will decide whether I fly back where I came from (Hong Kong, my flight doesn't go directly) or go to 14 days quarantine. My travel agency told me that only people from risk countries go through quarantine, that email was two days ago. I don't know whether they have old information or the embassy is just overly cautious with what they say but it's not looking good and won't be looking better in two weeks. I think it's pretty unlikely that I'll go there, I'm totally not sure what I'll do but for now I think going to Kazakhstan could be very cool and then driving with a motorcycle through the country to Georgia. I didn't do a lot of research yet though and everything might change within 24 hours. I'll try to call my travel agency today when it's morning in Germany and get some information about changing the flights, cancellation and so on.

I hope all of you are well, stay safe and healthy and don't run out of toilet paper. Better go now to the supermarket and buy everything they got! (Just kidding, please stay reasonable and help people in need!)

So far so good, love and peace (without too much social interactions),

Laurin