Goodbye Australia, Hello New Zealand

I have been in New Zealand about 4 days now and am staying with some friends through the weekend before I head up north to see glowworm caves and to go zorbing. It was pretty sad to leave Australia but I did have a good last week, despite the continuing rain.
When I got to Byron Bay I arrived at my hostel, the Arts Factory, and met up with Eline (whom I had met on Magnetic island and again in several other places throughout Oz). She was working at the hostel for free accomadation. The hostel is pretty big and very unique. I slept in an old covred wagaon which was next to a teepee and a doeuble decker bus that also were full of backpackers. The wagon was without power and was also home to several large spiders. The hostel also had yoga and didgeridoo classes, hammocks, a turkey and a giant lizard that wandered around, and lots of other interesting amenities. I styaed for 3 days exploring the hostel and the town of Byron Bay. The city is on the beach and is known as for being full of hippies and having a cool lighthouse that is the easternmost point of continental Australia. Now it is full of hip cafes and shops and lots of backpackers. I went on a day trip to Nimbin, a nearby town that is known as the marijuana capitol of Australia. It was an interesting place but unless you want to get high there is not much else to do. They do have the Nimbin Museum which is supposedly a history museum devoted to the counterculture but I think the people who built it were on drugs and it made absolutely no sense to me. On our way back to Byron we stopped at the home of an old American hippie who had moved to Nimbin in the 70's. Paul met us at the end of the road wearing a Yosemite Sam button down shirt and Hawain print sweatpants and showed us his junk sculpture garden he had been working on for the last ten years, made of computers and televisions and such. We then went and sat on his porch and ate watermelon and cracked macadamia nuts while it rained. We then went to see a waterfall but didn't stay too long thanks to the weather, before heading back to Byron where I made dinner with Eline and some other people at the hostel.
After three relaxing and mostly sunny days in Byron I headed up past Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast to stay with Amy (Flutterby) my first co-counselor at camp who hadn't seen in over 3 years. We had planned to hang out at the beach and do some hiking but that was not to be since it rained every day I was on the innapropriately named Sunshine Coast. We did manage to see most of the towns on the coast and get very wet trying to do some sightseeing anyway. It was good to catch up and after a big night in with Amy and her friends I flew away the next day to New Zealand.
I arrived in Wellington around midnight and headed to my hostel. The next morning around 6 I woke up to one of my dorm-mates having a very loud cell phone conversation from her bed in an Eastern European language. I am not sure if I yelled at her or not but hope that I did. I spent the morning at the Te Papa museum which was amazing. It's the national museum of New Zealand and was full of very cool and interesting exhibits about anything you could ever want to know about New Zealand history, culture, and ecology. I then walked around the city admiring the harbor and all the cafes. I did see a few Lord of the Rings relics but did not get to go on a tour to see them all. I then took the bus to the town of Palmerston North to stay with two more camp friends (Kiai and Frizzle or Dan and Penny.) It was a beautiful ride through a gorge. It was also full of sheep everywhere. I haven't done too much sightseeing yet but am excited to keep exploring New Zealand! I can't believe I only have two weeks left before I fly back to New Orleans.