The green and rolling hills of New Zealand’s north island

By Rachel

Looking back through our blog posts I feel like we short-changed New Zealand. We spent two weeks there and saw beautiful landscapes. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t the greatest – lots of gray, rainy days – but it was green, it was rolling, and when the sun came out the ocean was blue as blue and it was gorgeous.

With only a couple of weeks, we decided to focus on the north island. We chose to use the bus rather than rent a car and were able to travel from Auckland to Tauranga to Matamata (and back to Tauranga) to Rotorua to the Waitomo Caves and back to Auckland for $125/person. Not bad at all! It also meant that we didn’t have to figure out how to get where we were going or worry about the fog or the rain.

In the end we met lovely people and were wowed by a landscape born from the string of volcanoes that created New Zealand. Just to give you a bit of a feel of the places we went to….

Auckland