Going South (~ Dec 10th)

After I sorted everything out in Auckland, I booked buses to the south. I wanted to meet Ronja and Sönke in Taupo, a city by a lake pretty much in the middle of the northern island.

The buses connecting cities are good, I guess, and there are 3 companies in total (I think), that work in NZ. One is Intercity, then Nakedbus and it's smaller counterpart Manabus. I have used all 3 and all have good standards and most of them had wifi working on board (though many other travelers told me that I was lucky).
Besides these 3 there are also other bus companies, mostly they do guided tours and such like "Stray Bus" or "Kiwi Experience", here the travellers are transported from one city to the next, can do all sorts of activities, that are organised by the guides and see alot of things, sometimes off the beaten track, though if an entire bus full of tourists goes somewhere, I don't know how off the track it actually is...

Anywho... next to me on the bus to Taupo was a maori woman (judging by the tatoos, dialect and skin colour and later on what she said). She was drinking quite alot of wine during the ride, singing along to her music she was listening to on her phone. Now and then she'd talk to me and when she found out I was german she asked me if we were still "hunting them jews". I denied of course, but she did make a few more comments about me being german and all conected to Nazi Germany. At one point she told me that maori troops were the ones who killed hitler and defeated his army. I'm not sure how many maori troops fought in world war 2, but I doubt they forced hitler to commit suicide. Anyway, I tried listening to my own music and not be annoyed too much by her.  The bus was quite cool. It was a double decker with several seats making groups of 4 with a table in the middle, so seemed more luxorious than "normal" buses connecting cities. Though that was only this company, more others use the "regular buses".

Then we finally arrived in Taupo. A cute little town and looking pretty by the lake. Only the weather could have been much better. I got picked up by my friends Ronja and Sönke from Hamburg and we spent the evening together in our hostel. I shared a room with 6 other german people, who were all about partying. I was out with my friends for a while but all of them came back much later. One came back so late and woke up the entire hostel (I can imagine).
Unfortunately he was sleeping in my room. He forgot his key to get into the house so he started yelling the names of his friends, who were sleeping till then. After a couple of minutes the guys finally talked and one of them got up to help the guy inside. Then they had to compare their adventures and talk about what happened. They were apparently proud of getting into fights with the bouncers and so on and had gotten pretty drunk over the night. I was able to fall asleep quite quickly after he returned... But a great example of how not to behave in a foreign country you are visiting...

We wanted to do a trek up in the Tongoriro national park close to Taupo (or should I say Mordor?) and were eager to do it soon. But as I had mentioned the weather sucked and didn't allow it. We asked the tourist office: i-site (you can find these almost in every town!). They informed us, that all shuttles were called off till the weather improves. It was still snowing with really strong winds, so no one was encouraged to go up there...
Sad we accepted this and worked out an optional bad weather plan. We went to the cinema (we watched a cute movie called "Pete's Dragon"), visited the iron man competition going on and just sat by the lake. Ronja and Sönke planned to go on soon with their car, alas I couldn't follow, because the cities aren't connected THAT well by bus and their car only has 2 seats. The buses connect the cities more in a north-south direction and more rarely in the east-west direction (where they were heading)
So I just headed out to Wellington instead, the bus I got was leaving 2 days later, so I had some time to kill. The other 2 had moved to a free camping site and told me how great it was and they had met other nice people. So I headed over there to meet them and we had a fun evening =)
I then left Taupo the next day to move towards Wellington, the capital of New Zealand!

On the way I stopped in Palmerston North, where I thought I'd meet Ronja and Sönke again, though they had told me the city is not worth it and they will probably just pass through, so I booked another bus from there to Wellington. I had a few hours in Palmerston I couldn't really enjoy because I had all of my backpacks with me and it was raining a tidbit, but it didn't seem as that big of a deal. I spent some time in the central park, which was nice.

With a big delay the bus finally arrived and took us to Wellington! The capital of New Zealand and again a harbour city.

This is actually mentioned in a travel guide, saying you should eat in the McDonalds airplane...

The cockpit of the old plane

What an experience! :D (thats Ronja and Sönke on the right)

AFter out meal we went into town and Sönke tried out a new ride... a recycled cycle