Happy New Year dear readers! I hope you are well. I spent the holiday season in New Zealand and I had a great time. After two weeks of traveling by plane, car and foot, I saw much of a country I knew very little earlier.
This trip was the best planned holiday I have ever had. Flights were booked already in last April. Then came travel guide reading period and by early autumn the route was set. It had to be well planned, because our entourage consisted of six people, five Finns and one French. Our trip was timed at the busiest holiday peak in NZ and that is why we booked everything well in advance.
As you can see from the above map, we had a lot of driving. 2900 kilometers altogether. It did not feel like too much of driving, though, thanks to the amazing sceneries and good company. We drove across the northern island and then we took a ferry to the southern island and drove across it and finally we flew from Queenstown back to Auckland.
I really liked New Zealand. I have never seen such variety of nature miracles in one country. There are rain forests, snow topped mountains and everything in between. The climate suited extremely well for my liking. NZ has now summer time and the temperatures are not too high (15-25°C). Although sun was quite dangerous with high UV index, so sunscreen was needed despite the mild temperatures.
NZ is mostly an outdoors country. There are dozens of outdoors activities to choose from almost in every place. I guess the best known is the bungee jump (in which I did not attend). I went hiking to the hills and mountains at most of the place we stopped. I also took a walk on ice at a glacier and conquered the top of a 1748m high mountain. New Zealand is a place where one can easily have a Stendhal's syndrome because of the breathtaking nature.
I will post pictures from various places I visited in NZ in the following days. I hope they show a little of the splendour and magic of that distant country.
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