Nothing too exciting to report since my last update. I hung out in Wellington for a couple more days because the weather suddenly turned beautiful. Then I drove up to New Plymouth, which is quite a bit north...about 5 hours or so, I think. I couch surfed with someone who was about half an hour outside the city, on their huge dairy farm. It was pretty nice although a bit annoying being so far outside of the city. But they fed me tons of food, which was a big plus. I'm really getting into this whole couch-surfing thing--so far everyone has been really great, and a lot of times they do things like give me food, drive me around, tell me cool things to do, or put me in touch with other people they know in NZ. It's been really great so far.

So I ended up staying almost a week in New Plymouth, at a couple people's houses. NP is a really cute city of about 50,000 and it has a great feel. Tons of cafes, art galleries, & gardens, and it's right on the waterfront. I was only planning on being there a couple days but I got sucked in. :) The weather was okay for most of the time during the day, but there were some intense thunderstorms at night and even a tornado about half an hour away. I had planned on doing lots of hiking while I was there on Mt Taranaki:


However, the weather on the mountain was pretty rough. I finally ended up going one day and only made it about a half an hour up before there was snow on the trail, and it started raining/hailing/snowing with lots of wind, and there was absolutely no visibility. As soon as the track became more exposed to the wind and not as sheltered, I turned around and headed back. Which was a bummer, because it's a beautiful mountain and is supposed to have some great hikes.

After NP, I drove down south to Wanganui and I'm couchsurfing with someone here on their TWO THOUSAND acre sheep/cattle/horse farm. It's amazing. The guy is a super cool traveling hippie and he's house sitting here for his parents. He bought me a beer last night and we went out to meet a couple of Canadians who he'd met through couch-surfing, who also live in Wanganui. It was cool to talk to other people who have the same accent as me, haha. Today Robbie the couchsurfing dude took me on a big tour of his farm, which was awesome. We rode on an ATV all over the place AND we took along his two 2-month old mutt puppies, so I basically got to ride on the bike of an ATV over immensely gorgeous farm land, in the sun, whilst cuddling puppies who just wanted to lick my face off.

On Tuesday I head down south to WWOOF (finally!) with a woman on her farm. I'm not sure what it's going to be like...she sounded a little weird when I called. But oh well, it's only for a week and I need to do it again, I haven't WWOOFed in well over a month. After that, I'll hang out in Wellington again for a few days, and then it's off to the South Island! I'm excited to go to the other half of NZ but not looking forward to the cold. I've basically had winter for the last 9 months and I'm ready for it to be done. Which isn't actually going to happen, since by the time I get back to the states it will be the start of winter again. Sigh.