Day 2 Today is our Waitomo Caves main event: Blackwater Rafting! That’s the clever branding invented by some nuts who, a couple decades ago, decided to start taking tourists on trips through the caves where you jump off underground waterfalls and float down a hidden river on an inner tube with a ceiling of glowworms… Read more…

Friday morning traffic on the two highways (SH3 and SH39) through Otorohanga was much busier than we had seen a couple days earlier, proving that the four-day school holiday around Easter turns it into a big travel weekend (the NZ Transport Agency even published traffic-backup predictions for the weekend like it did for the Christmas/New… Read more…

As we wheeled our bikes out to the street in the darkness, our AirBNB hosts continued their above-and-beyond by coming outside from their warm glowing house to give us more fresh-baked sweets, and a bag of pineapple chunks (and an offer to keep an eye on our bikes while we ran back to grab our… Read more…

It’s Monday, so unlike the once-a-day train we had to catch on the Wairarapa Line on Saturday, the Kapiti Line has trains running every 20 minutes even in the middle of the day. Not bad service for a suburb an hour outside of Wellington (buses extend MetLink’s reach even more-impressively, we’d seen them go by… Read more…

When we set off to do our four-day Cape Palliser loop, my plan was to use the train to again get us through the Remutaka Mountains and back to Upper Hutt on our 4th evening. But then I realized that rather than stressing ourselves to make sure we got to Featherston before the last afternoon… Read more…

Our second morning awaking at Putangirua Pinnacles was warmer than the first (53F), but the steady breeze flowing out of the canyon (the Breath of the Dead?!) made it feel colder than that. The overall forecast had the wind blowing perpendicular to the canyon, so it’s been interesting to learn how the local topography (or… Read more…