New Zealands Surf Highway

New Zealand has a Highway deemed "surf highway". The shit load of surf breaks that are scattered out along the coastal highway, are all marked with nice signs. The towns are all small surf towns and With Coast line on one side and The Pointy Volcano, Mount. Taranaki on the other, we were really looking forward to this part of our trip. We slept at an incredible bowl just at the start of the highway. Woke up to a, no run taking, no surf surfing, wind. Howling and flapping our tents even in the bottom of the bowl.

     
    One of the best things and worst things about surfing, is the lack of control you have over the surf itself. It teaches you to be patient and appreciate it when you have it good, and not get upset when its shitty. We had both been looking forward to this part of the trip and had planned to spend days riding as many different breaks as our skills could handle, and here we are with more spots to hit in a hundred mile stretch, then we might ever have, And none will have surf able conditions for the next few days.

We stopped at a bunch of different breaks all along our drive, and although there wasn't any surf, we were just stoked to be there anyway. No complaints of our surf highway dreams blown away in the wind. We did get some fun surf in New Plymouth though....

Locals

The towns in the North Island aren't filled with tourists..I mean, they are, but its not as bad as Queenstown. There, we out numbered the population of actual locals, probably 5 to 1. Every small town that we went to, we met people and spent some time with them in some way or another.

The kindness of the locals was the best part of the trip for me.  We had stopped at this skatepark for a quick little session to break up the drive. We ended up meeting a couple of guys at the park, they invited us back to their house, one of them rapped for us, the other one went outside and came back in the house with a few branches he cut off of some weed plants he had in his back yard.. haha. People were just eager to do whatever they thought would make our trip better. ...... Even if we didn't smoke weed.

 We dried the plants on the dashboard while we surfed and smoked a joint in their honor.

Most of the skateparks have zip lines too..

To the North

Got the Ferry out of the South Island, just in time to watch a beautiful Sunset over the Queen Charlotte Range.

 Taking the ferry, it seemed like the start of another Chapter in our journey. The South Island was now behind us and the New Plymouth Surf Highway was all we wanted.

The Northern Part of the Southern Island

The Able Tasman National Park is a Coastal Hot spot for Tourists. If you are a German, You probably had your cabins booked months before your plane touched down. Didnt seem like many out of country'ers passed it by without giving it a look. We got up there with the Herd to see what it had to offer. Motueka was a small town, which seemed to have more tourists bouncing around the streets than there were locals.

Spelunking

    The rain was pouring down outside, so we decided to take a little cave tour. The caves had a weird erie feeling with all the water dripping down everywhere. Just strange knowing how bad the rain is pouring down above you, and you're just in a natural hole 10 feet below. Always been a little scared of tight caves.

The List.

Life?

 Before I went down to New Zealand, I made a list with some places/spots I wanted to check out. Reefton Skatepark  was one of them. Seemed like almost every town had a skatepark in it, Some a little better/worse than others. Reefton was a random big skatepark in a tiny town in the middle of no where. Sits on the edge of a river and there wasn't a soul in sight. I think the list had 23 places to check out; most of them exceeded any expectations made from the few pictures I saw on the computer screen prior to coming down.

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Reefton Airlines

Sleep Outside.

There is a nice feeling you get when you wake up after a nice sleep outside. No sheetrock to stale up your air. Just some good heat from a raging bon fire, a sunset, and a bright moon. A nice Sunrise, food over the fire and do it all over again.

Thankful for all the nights we spent outside.

Adventuring

NZ is a good place to travel if you want to see a broad variety of nature crammed into a tight place. You can sit on top of an active volcano, get a surf in, and then go climb on a glacier, probably in the same day. You might be in a herd of people doing the same thing, though.

We hit up a bunch of obscure places on our way up the coast, and a bunch of tourist spots that were all along the way..

But the best part of our cruise north up the coast, was all the awesome places that we slept.In crazy woods, and beautiful beaches. Anywhere that looked comfortable. This beach was covered in a lot of cool stones. Met some locals that were sleeping on the beach too. They woke up wary and walked up the beach and found a lot of Jade stone that washes up on shore.

Northing

There isn't much on the Map that is South of New Zealand. A little of Argentina and Chile, and Antarctica. This could very well be as far down on this planet as either of us will see in our lives. After leaving Queenstown and starting our drive back North, even though we still had a Month left, it seemed like the start of a slow journey back home to New England.