After our stay in Wellington, our next goal was the Tongariro Crossing in the center of the North Island. Dagmar booked this alpine hike such that we would have a bit of time to explore on our way over, so we decided to travel up the North Island’s west coast (not to be confused with the South Island’s West Coast we wrote about previously) to see the city of New Plymouth, located in the shadow of the volcanic Mt. Taranaki. On the way, we spent the night in a little town called Whanganui. And that funky place name calls for…the linguistics minute! —————————— When reading a New Zealand map, you…

With the proposal out of the way, a big weight was off Stefan’s chest and a little weight out of his pocket. The next stop on our South Island tour was the wild west coast, frequently referred to as the Wild Wet Coast for the large amount of rainfall it gets: according to Wikipedia, this rainfall occurs “due to the prevailing northwesterly wind pattern and the location of the Southern Alps, which give rise to heavy orographic precipitation.” Whatever that means. The West Coast, however, has more to offer than torrential downpours and $100 words for boosting your SAT vocabulary (stay tuned for a future post where we’ll get more…

You may recall from our HelpX #4 post that although we were extremely grateful to be taken in during New Zealand’s lockdown, our accommodations left something to be desired. So when the government announced after 5 weeks that they were dialing down restrictions from Level 4 to Level 3 (essentially still a mandatory shelter-in-place order, just with slightly loosened restrictions), we leapt at the chance to stay somewhere else. We’ll admit that this move was principally selfish in motivation, but we also recognized that our HelpX host had very much run out of projects for us over the course of our time there, and we really didn’t want to overstay…

We’re back! In more ways than one. It’s been a long time since our last blog post, but now that we’re both back in the US we’re going to work on catching up with our writing. We haven’t even scratched the surface  on all the adventures and photos we had while in New Zealand, so keep checking in for more! Like many other New Year’s resolutions that are unlikely to last even through January, we’re setting ourselves the goal to publish by the first of every month. That being said, let’s get to it! If you recall from our trip to Rangitoto, we had a bit of a tight schedule…

Hello everyone! To shake things up, we decided to do this blog post a bit differently. Rather than posting a written breakdown of our hike along the Rakiura Track, we created a video as usual (above), and then a podcast (below)! As you’re listening to the podcast, you can scroll down here and see some relevant pictures and captions. Let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more posts in this style rather than exclusively in the written format! Getting to Stewart Island Prepping for the Track Day 2 of the Rakiura Track Day 3 of the Rakiura Track