“Yep, that’s a snow capped volcano…”

Since we are still not yet acclimated to NZ time, we are going to bed at 7pm and waking up at 4 feeling like normal.  The good news is that gives us the ability to see the sun come up as we are driving to our next destination. 

There is a little town named Waitomo about an hour and a half south of Raglan that has 3 or 4 of the world’s craziest caves.   We took an underground river tour on an aluminum boat in the dark.  When you look up at the cave ceiling it looks like stars on the night sky.  These are phosphoresce webs spun by the glowworms to attract tiny insects.  They would not allow photography there, but here are a few shots from the cave down the road we were able to walk through.

Around noon we headed off to our next campsite about 2.5 hours away in Oakura beach at the base of Mt. Egmont in the Taranaki region (more on that below).  We pulled in later in the afternoon, and I was greeted to this amazing little waist to chest high left beach break to myself.  (In fact, the author may have to take a little break from typing to go catch a few).  While I’m gone, check out a few of our setup at Oakura with the little left out front…

Ok I’m back.  I saw some guy running down the beach with a board so I followed him.  This was a good call because he lead me to a new break about 1km down the beach I soon found out was named Anu Anu.  I caught 6 or 7 head high waves for about 300 yards each (leg burners!).  Sorry no pictures on that one.

Ok so quick time lapse to present.  Yesterday we hiked this volcano named Mt. Egmont.  We saw 2 waterfalls, hiked through what is called the goblin forest and then checked out this big open ocean right off of the famed Stent road.

So far the tallies are as follows: 136,468 sheep, 880.6 km, 68 litres of diesel, 7 surf breaks, 6km hiked, 2 caves, 2 bottles of wine and 1 snowcapped volcano (soon to be 3).  Not bad for 3.5 days of travel.

Next up on the itinerary: a hike through middle earth where the ring was destroyed (I’m in the process of watching Lord of the Rings for the 1^st time on the RV’s DVD player to appreciate what this means).