Our first day in New Zealand was a long one: we got up at 4:45 AM for our flight, and finally arrived at the Auckland airport at 2:00 PM. Our flight was really good, but unfortunately we've all now been spoiled to travel on Emirates, which was crazy comfortable and nice. I mean, hot towel service in coach!? Amazing! And most importantly, there was lots of legroom and really big TV screens: it seemed a shame to waste our Emirates experience on such a short three hour flight.
Unfortunately, even the fancy airlines can have unruly children on them, which meant that none of us got much rest on the flight. So we started out pretty tired, but we've survived!
If Australia is strict on importing food and possibly dirty items, New Zealand is crazy strict. It took us a good two hours to get out of the airport through passport control and customs. We had to go through an X-ray machine as the last step, which was weird. But we all passed and they let us into the country!
Then we picked up our rental car and headed south, east, and then back north to our destination #1: Haihei!
Driving in New Zealand gave us a unique perception of the local culture. The country must have spent a hundred thousand dollars putting up motherly suggestions in the form of road signs. Every few kilometers we would pass a new one like "Think about your speed on this road" or "Consider other road users." Each one was polite and kindly suggested you practice good driving practices in some form or other. Some of them were themed with a colorful kiwi bird or line drawings of round people. It was very odd but still sort of endearing.
After a few hours and a stop for dinner, we made it to Haihei!
Hahei is in the Coromandel Peninsula and is the closest town to Cathedal Cove. When I was looking into places to stay, I read reviews for three restaurants in town, and noted them down. Turns out that they are the only three restaurants in town and pretty much within a few hundred yards of each other, so my notes were unnecessary! But since we were pretty wiped out, it didn't really matter that there was nothing going on in Haihei past 6 PM: all we wanted was a bed. But we did take the time to go check out Haihei Beach while the sun was setting!
Then we said goodnight to Haihei Beach and headed to our airbnb cabin for some good sleeping. Not a bad way to spend our summer solstice!
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Gorgeous photos on all three of the next posts. Absolutely dreamy! You need to turn this blog into a travel book for sure:) I also like Holly's jacket very much:)
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