Last weekend was the Activity Weekend for our program! It was great to get away (and have everything already paid for!) The director here (my second mother at this point) picked us up Friday afternoon and we drove to Waitomo which is about 3 hours south of Auckland. We dropped off our bags at a cute hostel and headed to a park for a quick hike. Here hiking is called “tramping.” So we wandered through the woods for about an hour. It turns out that this was the same spot that we were going to doing our blackwater rafting through the next day. It was gorgeous!
We headed back shortly after since it was getting dark. The sunsets around 5:30 pm here still so the days are quite short. Waitomo is a really tiny town with only one pub/ restaurant so we headed out and grabbed burgers and chips(French fries.) After we got back our group rested in the hostel in front of a cozy fire and watched movies for the night.
The next morning we woke up early to go blackwater rafting. I volunteered to go on the earlier trip. It turned out to be 5 kids from my program and 10 other people from Brazil who spoke absolutely no English. It made for a really interesting trip. Blackwater rafting consists of tubing through caves in complete darkness underground. Keeping in mind that it is winter here, you can imagine how cold it really was. They gave us wetsuits and helmets and I wore 3 layers of thermals underneath but it was still quite chilly. The water was about 40 degrees. So we climbed through parts and rafted through others. These caves were filled with glowworms which was super cool until we found out that that they were actually maggots that glow in the dark. But it was really neat to lay back and see nothing but tiny little glowing specs above us. They looked almost like constellations in the sky. After coming out of the caves they gave us bagels and soup and we took warm showers.
We all hopped back in the van and headed off to Raglan. It is almost halfway between Waitomo and Auckland. It’s a cute little beach town. We stayed at the sweetest hostel ever. It reminded me of a summery beach house. Since it was raining we didn’t get to do anything so we wandered around the town for a bit.We cooked dinner as a big group and then watched a movie before going to bed. Sunday morning we woke up and got ready for our surf lesson! This was probably the highlight of my weekend since I have wanted to surf for ages. We had a dry land lesson first before we headed to the beach. The beach itself was absolutely gorgeous. The water was freezing, but not nearly as bad as the caves were.
The instructors were so friendly and helpful. The water was a bit rough but I managed to stand up on my 4th try! We stayed in the water for about an hour and a half. Although, we had to keep getting out and walking back down since we were being dragged by the undertow.
(Yes, that is actualy me!)
All in all it was a great weekend!
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