Six months of freedom.....New Zealand, Part1

Hello everyone,

My Name is Florian and i recently spent six months traveling the world with my girlfriend. I would like to share some stories, pictures, movies and adventures we had on the road with you. As we started off in New Zealand, (spoiler alert: my alltime favourite country), we will begin our journey here.

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Actually every journey begins with packing up your stuff. Thats what we did.

Somehow i thought i needed all of that stuff.

I am still amazed how everything fit into my backpacks.

After an exhausted flight from Munic to Auckland (~30Hours), we finally landed and found our pretty small but still expansive hostel in reach of the city center of Auckland. (It was pretty cold too)

At least we had a window.

We visited some local sights like Mount Eden and the famous TV-boradcasting tower, but all in all, we were not here for the cities. (And we still don't care too much about cities around the world)

Mount Eden and the city of Auckland still are a quite unique view.

We even saw the famous New Zealandian Kiwi (I know it's a terrible joke :) )

After some days of strolling around and adjusting to the timeshift, we picked up our home for the nex two months. We became quite fond of him and named him "Eduard" (translates to "the protector") It took me quite some time to become used to driving on the wrong side of the street and more often than i like to admit, i activated the windscreen wipers instead of giving a signal when turning. (Who would have thought that this is the other way around too?)

The roundabouts gave me hell the first few weeks.

Eduard offered a home and actually quite a bit of room to store our stuff.

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At our first few days with Eduard we were following the "hints" of fellow travellers about a beautiful spot on the Coromandel Peninsula called "Hot Water Beach", were one could dig his own spa into the quiet beach.
Go there they said, it will be fun they said.......

My girlfriend NOT having fun among a ton of New Zealandian tourists

After some hiking we fortunately were able to find some peaceful and quiet spots. The surge was coming in fast, so we didn't have too much time enjoying them, but still, we made our peace with Coromandel Peninsula.

Who needs a spa anyway?

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In the next few post, we will share the vastness and lonlyness of this amazing country with you. We came across huge, breeding bird colonies, wild parrots, active vulcanos and the smallest penguin on earth.

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I hope you enjoyed my short sum up of our first few days in New Zealand.
What about you? Did you ever visit New Zealand? What was your favourite spot?