Last week

The ferry arrived in Wellington at around 2 pm and we headed to the hostel.

We had a reunion planned for the evening with Guillermo and Nathan, two locals we had met on our first visit to Wellington.

On Monday, we visited the WETA Caves, a film studio on the outskirts of the city where movies like The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were filmed. This tour was extremely interesting as it showed how elaborate it is to create props for a film and how meticulous the directors are.

An object that only appears for a few seconds in the film can have up to hundreds of designs before it is accepted.

The next day, we continued our journey to New Plymouth, a city on the west coast of the North Island.

A day hike on Mt. Taranaki, a famous volcano in the area, was on the agenda.

The route along the base of the mountain was about 18km long and offered beautiful views of the ocean and New Plymouth.

On Friday the 23rd, we went to Hamilton to visit Caro, a school friend of ours who is doing au pair in a very nice family there for a year. The next day, we went on a trip together to a waterfall and to Raglan, a seaside town famous for its black beach. Of course, we couldn't miss the opportunity to have fish and chips at the harbor, a very popular meal among the Kiwis.

On Sundays, we explored Hamilton a little closer and got to know Caro's host family before returning to Auckland in the evening, the starting point of our journey.

However, 12 hours later we left Auckland again to go on a trip to the Coromandel Peninsula with Tony, a friend of Fabian's father who lives in Auckland and is about 2 hours away.

There we continued by boat to Slipper Island, where he has a holiday home and where we stayed overnight. But before that, we went out to sea to fish for dinner. Fortunately, we were successful and didn't have to go hungry in the evening, on the contrary.

Before we returned to Auckland the next evening, Tony showed us the beautiful port city of Pauanui.

This particular evening was the last of our long and yet so short journey, which now came to an end after 12 weeks. A journey in which we experienced so much, explored almost all of New Zealand, and met many nice people, both locals and other backpackers. That's why these 12 weeks will definitely be unforgettable.