tiny travels

This blog is a documentation of all my travels. It originally started as a blog for my year long backpacking trip through Europe, which was cut short. I am continuing my travels abroad however, and you can find all the updates here! Visting this page will show you the places I would like to see, and visiting this page will show you a map of where I've been! Below I have a donate button if you feel so inclined to donate money to my trip! If you'd like more information about how the money will be used feel free to ask me questions here. *Please let me know if you do donate, so I can thank you properly.*

[my-tiny-travels]

Friday 04/25/14

Waiotapu Geothermal Wonderland! I love these geothermal pools and geysers, especially the beautiful blues and greens. It smells absolutely horrible with all the sulfur around but it's so worth it. Looking at all these pictures together makes me feel so lucky to see the things I've seen, not just this but everything. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Thursday 04/24/14

We went to the i-Site in town to get some ideas of things to do. After, we went to Taupo for a couple hours to look around at some shops, I got a new shirt and some stickers for my dad(!). These are some pictures of some graffiti in Taupo.

[my-tiny-travels]

Wednesday 04/23/14

The first picture is of the sanctuary from above, on the dam.

The second is from the drive to Rotorua, later that evening.

[my-tiny-travels]

Wednesday 04/23/14

We went to the Wellington City and Sea Museum which was pretty cool, but a tremendous amount of reading. There was a lot of cool information, especially about New Zealand's involvement in both the World Wars, which I didn't know. 

We then went to Zealandia, which is a wildlife sanctuary. Their goal is to restore the area to a prehuman condition. It's absolutely beautiful, and it's one of the only places you can see some of the birds that are now incredibly endangered. They had a short movie in the exhibition part that showed the rapid damage that humans have caused the native species and land, and how people have tried (and sometimes failed) to save species of endangered animals. 

Bird names in order: Takahe, Tui, Kākā.

[my-tiny-travels]

Tuesday 04/22/14

We took the cable car to the lookout above the city, and to Carter observatory and the Botanic Gardens. The observatory was awesome, they have the typical space information, but have the Maori legends along with it. It was also a really cool interactive museum, and I love those types of hands on things. We walked down to the city, through the gardens (which were beautiful) and at the bottom there was a duck pond where we watched these little baby duckling try to climb the ledge for 20 minutes. We also walked through the Bolton Street Memorial Park. Part of the Memorial Park was the old cemetery. We read some of the headstones and most of them were from the 19th and early 20th century. There was one plot where 4 children from the same family were buried, all between the ages of a couple months to 10 years old. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Monday 04/21/14

All of the shops were working their Sunday hours because of Easter the day before, so we didn't really do a whole lot. It was a beautiful sunny day (the first one in about 9 or 10 days) so we walked around a lot. We went to the i-Site information and not only found some things to do in Wellington, but we also planned the rest of our trip through the North island!

[my-tiny-travels]

Sunday 04/20/14

On top of the tree falling on the van and driving away still plugged in, we can now add bumping into an old lady's car in a car park to the list. Nothing was damaged and nobody was hurt but it's pretty funny how many things have happened to us in this van!

At 2 pm we drove the van onto the ferry to Wellington, and it took 3 hours to cross the Cook Straight. Along the way we saw a full rainbow, which was beautiful. We landed in Wellington with blue skies and sun.

[my-tiny-travels]

Saturday 04/19/14

We went to the Picton Museum of Heritage and Whaling, yet another low budget museum. I do actually really like those types of museums because they seem more intimate and I don't feel pressure to hurry up at all, which is nice. Picton has a long history of whaling, and this museum had a lot of information about that. 

After, we went to the aquarium, and that had a couple highlights (like the teeny tiny baby seahorses!!!!), but over all it was pretty bad. Half the animals weren't even in the tanks/cages/etc and it was really overpriced.

[my-tiny-travels]

Friday 04/18/14

In the morning when we were leaving the motor park, we accidentally started driving off still plugged into the electricity. The plug attached to the van came out and the cord was stripped, but luckily there was a licensed electrician in the spot across from us, and he fixed it completely for free! So we started our drive to Picton a couple hours late, especially because we made a stop to walk the beach a bit, 30 minutes after we left the motor park. We drove along the coast almost the whole way, which was absolutely beautiful. 

We got to Picton late afternoon, and because it's a port city (this is where people take the ferry to and from the North island), there were a bunch of trains and some really good graffiti.

[my-tiny-travels]

Thursday 04/17/14

The weather was pretty crazy today in Nelson, NZ, so we went to the Nelson Provincial Museum to stay inside. A lot of the museums in these little cities are pretty low budget, and a lot of the stuff is on loan from other, bigger museums. This was no exception. It was a pretty interesting museum, with a lot of history about not only Nelson, but New Zealand as a whole. However, there were a lot of things missing from the displays which was kind of disappointing how they didn't change them, etc. There was a really cool exhibit about the Canterbury earthquakes (Christchurch), with some pretty insane footage of the initial damage and some icons of the city that had been destroyed in the quakes. 

On our way back to Richmond (where our motor park was) from Nelson (about a 20 minute drive), a lot of the roads were blocked by trees that had fallen in the storm. We were waiting in line for cars going the other way because the street was half blocked by a tree, and about 30 seconds after we were allowed to go a tree fell on the back end of our van. We and the van were alright but it definitely scared the shit out of us haha.

[my-tiny-travels]

Wednesday 04/16/14

No photos or special stories for today, as I spent literally all day catching up with this blog. Obviously not updating for almost a month is a very time consuming thing! It was pouring rain anyway so there wasn't much we missed. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Tuesday 04/15/14

Apparently the rain is following us, because all day in Nelson it rained as well. We walked around town, got a new umbrella, went to the info center, etc. We ended up going to this seafood restaurant right on the coast which was delicious. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Monday 04/14/14

Mom and I did the Sentinel Rock Walk in mid afternoon, right as the rain started really coming down. We got to the lookout, which had an amazing view, but we were both over the rain. We were supposed to do two other walks but were so soaked after 10 minutes we just got back in the van instead. That afternoon we drove from Franz Josef to Greymouth, where we were supposed to stay the night, but instead decided to go straight to Nelson. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Sunday 04/13/14

Did pretty much nothing all day because it was so rainy. We walked around a bit, went to the information place, found a place to park over night and then hung out in the camper. I did do a lot of drawing so it wasn't a total waste of a day. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Saturday 04/12/14

Driving, driving and more driving. We drove 6 hours from Queenstown to Franz Josef. We went to a pub for dinner and met a couple younger people from a hostel down the street who told us to just park our van in the YHA parking lot. We ended up doing that but had to leave early in the morning because we were worried about the employees discovering us. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Friday 04/11/14 (Milford Sound)

These were taken on the cruise of Milford Sound. The water was absolutely beautiful, and the contrast between the blue and green of the mountains was unbelievable. 

[my-tiny-travels]

Friday 04/11/14 (drive to Milford Sound)

We took a tour/cruise to Milford Sound, and these are pictures just from the drive up there. It was absolutely beautiful. The first picture was inside the bus, it had a glass ceiling and chairs facing outward so you could see all around you. The second picture is of the mountains reflected in the Mirror Lakes. I don't remember exactly where the last four pictures were taken, but they're all beautiful spots. The third picture is a Kea, the native parrots to New Zealand.